RPG Maker strikes again!
"The Legend of Bean" 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.
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 a painfully generic, badly translated anime fanfiction associated here as you need to escort the developers waifu/imaginary girlfriend around the place, or whatever. The writing iis crap, the way the RPG Maker assets were flipped is bad.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 7 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, 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 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
It's important to note that, despite this being such a low quality product, there's a number of positive reviews that all appeared several years at the same time, from suspiciously inactive Steam accounts that have reviewed almost no other games apart from this, all in Simplified Chinese and all the reviews happened on the same day, after zero activity on the game for years.
On a purely unrelated note, recent US FTC rulings mean that review manipulation and fake reviews are now federal crimes. Interesting, isn't it? Regardless... take the review score of this game with a grain of salt.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
"The Legend of Bean" is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. 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.
