Selatria

Among all the competently made JRPGs that I've played, "Selatria" is unfortunately the least entertaining one. A decent story, decent battles, decent area designs - it's all futile if the game isn't fun. And why isn't it fun? Because it's littered with stupid (reaction-based) mini-games and nonsensical puzzles. I've never been so furious when playing a JRPG. Total crap JRPGs, those I can abandon after a few hours without ever thinking about them again. But this game lured me into wasting 60 hours until it finally broke me, and the developer wasn't willing to offer any swift help via Steam or Discord. When I asked a question about a specific time-pressure reaction-based puzzle sequence (even providing a screenshot), during which I had the feeling that it's physically impossible to meet the requirements (and to make matters worse, it's one of those puzzles during which a single misstep forces the player to repeat the whole sequence), the developer got all secretive and said that he might post a solution at some point. That's not what I deem great customer service. Since I had posted my review, the developer finally uploaded some puzzle solutions to YouTube, including Baizorak's Nest, the one which made me quit. Now, did the video show me that I was simply stupid? No, the smooth video sequence showed me that it was impossible for me to complete the puzzle in the first place because of the heavy lag that I experienced on that map. So if you're brave enough to try out this game, make sure your PC is sufficiently potent. Should I even mention all the other negative points? There are too many stupid design decisions, the worst ones being no auto-dash, not being able to save (or switch party members) anytime/anywhere, not being able to switch the protagonist's damage/healing roles mid-battle, and a ton of permanently missable items because of all the one-time-only areas and areas that become unavailable at some point. And as with every commercially released RPG Maker game, whether it has been 13 years in the making like this one or 13 days, there's a multitude of bugs that haven't been fixed (in a timely manner). If you just want to complete the main story and don't mind a few (reaction-based) mini-games along the way, check this game out, but if you're a completionist and want to achieve everything, prepare for one hell of an annoying "adventure".

This could be a decent homage to classic games if not for limited assets and bad engine that doesn’t make the experience fun. The game takes place in a world that’s governed by Selatria, which is a form of magic. Sadly, the world is also stuck in a war between two different kingdoms. While one was superior in magic, the other was better in arms. Although some other characters will join you during the adventure, the main two belong to the magic kingdom. The first is Mage a young student who’s close to finishing his magician school, and the other is Melanie, a knight who often has to look after clumsy Mage and fix his mistakes. The whole thing gets complicated when two heroes return from a trial in a nearby cave and see that their town was attacked. First thing you’ll notice is that the game’s engine isn’t the best. Although it immediately reminds you of a well-known software for creating classic RPG games, it’s missing a lot of quality of life features. The biggest criticism are painfully slow battles without any option to speed it up, strange and annoying lag on some maps, F12 key resetting the game instead of creating a screenshot (don’t repeat my mistake of trying to save the moment of defeating a hard boss), and no full screen mode. You can force this mode with Alt+Enter, but you’ll be stuck with a small square in the middle and a lot of black all around. This leaves you with a window mode that only allows 4:3 aspect ratio. Another issue is tied to gamepad. While supported, it’s very buggy and makes playing unbearable. The problem is that if you press a button during text squares, such as victory message or conversations with NPCs, the current text will start looping and won’t let you move to the next one until you press a keyboard key. What the game does well is voice acting. Voices are only heard during cutscenes and major conversations, but they’re not amateurish. The only small issue is that some sound too similar, which is understandable. Combat doesn’t move away from the established RPG template. You have your basic attack and skills that use action points, or AP for short. Each character has its own skills, so while a mage has magic, the knight has blade, the assassin. Also, Mage can change class and go for offence, healing, or balance. All classes have different spells. Slight annoyance is that default action is always attack, and selection isn’t kept from round to round. Strangely, the selection stays when you use skills. New skills are unlocked as you level-up so you don’t have to buy them or look for them in the world. What’s interesting that skills can also be passive, which means they are always active or work under certain conditions. One of more interesting and useful are the knight’s “team attacks”; if you attack with a fire blade, the mage will cast a free fire spell. AP doesn’t restore on its own. When in battle, you need to defend to restore some of the AP or cast a free spell to regenerate AP for some other characters. This doesn’t let you cheese the mechanic and cast unlimited heal because this doesn’t work outside of combat. What makes defense even more useful is that it also heals you for a few points. A lot of times this might give you a valuable breathing room to cast a spell or attack almost-dead enemy. Of course, you can also find a weak enemy and keep defending until you refill both health and AP. Even more important, the game adds one nice feature that might save you even when you find yourself without any items deep in a dungeon. Simply by walking around, you accumulate something called “reserved Selatria”. The limit is 500, but you can spend this at any save point to restore both health and AP by inputting the amount you want. The world looks big, but you don’t have much room for exploration. There are no meaningful side-quests, only small tasks that give you a small reward. If you’re into collectibles, you can look for 50 cats hidden all over the world. Since the game is divided into chapters, you are lead through in a linear fashion, and sometimes even forced into a limited location that you never see again. Of course, each part of the map offers a few extra locations, but the path forward is clear. The game’s loop is classic: first there’s a town where you get the next story piece, buy new gear, and then you go to the dungeon with a boss. And then you get to another town and repeat. Dungeons are monotonous mazes of corridors. Except for specific locations, the majority of enemy encounters in the world are random. However, visible enemies are a nuisance because they reset each time you switch rooms. Equipment is nothing special. Each new gear improves stats by a couple of points to make it look like you’re getting stronger, but the difference isn’t that big. Often I ignored shops because you can get a lot from chests in dungeons. As always, you can loot houses by inspecting drawers, pots, and barrels.

Been waiting for this release for a long time :) A passion project from a dev team who have all loved JRPGs for decades, Selatria is a must-play for fellow lovers of the genre! I'm excited to see the rest of the story now that this is out

Something spoiled my fun playing this game. It was running fine..till one of the updates. OK, I didn't run it for a long time. But today it first stoped loading. After a good 15 minutes later I canceld Visual C++ redistributable and...voila it was loading again. Only that there was no Fullscreen. Oh, for a few seconds it starts in Fullscreen but than it jumps to only 1/2 screen....and no I couldn't change it back to full. One look at the installed files....OMG, 4 GB for a game not better than any RPGMaker game....because the dev couldn't reduce the audio SE files (3.14 GB) Sadly it's too late for a refund.

Finally Full Version here, excellent Game. Remind me of Lufia series the battle system. Love turned based role playing games. I highly recommanded to try this game out.

I really love this game. I just finished it today and it has been an awesome ride. The first half of this game introduced me to turn based JRPG style gameplay and made me fall in love with the genre. I played Chronotrigger and Final Fantasy 1-5 while I waited for the full version of Selatria to come out. For me, it absolutely holds up when compared to those. The stylistic influence is obvious enough to feel familiar, yet there is enough originality that the game stays enticing and absorbing. Some of my favorite features of this game are: Fun and unique (to me) battle system – I enjoyed pulling off team attacks and figuring out which character combinations worked well together. Some combinations made combat easy to the point of feeling cozy and relaxing, while others give the player more of a challenge. I liked to try to level all of the characters as evenly as possible, which encouraged me to embrace the challenge of sometimes using a party that doesn’t synergize optimally. Voice Acting, Music, and Art Style – After coming from the classics with only pixel graphics and no voice acting, Selatria presents a pleasant change. Many of the assets are hand drawn, which really adds a sense of emotional connection to the characters when combined with the voice acting. The music does a great job setting the mood of each scene. Most of the puzzles – They strike a good balance between challenging and possible. I often considered the puzzle sections to be the Real Bosses of this game as they required multiple attempts for me to figure out what to do and to practice executing them perfectly. That said, there are a few puzzles that are impossibly difficult (for me and apparently others). Thankfully, Whim Indie posted the solutions to these on their YouTube channel. For me, it was worth giving up, watching those, and carrying on with the game. The Dev Team – These guys are great. They’ve been working on this game for years and years and they are still committed to supporting the project. They are very responsive on the Whim Indie Discord, and respond personally to bug reports and issue patches promptly. Playing on Steam Deck – I played this game almost exclusively on Steam Deck Oled and the experience was great. The game fits really well on that platform, as long as you are aware of some of its issues. 1. requires proton 5.13-6 for best results on steam deck. This fixes a bug where the last part of voice acted lines are cut off, and improves fps performance on the overworld. However, even on 5.13-6 there are a few parts where the game just runs poorly, at around 10 fps. While a bit frustrating, the game remains playable. And thankfully these instances are pretty rare. 2. Coming out of the starting area you are subjected several freezes that occur during a dialog section. Don’t give up, but it takes a few minutes between each line of dialog. Just press A to get through it and know that it doesn’t happen again in the game. 3. I had a couple of error message crashes (missing files) in my playthrough. After messaging the devs on Discord, they put out patches to fix these so they shouldn’t be happening now. 4. The Deck’s suspend-resume feature doesn’t work properly so the game crashes after resuming from sleep. Knowing this, its imperative to use the game’s built-in quicksave function and quit the game before suspending. For me, quicksaves worked perfectly and also synced to desktop via Steam’s cloudsave. But I did love that there’s no Windows border around the game when playing on Steam Deck. Overall, I definitely recommend this game to any fans of turn-based RPGs or anyone curious about the genre.

Great game! There are over 60 hours of content and plenty of locations to explore! Some puzzles may be difficult but there is a guide that helps out with most of the difficult ones.

Fantastic- difficult at times but well worth the entertainment

I started playing this game originally when I met the Dev team back at Gameacon. After beating the original version, grinding the hell out of it, learning its guts, and getting to beta test the full version of the game, i can say it's beyond recommended. I have loved this game and this dev company for years. Give it a playthrough, Its worth beating at least once. this game has its moments where it is beyond frustrating, but it is learnable. I can personally guarantee that everything is humanly possible, if not sometimes needing to be near perfect, but that's part of it's charm, half of those parts are optional, and the other half that arent are learnable with a few times of repetition. This game will challenge you, but also keep you absorbed in the character's growth. Call it nostalgia, but i need to do another playthrough. Also.. I'm in the game ;3 I couldn't have asked for a greater honor than that. You can find me in the bane of my existence. MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATTTTT!!! (Fire Dungeon)