The Deal

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This game has a couple of nice features, some things that can be worked on, and others where there's no saving from. I dove into this thinking it might be a charming little creation with a nice story and compelling characters. However, it left much to be desired, and let me explain why. The auto text is too fast to be able to read through in time. Now, this might be because I'm a slow reader but when you do this type of thing, you have to take into account a lot of stuff. This included. Personally, I found the quotation marks for the description in books unnecessary. It just feels weird to read the information about effects as if someone in the book is actually explaining it to another person. There are too many commas everywhere where they do not need to be. Adding a lot of commas does not automatically make things sound better. It's a very double-edged sword—it can either improve your text or completely demolish it and make it very hard to read. When I started playing, I rarely found spelling errors but the further I went, there were all of a sudden a lot more. Music is too loud during battle. I understand wanting to hype things up, but there's no need to blow someone's eardrums to do it. I had the worst time trying to get my volume right, so I wouldn't be blasted every time I got into a fight. Next thing! I couldn't find the plot for the life of me. It starts fine and all, but there's not much else to it than four friends that decide to travel, adventure, and talk to people. Now that could work if you threw some tension in. However, there isn't any of that—that I could find, at least. This might be because I didn't get there, but you shouldn't have to play a game for 6+ hours to figure out what it's even about. There should have been something. If not tension, then motivation, ambition, something that drove the characters forward, a goal. Just something. That brings me to the next bit. I do like the characters. They have well-established personalities. Again, I didn't get too much from them as I didn't get very far but the parts I did, I liked well enough to continue for a while. I also liked that even the insignificant characters had portraits—regardless of whether they were repeated ones or not. That was a lot of fun as a whole and even the most trivial of the bunch had clear personalities. I do love the fact that there's no grinding. It's all well-paced and consistent in that form. It moved things along quicker, which I appreciated. In most RPG Maker games, you have to grind up several levels like in Pokémon before you can even get anywhere, which is more a pain than pleasure. There are three things that I look for in these types of games: text, characters, and plot. After a while—as you can tell by the stuff I've said above—it became clear that The Deal only had one out of three of these. I would not call this a bad game but it's not a good one. It's fine. Sadly, “fine” is not enough to keep the interest.

RPG Maker strikes again! The Deal 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. 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. This time Andorlea/Warfare/SimProse/whatever other shell account this guy uses to try hide his identity has once more stamped out a painfully generic copy + paste RPG Maker asset flip. It's horribly basic, and although it has fewer than usual grammatical and spelling errors, it's full of stock copy + pasted RPG Maker assets... little real game development has taken place here, this is just a cash grab, it's shovelware polluting Steam for profit. This "developer" has dumped over 100 copy+pasted RPG Maker asset flips onto Steam, and keeps pumping out minimum viable product RPG Maker asset flips as rapidly as possible to try gouge gamers. I think in this case given the length of the game it's possibly something that SimProse/Aldorlea grabbed from someone who perhaps tried to genuinely make a game with RPG Maker (gameplay is well over 15 hours if anyone can be bothered: Spoiler, almost nobody did, see the player stats below), but it's not at all great, still painfully generic, and still, well, everything that's wrong with RPG Maker. We must ask why this ongoing pollution from Aldorlea has any serious value for gamers or the gaming industry. This kind of cash grab construction kit shovelware from bad actors like Andorlea gives amateur developers a bad name. This pollution takes marketing space away from genuine indie developers who are doing the right thing, and making real games instead of copying+pasting premade assets in a children's video game construction kit. It makes it harder for gamers to find genuinely made games. This pollution is harmful to Steam, to gamers and the gaming industry. 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. You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. The Deal has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for starting the game, trivial to achieve, but less than 6 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch. So, should you buy this game? The Deal has the completely unrealistic cash grab price of around $7 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. Gamers who want a good retro JRPG experience would be better off playing the originals, like Final Fantasy, Star Ocean or Chrono Trigger. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

I am 32 years old. My ex-wife and I have a daughter together, and we adopted our son together. Both are now 4 years old. When we were going through our separation, I felt lost and unhappy. I was self-destructive. One day, I was so angry with everything spiraling out of control that I punched a concrete wall in a moment of overwhelming emotion. This resulted in breaking my fifth metacarpal in my right hand—the hand I worked with, played games with, and used to carry my children to bed—the hand I desperately needed to ensure I could continue providing. Upon learning the severity of the self-inflicted damage, I became almost suicidal. Keep in mind that just a few months before this, I was the happiest man, with no history of depression or anxiety. I had never experienced anger outbursts, nor was I the type to break down and cry, but I was in a tough situation that truly prevented me from seeing the light on the other side. With nothing better to do, I looked for a game I could play WITH ONE HAND while recovering. Somehow, I stumbled upon this game and read some of the comments. I decided it was worth a try... I must admit I didn't beat the game, nor did I play as much as some of you. In fact, I may have played this game for only a day or two. That being said, after doing so, I had a new joy and hope for life. I managed to leave behind the pain and suffering that had been thrust upon me. I could experience the joy and happineass of other people. I relaxed for 5 ♥♥♥♥ minutes listening to this music, long enough to realize that I would be okay. After realizing this, I turned off the game and went back to work. My hand hurt a lot, but I was motivated. I stopped feeling so sorry for myself and became the father I needed to be at that moment, not the weak boy I was behaving like. Today, I am close friends with the mother of my children. We don't fight, argue, or say hurtful things to each other. We are parents and friends. Now I have 3 children. My third child is, wait, ALSO 4 YEARS OLD. The woman I am with was going through a very similar situation at the time of my separation, and we just unexpectedly stumbled into each other's lives. We have been dating for a year and are very happy together. Moral of the story: you never know what life has in store for you, and if I had given up when all odds were against me, I wouldn't be where I am today. This silly little game helped me realize that. Thank you.

Great old school RPG. Not extremely complicated and something you can set down and just play for hours. I am 13 hours in and have plenty left to do

No lo recomiendo hoy 2021. Es un juego desarrollado por RPG maker, por lo que muchos de sus recursos no son originales o novedosos, nos propone una linea argumental vaga, los diálogos son superficiales y aburridos, los personajes son estereotipos poco profundos, Comencé a jugarlo, pero tan pronto llegue a un punto me encontré con un Bug, que causa no se pueda continuar (Bug que por lo que vi ya estaba notificado), por lo que tuve que volver a cargar una partida previa para evitar la acción que gatillo el bug, Luego, continué con el juego, pero no paso tanto tiempo para encontrarme con otro bug que me dejo atrapado en una zona sin la posibilidad de salir y continuar la aventura. Claramente es un juego al que ya no prestan atención a los errores. La comunidad es pequeña y poco activa, no encontraras mucha ayuda o guía para cuando no sepas que hacer. Habría pedido reembolso, pero como lo conseguí con descuento no es mucho lo perdido. lo que si diré es que definitivamente no vale su precio.

Very cute indie turn-based RPG fighter. There is an incredible balance within the game where fighting and exploring are well-rewarded, yet the game does not require mass grinding in order to make progress. The soundtrack gets stuck in my head even years removed from playing the game.

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[i]Initialement j'avais eu se jeu plus pour un côté détente et simplement pour le fun, sans rechercher des éléments spécifique de gameplay en particulier. Donc cette évaluation est plus basé sur une approche sans réelle exigence de jeu RPG-old school attendu dans sa globalité.[/i] J'étais déjà un peu sceptique au début de la partie, sur comment la narration et l'histoire du jeu allait être abordée et comment la suite des événements allaient se dérouler, mais quelques heures de jeu par la suite et après avoir terminé le jeu, j'ai concrètement apprécier le jeu dans son ensemble. On retrouve bien ces caractéristiques de jeu RPG de déplacement case par case, au tour par tour pour les combats, et en toute honnête pour un petit jeu RPG comme celui-là, on se retrouve mine de rien avec une bonne variété d'éléments et de décors, ce qui est déjà bien appréciable pour le peu d'heure de gameplay de ce jeu. Je préfère rajouter tout de suite qu'il n'y a pas d'option de difficulté, le jeu est suffisamment équilibré pour les moins expérimentés, pour pouvoir terminer l'aventure avec pas mal de possibilités. Niveau musique et bande sonore c'est ok-tier, certains sont sympa, d'autres moins, rien de bien spéciale à redire là-dessus. Je vais commencer par les points négatives que j'ai pus retenir durant l'aventure pour finir avec du positif =) - Les conversations entre les personnages et les dialogues sont dans l'ensemble très "goofy" ! Et c'était déjà cet élément que j'avais pu constater dès les 1ère lignes de narration comme mentionner au dessus. Je sais qu'il y a cet effort de vouloir donner de la conversation aux différents personnages, de la profondeur et de perdurer les dialogues de jeu dans ce monde fantaisie, mais il y a vraiment cette sensation où c'est vraiment très enfantins, très exagérer à certains moment ! Cependant, je peux peut personnellement mentionné des petites touches d'humour extrêmement bien placés qui rend de nouveau certains échanges très sympa et amusant à lire. - Comme c'est une petite aventure, le jeu est énormément basé sur du "go back" pour faire durer un peu plus longtemps son gameplay. Cela signifie qu'on est à devoir revenir fréquemment sur nos pas pour accomplir des sidequests, de rediscuter avec des pnjs, ou de devoir donner un objet à tel pnj pour donner un autre objet à un autre pnj qu'on a vu au début de l'aventure, etc. Cela nous oblige constamment à revenir sur tous les niveaux et villages précédents beaucoup trop souvent pour accomplir des quêtes et même si ce sont des événements facultatifs, cela freine souvent la dynamique de l'aventure dans son ensemble. - Pour mettre en avant le dernier point cité, je pense qu'il y aurait peut-être été plus sympa de rajouter une sorte de "liste/livre des quêtes" qu'on a en cours. Je sais qu'il y a le journal de Jonathan qui permet de contextualisé la quête principale, mais pour les autres quêtes, soit tu as gardés des notes à côté de toi, soit tu as une bonne mémoire pour t'en rappeler, soit c'est foutu et tu es obligés de te retapé l'intégralité du jeu pour aller chercher le pnj ou l'objectif de ta quête (rip pour tous ceux qui font des pauses ou qui n'ont pas rejouer à ce jeu depuis plusieurs jours/semaines) + Comme mentionner au début, on a plutôt une bonne diversité/variété d'éléments de gameplay à mon goût pour un jeu censé être "court" et être fini en moins de 15h. On a plein de niveau différents, plein de magie, plein de stuffs/items, plein de mobs, plein de bosses, bref, sur le côté combat, personnages, niveaux, on est bien servi. + Je tiens à souligner également la patte artistique de ce RPG qui a été bien soigné et dans l'ensemble correcte avec ces différents environnements (connaissant d'autres jeux de la sorte, beaucoup moins qualitatif) + Les phases de combat bien travaillé et équilibré : on est sur un jeu stratégique au tour par tour et non sur du bourrinage, il faut donc exploiter au mieux ces personnages et jouer suffisamment malin face à des ennemies aux larges variétés d'attaques et de sorts en tout genre ! La difficulté est amplement correcte de façon à pardonner certaines de vos erreurs commises durant les combats. + Autres mentions dans l'ensemble bons, comme le faite d'être suffisamment récompensé en étant curieux, en explorant et en accomplissant les sidequests, la variété des environnements, notre propre campement, et l'équilibrage globale du jeu. J'ai fini avec presque 15h de jeu (avec une certaines quantité d'aller-retour dans les différents niveaux...), tout en ayant presque visé le 100% j'ai 2-3 items de quêtes que je n'ai jamais pus savoir comment les utiliser, avec des personnages niveau 23, en ayant tous les artefacts et ayant vaincu les 2 sorcières annexes. Dans son ensemble, si vous voulez un petit jeu RPG à l'ancienne pas trop long, sans se creuser trop les méninges, je vous recommande bien ce petit jeu sympatoche =D

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