RPG Maker strikes again!
Robot Female Hero 3 is one of hundreds of low effort retro-pixel RPG Maker asset/construction kit flips spamming the Steam catalog, made with the RPG Maker video game construction kit... in their own words, "Our easy to use tools are simple enough for a child." Like all RPG Maker "games", this is essentially a bunch of low quality/canned assets from RPG Maker coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club fan fiction. Along with the canned assets, there's some bespoke artwork. The artwork here is terrible, it's a blend of old retro pixel "art" used as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics, and some of the most amateurish MS-Paint style drawings (I won't deign to call these "illustrations"). It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can do graphics properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result of these decisions.
As with all RPG Maker games, the poor quality engine displays badly in fullscreen and doesn't have full HD support or any graphics tweaking options, making this unacceptable for any dedicated modern PC gamer. The point can be made that the intention of RPG Maker is to make demos and small games to pass around friends, and shouldn't be used for "professional" game development.
Like most RPG Maker shovelware and asset flips, the game features extremely low quality copy + pasted 2D retro pixel art, looks awful, and has even worse gameplay. RPG Maker is an absolutely terrible construction kit, and never results in games of any reasonable quality or value to gamers.
There's an extremely weak, generic story about robots and alien invasion, and lame attempts at humour. This is perfectly aligned with the incredibly lazy construction kit/MS paint technical delivery. From end to end, this is garbage.
Gamers who want a good retro JRPG experience would be better off playing the originals, like Final Fantasy, Star Ocean or Chrono Trigger.
The poor quality of this game is reflected in the general public reception. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game all-time peak player count was only ONE player. That's right, only one person ever played this at a time. When I played this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak player count for the game. OUCH. The only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in the game is to be expected. Gamers just didn't take this low quality game seriously, and for good reason.
If this was some kind of free game on Itch, it would probably get a few pats on the back and participation trophies, but this game has the insulting cash grab price of $12 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games, let alone the sheer number of free games available on Steam. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.
