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A very, very meta RPG. Everyone is aware they are in a video game, and the player is explicitly asked why they’re playing the game and making the choices they are at several points. I initially expected this to be irritatingly pretentious or pointlessly trite as meta stories so often are, but I actually thought it struck a good balance I genuinely appreciated. Though framed comedically, there is a serious undercurrent to it that I thought gave the game real poignancy. There is a strong emphasis on the importance of sensitivity, nuance, and small acts of kindness; this is a game where you can tip helpful NPCs for giving you exposition, and you will actually get to see what they did with the money and how it changed their life. I never felt like it was giving me the option to be nice to faceless NPCs just to mock me or the concept itself, as often seems to be the case in similar parodic RPGs. Though the tone is overall absurdist, there is a genuineness to everything I found really touching.
Unfortunately, this is also an RPG that should have been a visual novel.
The game’s description promises that it “features everything that you loved from the 8-bit RPGs of your childhood and leaves behind everything you didn’t”. Unsurprisingly, it can’t live up to this boast; it is just another RPG Maker RPG, with all the flaws standard for the genre, including the many hated features from those 8-bit RPGs I’m really baffled the program hasn’t shucked yet. Damage calculation appears to use an incredibly poorly-balanced subtractive defense formula that creates wildly different damage values for even tiny differences in defensive stats — my fighters would often take literally no damage from attacks that cut my casters’ health in half. To really double down on this, magic defense is almost impossible to come by if you’re not a caster because only casters can equip magical armor, so fighters are sitting ducks against spells and there’s little you can do about it. Because oh yes of course enemy targeting is totally random, better hope enemies land that hit on the person who will take single-digit damage from it and not the person you’ll have to revive next turn. (To rub salt in the wound, the tank class has an ability that’s supposed to draw attacks, but it appears to only work some of the time, because ???) Oh, but good luck if someone does go down, because that infuriating thing from 8-bit RPGs where you have to input commands for the whole turn without knowing what the enemies will do? Oh, you better bet that’s a feature! Enjoy telling your paladin to raise your cleric only to have them get murdered themselves before their turn comes up. And I haven’t even mentioned the random miss and crit rates! Why are those still a thing? Seriously? Why, in 2019, have we not collectively risen up and scrubbed that terrible [i]Dungeons and Dragons[/i] artifact from our systems? [i]Who is this appealing to?[/i]
But even aside from the poor decision to use RPG Maker’s default battle system, this game just seems very poorly and haphazardly designed. You have access to limited monster-repel spells and items at the start of the game… yet as early as the third dungeon, you get the ability to turn off random encounters freely. So… why are the limited versions there at all? (Incidentally, developers: if players want to turn off a core gameplay feature, that’s a sign it shouldn’t be there in the first place.) You get the ability to change classes a la Dragon Quest III, but despite advising you to wait until you get all the skills for a class first (since they transfer), the game gives you no way of knowing when you’ve gotten the final skill for a class. Some classes also have passive abilities, but they are not listed in the character screens and are only mentioned by NPCs in the starting area. I was also honestly quite surprised to learn class shifting was possible, because so many of the classes are obviously fusions between others — why exactly should I bother with the slow-leveling Sorcerer if I can produce the same effect by multiclassing a Warlock into a Healer? Relatedly, as I’ve come to expect from RPG Maker games, magic is crap — elemental spells need to hit an elemental weakness to be even marginally better than a physical attack from a fighter of the same level. (Until you get the ultimate endgame spells, which are ludicrously powerful and boss fights are virtually impossible without them. There’s just no middle ground in this game.) To make matters worse, the super caster class doesn’t even seem to get every element naturally — are you supposed to multiclass into Warlock for those, or…?
So, ultimately, this looked like a nice idea marred by very amateurish design. I… am not sure if I can say it’s worth money, frankly. Which is unfortunate, because the story really is quite nice, but the gameplay is just that unenjoyable. I think I would have liked it a lot better if it was one of those visual novel RPGs where the battles are only a formality.
(Trigger warning if you play it yourself: the PC’s father misgenders them frequently. I don’t see any reason to believe it’s malicious, but be aware if that’s something that upsets you.)
