Iniquity and Vindication

Iniquity and Vindication is a game by LockeZ who's a guy that talks a lot about game design and battle design on the forums. I've seen LockeZ talk about these subjects for years now but I've never actually dove into one of his games to see if he can put his money where his mouth is, so here goes.

Side note: While LockeZ has presented himself as an expert (I don't mean to suggest he has been immodest or said he was awesome or something, just that he has shared a plethora of opinions with an air of, well, expertise) I have seen him get shit on around here a lot over the years too. Generally speaking by now-departed jerkasses who I a) generally respected as avant garde indie game developers but b) certainly never liked as people. Because of that split opinion, I had wondered for a long time if they were right (due to a) or wrong (due to b) about LockeZ. Now I think that anyone who said that LockeZ was a terrible game designer probably had their head up their ass. None of these preconceptions had any particular impact on the review, I just thought they made a fascinating contextual note.

So let's dive into some game evaluation. Iniquity and Vindication is a comedy game (honestly with a title like that it had better be) which is why I had not ever felt compelled to check it out before and why I'm not more excited about it now. I am not, to be honest, a big fan of comedy games.

(Random Rant: I have no idea why the word Iniquity is in the game's title. None. Serious or silly, the word "iniquity" connotes obscene, immoral, improper behavior, vice, sin, turpitude etcetera i.e. "den of iniquity" being a cliched phrase referring to opium dens, crack houses, brothels, Las Vegas, and so on. At no point during the two hours I was playing did the game invoke, explore, or even vaguely touch on anything that anyone might consider Iniquity.)

A big reason for that is, as I mentioned in my review of Chase for Divinity by unity, comedy games are a crap shoot. Without the factors and nuances that professional comedians master like tone and timing, all a game has to deliver humor is text and visuals and since individual senses of humor are so extraordinarily subjective...yeah. It's a crap shoot.

The other reason is that generally speaking when I'm playing a game of any substance I want to care about the characters and the story and be invested in the gameplay. But when all of the above seems to clearly exist solely as a vessel for "zany hi-jinx" (which can sometimes feel forced), it makes it difficult for me to really care and get invested.

So is I&V funny? When you denote something as a piece of comedy, that becomes the prime rubric by which it's judged, after all, and all other things are secondary. If this review was grading solely based on humor-value the score would be closer to 2.5 or 3 Stars. Frequently the game made me snort, titter, or snicker with its various quips and zany character moments (not to mention the names of various enemies and items and pieces of equipment, all thoroughly embalmed in a potent brine of ridiculousness) but it never elicited any major yuks or laugh out loud moments: no powerful guffaw or a real belly laugh or a jag of uncontrollable laughter was elicited from me at any point.

The writing in I&V is solid and the characters' respective personalities are well drawn in spite of (or perhaps because of) their absurdity. The scene with the BIG RED BUTTON was representative of some of the better and funnier writing in the game.

On some level I feel frustrated that I&V is a comedy game because the graphics and music are good and the gameplay is stellar. The battles, dungeons, and puzzles are definitely some of the best that I've seen in an RM game. Even the setting is actually really interesting on its own without being turned into a backdrop for zany hi-jinx. A modern/futuristic Earth where the powers of ancient Egyptian artifacts are being unlocked and changing the face of modern warfare? Man, it's pretty out there but if someone was peddling a SERIOUS game or story with this kind of premise, I'd be like...sign me up!

Now I don't want to sound like a total stuffed shirt. I do in fact have a pretty robust sense of humor and honestly about 40-50% of the media I consume on a whole is designed to make me laugh. It's just not often that I look to scratch that itch with games. I don't think that converting Iniquity & Vindication to something highhandedly self serious would be a good idea either, as it would lose all of what makes it technique. But LockeZ describes it as "a blend of comedy and action in the manner of Disgaea or Dr. McNinja" and I guess I'd be more invested in it if the way comedy and action was blended was a bit different. Something like The Expendables where the viewer can choose from moment to moment if they're enjoying it as a ridiculous over the top action flick or a ridiculous over the top action flick. As opposed to something more like a webcomic. But this is a pretty subjective and nuanced criticism, and I've already dropped a lot of words on it, so I'll let it lie.

The graphics in Iniquity & Vindication are actually quite good. The maps aren't "lush" or "atmospheric" there's no fancy lighting effects or overlays or anything but they are well designed with some pretty neat tilesets. Not all of the tiles seemed to mesh with the others in terms of style but that's fairly standard with RMXP and nothing was so glaring it detracted from my enjoyment. Character sprites included lots of cool animations, particularly the JUMPIN' + FLIPPIN' + SWORDIN' animations of the protagonist, James. The way that on-map gameplay seamlessly transitioned into battles was awesome and custom battle graphics included sharks in swim trunks riding surfboards, sharks surfing on crocodiles, and enemies wielding sharkzookas that fired shark torpedoes. I could not approve more.

The music choices for the most part are fun and fitting although the music selection gets messed up occasionally by the continue feature (which I'm about to lavish praise on a little further down) for instance at one point after I continued following a boss battle the REALLY INTENSE METAL BATTLE MUSIC continued to played over a fairly talky cutscene before the boss fight which felt awkward and inappropriate.

Gameplay in I&V has a lot of kickass features that really contributed to my enjoyment of it. Battles are really awesome from what I've seen. Every battle in the game is a fairly solid challenge and a bit like a puzzle: you need to keep on your toes and pay attention to the situation you're in and make clever and competent use of your skills to survive. Offensive skills on their own aren't powerful but it is possible to set up effective skill synergies even in a single character party. A quick-charging ATB bar kept me from ever getting bored and 'Chakra' replaced the defend command and was something I actually used pretty often--in most RPGs 'Defend' is not a valuable strategic option and is rarely used, but not so here.

The blue magic skill learning system for Veris was really cool and reminded me of one of my favorite RM games of all time, A Blurred Line. I didn't 'get' James' skill learning nearly as well and I feel like it could have been explained a lot better because it felt very random and haphazard to me. A few individual abilities felt poorly balanced to me too. I thought the damage of Giga Blast was tremendously underwhelming, at least once Veris got the ability to use it...with its extremely high cost and limitations (one use per battle) it should do at least four times that much damage. Likewise, I learned Aura Punch in the final boss fight and took about ten turns using Chakra to charge James' Energy to full, only to see Aura Punch do less damage than Silhouette, which was super fucking lame.

This game is full of kickass boss fights. I don't want to spoil any of them for you the reader but they are really freaking awesome, the music and graphics help you get pumped, and every boss has one or more clever strategic gimmicks that you must observe and take advantage of to succeed. Status effects work on bosses just as well as anyone else which is good because you'll need to use them to the fullest to survive. Most of the boss fights will leave you with a sense of accomplishment upon beating them, like you solved a puzzle, whether it took you just one try or a few.

The technical programming skill to implement these boss fights--which weren't without bugs or glitches, but were without any bugs or glitches that kept me from finishing the game--seems very impressive to me. Between that and the seamless transition to on-map battles, either LockeZ is a gifted RGSS scripter himself or the arsenal of scripts available for RMXP has improved a LOT in the years since I abandoned that program. The programming involved in the fight with the female operative on the bridge and all of the magic circles alone seemed mind boggling in its complexity. Although I do want to take this opportunity to pick nits: the stun status effect did not prevent bosses who were stunned from summoning, and that annoyed me.

The best design decision made in this game by a long shot was the continue feature, which lets you jump back into a battle immediately after you fail. Combined with the ability to save your game anywhere, this really cuts down on the frustration potential. So does the fact that the game, as it promises on the game page, will never make you fight the same fight twice.

The continue feature especially is a good thing, because the fights in this game are TOUGH and you WILL die and I very likely would have quit early on if not for the convenience of the continue feature because there were many times that I had, like a jerk, forgotten to save recently. That said, I did notice that when I used continue to retry a fight, Veris would start the fight with Blue Magic abilities he learned from the enemies that logically he wouldn't have learned yet, and this felt wrong to me. This wasn't a deal breaker by any means but it is illogical and should be fixable.

The fun in I&V isn't just to be found in the battles, though. Dungeons are very cleverly designed and you will need to use on-map tools (a la Zelda or Metroid) to advance by completing simple but engaging puzzles. For the most part I really enjoyed the dungeon gameplay, and the Prison Ship dungeon was one of the better dungeons I've seen in an RPG I'd, have to say (although it did have maybe 2-3 too many battles for my taste). That said I've got some nitpicks here. First off, even though this is a comedy game, the vertical levels of a ship are NEVER referred to as "Floors". They're referred to as "Decks". So the lift shouldn't take you to 1F, 2F, 3F etc. It should transport you between Deck 3, Deck 2, and Deck 1. Secondly, I almost got stuck at the electrified door/fence puzzle because up until that point in the game the only objects that were laserable with the laser cannon were wooden boxes (and the blue switch thingies). I found myself ferociously overthinking the problem (i.e. trying to push the explosive barrel to all different positions next to the generator and then lighting it with the lighter) because the game had given me no indication whatsoever that the generator was an object I could effect directly with the laser cannon. At that point in the game I had tried to laser cannon lots of things (including enemies) with no result whatsoever, so I had mentally resigned myself to the laser cannon working on wooden boxes only.

-BOTTOM LINE-
Iniquity & Vindication starts off with a roaring rampage of preemptive revenge versus every shark in a shark factory and only gets better from there. Witty and absurd humor and a panoply of sick boss battles await you if you give this game a shot.