Check: Chapter One is a VX Ace game created by PolygonGaming, and is the first chapter of what is to become a fairly entertaining saga. To my knowledge, this is Polygon's first attempt at an RPG Maker game (or at least his game published on RMN). At first glance, there is nothing special about the game. It's just another standard RPG using the VX Ace RTP for just about everything, but there's something about Check that makes it interesting enough to get you hooked.

When you start the game, you're greeted by a generic RTP title screen. Not a good sign, but upon starting a new game you also get a short intro sequence with the Polygon Gaming logo. It was nice to look at, but with the effort used to add in something extra like that, there could have been a better title screen made for the game. More unsettling was that after the lovely Polygon logo, you're immediately dropped into the world map near a village with no real intro to the story. However, I don't have any complaints about this, because attempting to go away from the town prompts you with a self-dialogue of Sky (the player's character) mentioning that he should head into town, and you aren't able to go anywhere until you enter. I think the intro could have been done a bit better, but as I'm working on my own project I understand how difficult it is to make a strong intro, and Check's could have been a lot worse. Perhaps Chapter Two will have a stronger intro scene?

Once you enter Yuita Village, the introduction continues to be a bit odd as Sky states that he needs to get to the pub so he can use the toilet. At least he didn't need to go see the king about a missing princess or something, so there's a few points for originality. As Sky waits for an employee in the pub to give him the restroom's key, he meets up with his old friend Apple, and this is the moment when the game starts to get good. If it were any other combination of characters, I don't think Check would work. Sky and Apple are likely to be the driving force of the series that keeps players coming back. The two don't seem to be very deep or complex, but do they don't need to be, nor do they try to be. Unfortunately, the other characters weren't done as well as our heroes. Pretty much all of the NPCs were boring and had corny one liners. The Super Camper was the most interesting character apart from the protagonists, and he isn't even part of the actual story. In future releases, I'd like to see NPCs telling us something useful instead of simply existing.

Sky ends up trying to go take a leak, but on his way there he sees a few soldiers come out of the restroom. They begin to talk about something that "The Empire" has discovered up on Mt. Yuita, then they freak out as they realize their map of the mountain is locked in the bathroom. The random and seemingly unimportant "I gotta piss" plot of the game suddenly gets serious as the the soldiers attack Sky for the bathroom key he has. Apple, being the good friend she is, quickly comes to assist Sky in slaughtering the nameless unfortunate idiots who got stuck into your training battle.

The combat is very simple, and seems to come down to Sky button mashing attack until he has enough TP to use his Aura Blade skill (which comes with a neat animation), and Apple spamming magic since her melee skill is useless (considering she's the mage, it's supposed to be useless). Alternatively, I found that a lot of enemies could be dispatched simply by Sky knocking out 90% of their health with his standard attack, then Apple finishing them off with her melee attack. For the first half of the game, I pretty much button mashed attack because the enemies weren't difficult at all. Not once in the first half of the game did I feel in danger by any of the encounters. Despite the very simple combat, the battles were still fun enough not to bore me, and the encounter rate was really low which is always a plus. As an added bonus, the game uses a sideview battle script.

Back to the story. After dispatching the bloodthirsty soldiers, Sky and Apple decide to go up to the mountain and see what the Empire found. From here, the player engages in an extremely long trek up the mountain filled the simple battles I described above, and no real sense of direction when you're trying to figure out which way to go. However, this didn't frustrate me very much. Along the way, Sky and Apple constantly stop to talk to one another. I can see how some players might get turned off by this if they just want to run through dungeons and kill monsters, but if you're that type of gamer then I don't think Check was made for you. I can tell already, the series is going to be heavily story based and centered around the interaction between Sky and Apple.

The conversations between Sky and Apple is where the character development and backstories are handled. As I said before, neither character is extremely deep, but they're not blank slates. Both have personalities and motivations, and the two make a great pair of protagonists for the game. I kept finding myself wanting to run into the next dialogue scene rather than hoping for the next battle to come up.

I'm going to stop talking about the story here so that nothing gets ruined, but I will say that there's a wakeup call boss at the top of the mountain. Its not very difficult to beat, but at that moment you realize that button mashing "attack" isn't going to get you through the entire game. And the wakeup call stays true as the encounters afterwards are a bit tougher. The enemies have more health and seem to deal more damage. The difficulty didn't go through the roof or anything, but you can see the difference at this point. This is only the first chapter after all, so I'm assuming the fights will get tougher as we go on.

I've pretty much summed up the things I liked about Check, and the reasons why I'm going to play the next chapter. It is extremely difficult to get me interested in someone else's RM game, but Check managed to do it and seems to show a lot of promise. To make sure the rest of the chapters turn out well, there are quite a few things that need to be worked on. Let us take a look at the ugly bits of this otherwise beautiful game.



This is the pub I mentioned at the beginning of the game. Right away, we can see the issues. All the objects on the map (chairs, tables, barrels, etc) are placed on top of a different tile than what the floor is. This looks really bad and is one of the reasons my expectations were low at the beginning. Someone not as patient as myself might see something like this, then close the game and delete it as they dismiss it as one of those games. There were other small mapping errors too, such as the top of trees being cut off in some places on Mt. Yuita. Now aside from those errors, I think the mapping was pretty good. Everything looked great and there wasn't too much open space anywhere that I can remember. Just fix the small graphical bugs and the game will look a lot better. I saw little errors all over the place, and unfortunately it cost the game a few points for me.

The music never seemed out of place, but I personally just can't stand the RTP music in VX Ace which is all that was used. It was used fittingly for all the scenes, but still. Custom music is one of the easiest things to implement into a game. I understand that not everyone can make custom content, but there is a lot of free content available out there. If you're not sure where to look, check out Aaron Krogh's music, which is free as long as you credit him. I think that adding some new songs into Check would really help make it a better experience because a lot of us really get annoyed when we hear nothing but RTP music. The graphics on the other hand were fine, and I believe there were some custom facesets used for Sky and Apple's expressions. Nice job on that.

My biggest complain however, is that Sky never went to the bathroom! I don't know, maybe the dude wet himself when those soldiers bum rushed him in the pub...

Nah, just kidding about the last bit. I really don't have much bad to say about Check. For a first game, it's a good attempt that avoids a lot of the annoyances you might find in other first tries. The only things really holding it back are the graphical errors, but they don't break the game and aren't very distracting. If you're looking for a fairly casual story driven experience that isn't too difficult, you'll probably enjoy Check.

Conclusion:
Check: Chapter One gets a 3/5. There isn't very much that sets it apart from other games besides Sky and Apple, plus there are the few errors I mentioned that take off a bit from the score. That said, it was still a fun experience and I would gladly bring the score up if the mapping issues are fixed in an update later on. I have high expectations of the later chapters, because I can only see Check getting better from here.