Tales of the Drunken Paladin: Version II

Drunken Paladin is one of those games in the RM community that has managed to grab the attention of a number of people few games only dream of having. The praise for this game is strong, not in terms of general consensus, but in terms of the fanbase this game seems to have generated that is filled with zealots that will have none of the criticism that this game actually deserves. How this game managed to form such a strong following is beyond me, for there are major and glaring flaws design-wise, gameplay-wise and writing-wise that seriously hinders me from enjoying this game. Despite all of my initial harsh words about this game, I will say that this is a game of meticulous effort; blood and sweat was put into this project and it shows, though, blood and sweat alone does not warrant any exemption from criticism of its flaws. This game had a lot of effort put into it; it was just that effort is not enough to save it.

First off, I would like to state that this game took me months to complete, and I will try my best to recollect my experiences with it accurately. The reason why it took so long can be summarized by the first paragraph you just read. I have a policy in which I must finish the game before I consider myself adequate enough to review it. It is more or less true that after you traverse though a good bit of a professional game, you can safely say that the quality of it will project throughout the entire project, though in terms of amateur designed RM games, this is not always the case, for a project designer very well can improve in the middle of a project and make the project better and better as time rolls on. This is a burden I carry myself and it has its pros and cons, in this case, the cons definitely weighed more heavily, as this game was consistent in its quality level – quite shoddy.

Design-wise, this game was very inconsistent. An immediate example that I can think of is that at certain points in the game, you can dash, and at certain points in the game, you are forced to crawl-speed walk to traverse through its superfluously decorated and unnecessarily difficult to navigate areas (The mining village took ages to just go from one end to the other, not because of its size, but because of its convoluted passage ways and cliffs). This isn’t on a bases of if you are in a room or not, whether it is in a situation in which running wouldn’t follow proper etiquettes (?) – No, it was completely random, sometimes, you just couldn’t dash for some reason, and other times, you could, and this bugged the hell out of me. This of course, is a design mistake than a design flaw. Word to the wise is – just make the character auto-dash; unless it is something like on a overworld map, in which the scale of distances is altered, auto-dash could mean the difference between a impatient gamer dropping your game or not, and there are a lot of impatient gamers out there.

Speaking of world maps, the world map of this game was ugly. The mapping, i.e. shapes of the islands, where you can and can’t go, was perfectly fine, but it was the selection of the tileset that made it very unpleasant to look at. The world map mixed actual world map tiles with in-town, or rather, when-the-protagonist-is-normal-sized tiles. If there is any way to make tiles from the same tileset clash, this is it. The inconsistency of the sizes of the trees often made it look like a bunch of sequoias randomly spawned amongst a forest of “normal” trees.

The gameplay was boring. There was nothing wrong with it, though I will say that it was on the difficult side, but it was just very generic and lackluster in terms of originality or quirkiness that would otherwise allow battles to intrigue me. You recruit party members as the story progress and each of them has a role, whether it would be healer, caster, status-inflictor, damage-giver, etc. and these characters have their typical helpful skills, with relevant HP and MP count and you go to town with them with the slew of random encounters you will face in this game. When boring battles and difficulty collide, that is when we have a problem. A challenge is only a worthy endeavor when the challenge itself is interesting – picking up spilled toothpicks after I’ve just gotten my nails clipped will never be a fun activity for me no matter how difficult it is.

The biggest problem I had with this game was the game biggest alleged selling point – the writing, or more specifically, the humor. The writing was just not very funny, and often times, was rather contrived and vulgar. Sure, there were a lot of NPCs and even more interactive objects in the game (which is one of the factors that shows intense effort and devotion to detail of the creator) that spewed out original dialogue from the characters, mainly “witty” one-liners from Anebriate, the main character, but none of it is humor, unless you consider two tasteless characters trading crude and unimaginative insults at each other to be funny. I think the entire script of the game can be summarized by, “Fuck you, you horse-shit eating cum bucket filled with turd,” and “No you, you fish-smelling bag of vaginas that fell from the butthole of a bird that was also a bird prostitute!” I’m improvising for a bit, so bear with me. But honestly, this kind of trite and tasteless dialogue will appear every other minute on your screen if you dare to play this game.

None of the characters are interesting, the story was boring, the pacing was repetitive and monotonous, ugh, as you can tell I downright did not like this game. Sorry if this review seemed like the next level of harsh, but after months of arduously trying to inch my way finally to the finish line of this game, it so happened that it was only the bad points of this game that I remember, and they were numerous. I will end this review on a happier side – I’m not saying this game is equivalent to garbage, that space in the trash can is reserved for things like Saint Seiya, but… ugh… this game was just bad… I’m sorry, I’m truly sorry, I can’t end this on a happy note, I tried.