Video Game Fables

[quote]A review copy was provided by the developer.[/quote] [quote]Follow my Curator page, [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41363546-Fruit-N-Doggie-Reviews/]Fruit N Doggie Reviews,[/url] so you can be updated whenever I post a new review.[/quote] [h1]Overall Rating - High Quality ★★★★☆[/h1] [h1]First Impressions[/h1] Many game developers are gamers themselves nowadays, having grown up on one generation or another of consoles. I think so much exposure and creativity has led to the increase of fourth-wall breaks and meta experiences, which doesn't always pay off. More often than not, I tend to avoid titles like that, but then I saw the positive response to Video Game Fables (VGF). It must be the optimist in me, as I was curious enough to take a review key and try it for myself. [h1]Gameplay[/h1] I've played a few RPGs that have experimented with XP, allowing the player to freely reset and spend them on different skill trees. However, VGF goes further with how XP is used. Like most games, you'll earn it by beating monsters and bosses, but the way it functions is more like a currency to purchase everything that'll strengthen your party. Equipping weapons, armor, accessories, and unique skills all require XP. The cost per item isn't too high, but with three party members it adds up pretty quickly. If you want to level up a character, you can only do so by leveling up the entire group. In theory, none of these changes are permanent, as you can refund a choice and use those points elsewhere. Unless you made an odd choice, I'd imagine most of the time you'd just wait to earn more XP instead of refunding it. The other unique mechanic stems from what the developers called “criticals.” Unlike most RPGs, where every attack has a chance of doing extra damage, a critical is something that you acquire from hitting enemies with basic moves. By default, you have every attack has a 40% chance to gain a critical, and it's stored as a red dot next to your character. You can use it to boost your regular attacks, but this is usually the least useful thing to do with it. Some spells can be cast without the use of a critical, yet will have an extra effect if you use a critical to cast it; more often than not, simply making it more powerful. However, all attack spells require a critical to use them, and they do considerably more damage than your regular attacks. Doing this or casting a healing spell are often better choices because they're more potent anyways. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3037342270 [h1]Controls[/h1] Since there's an active timer during battles, which impacts how effective your attacks and spells are, I was glad that VGF works with a controller. It made it much easier to navigate menus during my turn. I will admit though, the timer doesn't give much option for thinking in the heat of the moment. You more or less need to know what you want to do on the fly or in advance. Every so often, I'd notice a delay when trying to catch a fish or mine an ore. However, this same issue never came up during battles, so I found the controls worked well overall. [h1]Story[/h1] It's a bit unclear how this worked, but when the deity paused the game for a substantial time in the past, it caused minor changes to the game's script and structure. After the reset, everyone lost their memories, although that doesn't seem to be universally true. When the princess gets tired of waiting, she breaks the sequence of events, leading to a forsaken princess being unleashed. Long story short, the game broke once, and gets broken even worse due to impatience. Insert joke about releasing games too early here. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3037342015 [h1]Visuals[/h1] With all of the characters being flat yet also made up solely of blocks, it makes me think of the vox style, even though everything doesn't have that 3D pixelated appearance. Plus, with how the crowns look, I can't help but think they have spaceships on their heads. There's some variety in the way background objects are composed, as some look more blocky, while others are completely flat. It's a colorful but simple world, which helps distinguish between the different areas you're supposed to go. Even though it looks basic, considering how most indie games don't replicate this style, I imagine it takes more work to create than first appearance would suggest. [h1]Sound Design[/h1] From what I noticed while playing is that I believe certain tunes are used throughout the entire game, regardless of location. For instance, the battle and boss songs weren't changing, although I think being in different parts of the overworld did make a difference. After beating the game, a few songs felt a bit overused, but they otherwise seemed to be well composed tracks. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3037341755 [h1]Pros[/h1] 🌟 After you get past the initial lull and not so interesting first boss, the game starts picking up momentum. 🌟 The abundance of teleports makes getting around the world less of a chore than it could have been. 🌟 Although not wholly original, playing VGF felt like a unique gameplay experience. [h1]Cons[/h1] ❌ I'm glad I had so much gold in the end game, as it allowed me to start fleeing random battles. With so much ground to cover, especially since I wanted all of the achievements, I got tired of all the fights. ❌ Not every boss fight is very fun. Some of the gimmicks can be a bother. However, it's a good way to make them distinct from what other games do too, so I'd say they're overall a good addition. ❌ The pacing of the game feels a little slow, between the walking speed and how long it takes for turns to progress. [h1]Tips[/h1] 🔍 Each character's stats are equal initially, but due to their unique skills, it'll impact how you want to customize them. With Aru's healing skill, I set her up with a boomerang so she'd be more likely to get crits when needed. They aren't necessary to heal, but get the full potency. 🔍 Even though I cleared the optional DLC cups over time, none of the rewards were particularly useful. So if you want to save it for the end, you won't lose out on any amazing gear. 🔍 Non-attack skills don't require a crit to use them. For instance, putting an enemy to sleep. That's a really important mechanic to be mindful of. [h1]Final Thoughts[/h1] While first playing VGF, I started thinking that maybe I'd made a mistake, as the game wasn't holding my attention very well. The gameplay felt slow, the sense of my party getting stronger wasn't really there, and although amusing the first boss came across like a damage sponge. Only another hour or so later though, and my opinion began thawing. I enjoyed the oddball enemy design, the gameplay cycle was starting to make more sense, and the second boss fight wasn't nearly so tedious. By the time I was getting into the next set of gear, I tackled the first round of the DLC Nightmare Arena, with the thought that I might 100% the game. There are some annoying aspects to VGF, like the spawn rate of enemies and not getting a better reward for clearing the Nightmare Arena, but I rather enjoyed the gameplay once I got some momentum. It's a charming indie RPG that should take about a dozen hours to finish, so I'd recommend it to anyone wanting a casual RPG experience. [quote][url=https://steamcommunity.com/groups/thestrategyinformer/]Come join our group page: [b]The Strategy Informer[/b] for other great reviews, strategy, and strategy adjacent content![/url][/quote] [table] [tr] [th]PC Specs[/th] [th]Performance[/th] [/tr] [tr] [td]Ryzen 2700 RTX 2070 16GB RAM ADATA SSD 1920x1080 [/td] [td]The game ran without incident on default settings. 💖 - VGF is healthy [/td] [/tr] [/table]

Seriously such a fun game! Turn based combat with a bit of a twist of mechanics I haven't seen in other games. Genuinely funny and clever dialog that's made me laugh out loud multiple times. The OST is also really nice! Really impressive for being made by just one person.

Wow, what an absolute masterpiece. This game just keeps on giving and giving all the way to the end. The fact that I learned about this game from a twitter thread about how it has only sold a few hundred copies is an absolute tragedy and I will do my best to tell people about this. The game is funny and charming, the art style is entertaining and looks good in almost all areas, the core RPG battle system is extremely good borrowing heavily from FFX (the best turn based battle system in the FF series) while also seeming to borrow some elements of the flexibility of FFV with your ability to essentially 'respec' by getting a refund on your experience points whenever you want to use them for something else or to try a different weapon (which all have unique effects that can synergize (or not) with the three characters). Overall, the game is very easy, so I never needed to play around with these re-speccing abilities, but the combat was so fun I kind of wish I had--instead I just kept the same weapons from the start by just thinking which ones seemed to synergize well with the character's abilities (gave Aru the bow which allowed her to cast heals faster, gave Tator Gator the Wand since his abilities were magic-focused, and gave Nate the boomerang to set him up as my heavy-hitter who wanted to have CRITs). The CRIT system was phenomenal, and the modifiers on skills really let you evaluate what sounds useful and what doesn't and start to set-up powerful synergies in the late game. But the RPG battles are only a small part of the game--there are *constant* surprises both in terms of dungeon design and battles where you really never know what you'll get. I think the highlight for me was the fight with the collection/hoard. Without spoiling things, the game is not just an RPG--and even not just a platformer (though it does have heavy platformer mechanics outside of combat like all the Mario RPGs.) Any gripes I have are extremely minor.. things like the grass appearing to change LOD at weird times (especially noticeable on the patch next to the shop), occasional frame drops (seemed to happen early when enemy clouds would spawn but stopped after a couple hours in?), some bad camera angles in places, and some minor bugs here and there. In terms of design, my only complaints would be that the game funnels you gold but it feels like there aren't enough gold sinks--the limiting reagent for anything will pretty much always be other resources like crafting materials. Maybe a gold toss ability would be fun lol. And my other design complaint is not being able to jump on the world map--I assume it is for technical reasons to try to avoid players getting on top of things they shouldn't but in a game where I was constantly jumping for fun it was a tiny bit sad not to be able to there. All-in-all, what a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game. Definitely going to be playing the DLC.

TL;DR - GO GET THIS GAME! On normal circumstances I have been a massive skeptic of this genre's continued existance. This game changed that. What you are seeing here, is, to me, absolute proof that despite decades-building biases to the contrary, turn based rpg's still can have a legitimate reason to exist, assuming you can successfully take away all conventions that I thought forever bound to the genre, and I had less and less and less patience for with age, until nothing remained. Don't like RNG telling you an attack missed for no reason? IT'S GONE! Don't like random, unavoidable encounters out of thin air? GONE! Don't like having, and hence running out of, MP or flower points? GONE! Don't like the idea of the characters being unknowingly enslaved by archaic rules? GONE! This game grabbed every single thing I had ever grown to groan at, threw it in the bin where it deserves to be, and embraced modernity like NOBODY'S business. My new gold standard for turn based RPG's in this millenium. Turns out I really DON'T have to tolerate prehistoric practices anymore. It feels fantastic to have met a game that agrees. TL;DR - GO GET THIS GAME!

🚨💎Hidden gem!💎🚨 This game has a lot of charm, is actually pretty funny, and has very engaging central mechanics for classic RPG fans, plus a couple things I haven't seen before! The characters are really charming, and the humor is very tongue-in-cheek self-aware jrpg humor, has gotten a good handful of "audible exhale"s out of me in the first couple hours lol. There's an enemy that's a big stick of celery wearing running shoes and a sweatband and casts haste on himself... his name is "accelery" orz The combat mechanics in it are great, each of the three characters can be built into any class, the only things specific to them are their skill sets. The most distinctive mechanic is probably the EXP distribution-- All of your EXP goes into one pile you spend manually, and everything costs it: adding skill slots, equipping gear, and actually leveling your party (also interesting and very good- all three party members share one level). Nothing you can allocate it towards eats it permanently, you can redistribute it around if you'd rather equip a high-level piece of gear over your party level being 1 higher. I think the worst thing I can say about this game is that its title is [i]terrible[/i] lol. I might also say that going for voxel over like, a paper-style pixel sprite is a questionable decision, since the game mechanics are almost entirely reminiscent of games that came out [i]long before[/i] Minecraft. It looks and plays like the N64 JRPG classic that never was, so the voxels for me were a bit misleading. Not sure of the total length of the game, but I already put 5 hours into the demo before the time on this review. Considering this is a one-man dev, it's absolutely worth the purchase at full price, and I recommend checking it out if you like kinda lame (in a good way) self-aware humor and JRPGs from the N64 era!

Unbelievable how this isn't as big as Undertale. Arguably the best indie game of 2022. The main story is only 10 hours long (the rest of the recorded time was for the DLC challenge battles) and yet this game does so much to establish itself as being both memorable and fun within that limited time. Imo Iconoclasts is the only game I've ever personally played that was able to give more quality per minute than Video Game Fables. The writing and characters are spot-on from start to finish, with no real flaws anywhere in the humour or the dialogue. The CRIT system may just have overtaken Octopath's BREAK/BOOST system as my favourite underlying mechanic in any turn-based RPG ever, it's so good and needs to break into the mainstream consciousness as soon as possible. Every character has the perfect number of skills, all of them are relevant and continue to fill their niches even in endgame, avoiding the pitfall that a lot of indie RPGs fall into of having too few that they become repetitive (Sea of Stars) or way too many that 60% of them are totally useless (Chained Echoes). The soundtrack is also great, with the hub theme, overworld theme and battle theme being particularly amazing. The final dungeon is one of my favourites across all RPGs, and the third boss and final boss both rank amongst my all-time favourite fights in any game period. The game is not without flaw (highly annoying but ultimately manageable mandatory platforming peppered throughout the game, the resource economy, actual use of gold, and fishing rewards being pretty shallow and repetitive even early on in the game, the third-to-last dungeon being really painful in its structure compounded by the obnoxious enemy types found within, the unfailable, but very tedious and just generally unpleasant gameplay sequence between the final boss and the credits which imo should've just been a cutscene), but under the minor imperfections, you have a game so thoroughly good that the fact that its total player count is in the triple digits is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ crime. There are so many other things I want to say here, about the characters, story and especially the boss fight gimmicks, but I'm not even going to allude to them here in order to preserve the surprise for new players going in. The third and final bosses are absolutely made by their genius gimmicks that require you to drastically change your battle style just for them and only them compared to every other encounter in the game. If by some miracle you find yourself here, on this store page tucked away in this lonely, dusty corner of Steam, I have only one thing to say to you. Play. This. Game.

While playing this game, I imagined the developer smiling to himself as he wrote the dialogue and designed the boss encounters. "But what if..." "and maybe she should..." "Oh man, that would be so funny!" and I smiled with him. I was a kid again, playing pretend, dreaming up fun ideas for quests in my backyard. There's a lot of pressure for games to leave an impact these days. I'll say right now, this game probably won't change your worldview. BUT, if you let it, it will absolutely leave you smiling. Pros: - extremely unique boss encounters. These aren't even simple gimmicks, they completely change the rules (or game genre) for each major fight - the base combat is also very unique. critical hits are both your MP and an ability modifier, XP is somehow both a skilltree and a traditional level system, timed turn bonuses, strategy through choosing your turn order...there's a lot going on and yet its all extremely intuitive. - it's very silly. I giggled AND chuckled plenty of times. - short and sweet, never got boring. Finished it in a little over 10 hours which felt just right. Cons: - Honestly, just one: it could have benefited from some visual polish. It wears its inspirations proudly, with influences from classic RPGs like Dragon Quest and Paper Mario, but simple designs need careful attention to keep from looking unfinished. I understand that sometimes to get a game out the door you have to stop yourself from adding too many details, but even a little post-processing or a CRT filter could have helped hide some blemishes and inconsistencies in style. I was shocked to see this game didn't have way more reviews, and I wonder if this might have been something that held it back from the attention it deserved. Overall, this was a 10/10 for a fun little time with some goofy little blocky sprite people. I'm going to bed with a big smile tonight.

One of the better solo dev RPGs out there. Great artstyle,fun and unique enemies and bosses to fight. Unique battle system and great writing. Def worth the price of entry for a fun RPG worth your time and attention. Really something to be said about all of this being done by 1 person. Keep up the good work!

日本語はないので画面翻訳ソフトを使用してプレイ。 軽めのRPG+ミニゲーム。 ストーリー進行に必須のミニゲームがいくつもあり、 ボス戦にもだいたいミニゲームが追加される。 ミニゲーム嫌いにはお勧めできない。 3Dである事を活かした演出やミニゲームで 飽きさせないように工夫してある。 ストーリーは重くならない雰囲気が好み。 音楽も曲数が少ないながらも気に入った曲があった。 飽きずに楽しめたと思う。 *ゲームの簡単な内容を知りたい場合は、 このストアページの『このゲームについて』の文章を 訳してください。

Video but written to follow, https://youtu.be/OWh4elxno5Q One of the most sincere games I've ever played. It has fast battles, slow walking, cute characters, and a sense of humor. This game does not take itself seriously at all. Sure, it's a parody but written in a way that is enjoyable to a wider audience. The combat is quick, which I like. If you play fast you'll do more damage. Beyond that it's a wild ride! There are typical RPG fights but there are also very special ones. This is what this game's all about! Weird mechanics that keep it interesting. Don't worry, there are plenty of standard RPG mechanics. But Video Game Fables is something special. Overall, Video Game Fables is wonderful, a real delight. Fans of RPGs will find enough here to feel familiar until the game rips out out of your comfort zone. Trust me, you want it to happen. It's not perfect but has charmed me.