RAVENSBURG

this def a top RPGmaker game. love the art style and the gameplay is pretty fun, if you figure out a good team comp most of the bosses wont even be able to hit you. Love when an rpg lets you stun, blind, or freeze bosses

Bash cultists and creepy monsters while acquiring a harem of goth girls, femboys, and buxom babes. What more can one ask? If you're only interested in violence, there's just one mandatory CG and it's pretty tame. Gameplay tip: the first boss encounter is tuned with the expectation that you've been using souls to boost your attributes, so don't go using those all up on skills.

Fun little RPG with interesting story, personalities and it's endearing enough. It's rough all around the edges, as you'd expect from a small, indie, self published game like this one. However that makes it charming in it's own right. It's short enough that it's flaws don't become too apparent and it delivers what it promises within the scope of the game. Do give the game a try if you're interested and if you enjoy simple turn based RPGs

Imagine watching an artist as they begin painting their next masterpiece. They set up an easel with a blank canvas. They set up their palette, their brushes, knives, paint thinner, and whatever else they might need. They open up their closet and pull out a straight jacket. They ask you for help locking them into it. You ask why, and they tell you to just do it. Locked in the straight jacket, they manage to paint a magnificent piece of art holding the brush in their teeth. Ravensburg is almost as good of an RPG Maker game as a person could possibly make. For context, I've been messing around with RPG Maker since I was a Final Fantasy-obsessed teenager. I've never made anything I'd want to show to another person. Still, I have some awareness of RPG Maker's limitations. Over the years, I've played a few RPG Maker projects that really impressed me. Skilled developers have used the engine to perform magic tricks and even miracles. Most people make a lot of use of the stock assets to make boring slop. Even the good stuff has problems. Some of the best RPG Maker games make zero use of the combat. (Games like Yume Nikki come to mind.) This is usually fine, because the default combat in RPG Maker is usually pretty boring. Other good RPG Maker games manage to do something interesting with the combat, but are poorly written or have terrible maps. Ravensburg uses RPG Maker's whole carcass. It manages to do it really well in some areas and at least adequately in most others. The main appeal of Ravensburg is the art. The characters, monsters, sex scenes, and environments have a unique style. It's kind of like what would happen if a goth's sketchbook came to life. I found it really appealing. (To be fair, though, making bisexual vampire stuff is a quick path to my heart.) A secret appeal of Ravensburg is the level design. For the first time in a long time, I felt inspired to map out some of the game's environments on graph paper. Some areas have a sense of flow that reminds me of a good Doom wad. They still tend to feel like places that could exist in the fiction of the game before and after the events of the plot. They loop in on themselves and branch into other areas, sort of like the early hours of Dark Souls. While I'm comparing Ravensburg to other games, I should share my thoughts on the game's character progression. The game gives you a lot of party members to hang out with. There might be too many. Some are definitely more useful than others. You get introduced to most of them in the first area. Later in the game, there are even more. Ravensburg uses the Dragon Quest-esque system of having abstractions of monsters roaming the environments that can be easily-enough avoided. It reverses the logic of Resident Evil's combat encounters. In any early Resident Evil, the game encourages the player to avoid needless combat encounters so that they can save resources for later. In Ravensburg, you might juke enemies or avoid heavily populated maps so that you can come back later and grind experience for your more underleveled party members. This leads me to some of my problems with the game. The game uses four characters in the party. As far as I'm aware, Valdrich and Kazia, the game's two main characters, must always be in the party. I understand why this is the case. The last time I checked, there's no easy way to implement a party management menu into an RPG Maker game. The way Ravensburg does it is the way I would do it: the party members have set places to stand and you walk up to them and start a dialogue in which you are able to add them to your party if you have an empty slot. Slotting out Valdrich or Kazia would be difficult, because they have a lot of dialogue that the developer would have to rewrite events for if they were absent. Because it's the way I would do it, I have to imagine that there's a better way to do it. Another issue I have is soul management. In addition to EXP and gear, enemies usually drop souls when they die. You can use souls to unlock character abilities through dialogue trees. You can also consume them as an item to increase any of a character's attributes by 10. Because you get to choose the attribute that increases, any time you choose to use a soul as an item, it opens up a list of all the playable characters to choose from and then opens up a list of character attributes to choose from. It's kind of cumbersome. You also wouldn't be motivated to use them one at a time as you accrued them. There's no way to know what skills a new character might have and how useful they might be. Some skills are incredibly overpowered, others seem kind of ineffective. Some are okay, but cost a lot of SP (this game's MP) for what they do. Even so, there's a temptation to hoard souls until all of the skills are unlocked. Then, when you want to use them to improve characters, you have to slog through menus over and over again to use up all of the souls. It's worth saying that, while it is a pain in the neck, souls are neat items and allow for interesting alternative playstyles. Let's go back to something I liked about the game. The combat. This game pretty much uses the stock RPG Maker combat. That's usually a bad sign, but the combat encounters are usually crafted to provide some sort of challenge. Early encounters feel like they want to make the player use everything they can think of to survive. Boss encounters seem decently challenging into about the middle of the game. Towards the end, character progression stomps the difficulty curve. In my playthrough, the final boss didn't get a turn. Even so, there are still challenges to be had. There's an optional boss that reminds me of something out of Fear & Hunger. I would have liked to see more erotic scenes. I would have liked to hang out more with some of the party members. The game has a lot of translation issues. I can mostly forgive them, but some of the text in more recent parts of the game is pretty rough. Having said that, the developer seems to still be working on the game. These are all things that can be expanded on and fixed in updates. That's kind of a sad reality of modern games. I still prefer the possibility of updates to the finality of permanent flaws and deficiencies. Ravensburg is a pretty good game. It's like a painting created by an artist wearing a straight jacket. If the developer used a more open ended tool to create the game, they could have made something way better. As far as RPG Maker goes, it's one of the best projects I've ever played. I could see people that haven't played a lot of RPG Maker games not liking Ravensburg. I can't help but recommend it, personally. I love the art style. The characters are generally entertaining. Ravensburg makes good use of simple development tools and provides (what I find to be) decent value for the asking price.

Enjoyable little game. Still has some typo's, and some of the potion items you get don't seem to play a factor in the game, but it's still fun.

I'm very delighted by the existence of RAVENSBURG, a game cobbled by the many things the author adores that feels like it was put together from the ground up. For all its quirks, RPGMaker is a very worthwhile canvas to present all these ideas and there's a lot of things it adds to its otherwise traditional turn based style. RAVENSBURG will scratch the itch for those searching for an RPG with: -Lots of characters -Tense battles -Saucy interactions -YA Vampires -No frills length -Fancy interior -A whodunnit sideplot -Giant breasts Right off the bat, the characters stand out. I really enjoy Valdrich and Kazia, they have this intimate knowledge of each other as often shown by how Valdrich knows exactly how to push Kazia's buttons and vice versa. And it doesn't take long for you to meet everyone across the streets and eventually in the mansion. While they're archetypal and not always standout, everyone's charming and rooted in some way, I give my personal highlights to Rosaire, Alektor, Heratriz and Xandra. You get specific missions with them that all come with spicy scenes, not something I usually go for and Valdrich is pretty pushy all things considered but there's a clear passion nonetheless, not gonna say anything but the Alektor scene is pretty fun especially learning about his tail. You can swap them all in and out as you please, just remember you only have two slots, so it's expected you commit to a full team sooner or later. Helping this is the really interesting battle system. There's no respawning enemies in sight, experience can be limited but for the better, and you have souls to work with. These act as flat buffs to specific stats, meaning even if someone's a few levels behind, you can boost them upwards to give them extra footing back in the game. And the movesets are incredible as well, a lot of buff and debuff focus specifically, lowering stats, stacking effects, using unique items and even plenty of different healing moves to go through. Always appreciate an RPGMaker game that can go beyond the typical growth system and bring more to the table, like the meat system in Hylics. If I were to critique the game in its current state, I'd say money is pretty lenient. I had thousands by the end PLUS lots of shillings and whatnot, and I had optimized my gear setup on the many characters I used through and through, bought lots of items and everything. Beyond that, there's text box errors, like how one set of dialogue may be accidentally repeated, or someone might say something that someone else is actually saying. That and there's not a whole lot of equipment currently, but that's all still subject to change in due time, an update just dropped recently after all. Even then, this is a pretty impressive and neatly short RPG that I will definitely be coming back to, lots of side stories to fulfil and it's got this very intricate setting to it full of wonderfully maximal interface, detailed maps, immaculate CGs and killer atmosphere. Will watch this dev's work with interest. Excited for when we get more Alektor stuff.

This game clearly has endless passion put behind it, and I thoroughly enjoyed the game. It was a bit of a learning curve for me to understand the combat, but I got there and enjoyed the challenge of the game, as well as the diverse cast with their own personalities and stories. I look forward to the Dev's next game that was announced!

🥀🥀🥀💔💔💔

Picked this up just because it looked like a super high-effort project, and it definitely shows when playing. It's clear to me that this was put together with a lot of care and love for the setting and characters, and it's still getting updates which push that even further. All the artwork is highly detailed and stylish, especially for the character sprites and their personal story cutscenes. Despite the sheer quantity of art assets in the environments, with entirely unique tilesets and sprites for each area and interior, the high level of detail and quality remains consistent. The characters are a major strength of the game, with each having a very distinct design and personality. I found most of them to be likeable, with the majority of them having endearing qualities or entertaining dialogue and interactions in the game to experience. Depending on which party members you decide to bring along, they'll have different things to say at various story moments or when conversing with certain characters, and each party member will have an individual quest that will unlock cutscenes which depict the main character deepening their relationship with that party member. For the majority of the cast, this is a sexual encounter but these are optional. There are also a handful of encounters which don't involve any sexual content, some which are highly sexually charged but don't depict actual sex, and far more which are explicitly pornographic. There's no way of knowing which ones are sex scenes and which aren't; sometimes the character will allude to it but oftentimes it's just "Hey, would you like to spend some time together?" so if you're put off by that sort of thing, be aware that you can completely bypass it but you may miss out on a few genuine character interactions. In terms of the gameplay, it's a fairly standard RPG Maker combat system: elemental effects and weaknesses, equippable weapons and gear, special attacks that cost MP, items to use in combat for healing and revival, all expected features. In my experience, I did make an attempt to engage with the deeper combat systems but there's very little information displayed or none at all about an enemy's elemental affinity, and also no information about the affinities of your own party members. I was able to get through most of the game ignoring the elemental systems and just giving everyone a gun, then applying damage over time abilities and debuffs to the more difficult enemies, and when all else failed you can always just grind up your character and overlevel for the boss (although there's no respawning enemies). Overall I didn't find the combat to be engaging at all and mostly served as a barrier to seeing the story and character interactions. Combat is absolutely not the focus of the game, but I don't really think it should be the focus of a player's attention either. Something like OMORI basically just has a rock-paper-scissors elemental system but it has strategic depth by letting the characters swap between them with abilities and items, and abilities that benefit from being in certain states or syncing up with states of other party members. There's room to be strategic if you want and it can be interesting and engaging, or you can just remember rock-paper-scissors and smack down the enemy if you don't care. On the whole, I do like Ravensburg just because I can appreciate the dedication and passion the developer has for the world that they've created. Love bleeds from every pixel of this game and it can be hard to get that feeling from a lot of projects but you can really feel that the developer adores everything and everyone that they've put into the game and that alone makes this worthy of attention.

yes