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Self-Delusional?

  • Marrend
  • 02/25/2014 01:34 AM
  • 1270 views

Game Title: I'm My Own Hero
Engine: RPG Maker VX
Status at review: Complete

Background:
And lo, the quest was laid down from on high: Make an hour-long game using RTP-recognizable characters and end-bosses in the space of a fortnight! Many came for the glory of achievements, but only twenty-two were able to heed this holy call of gam mak. This is the tale of one such venture.
Which is a really fancy way of saying that this game was an entry into the RM Venture event.


Graphics:
As far as mapping is concerned, areas seem a bit on the large side. There's also the really jarring place where it's sandy beach on one screen, and deep forest the next. I dunno. Maybe there was a better way to go about it, but maybe there were higher priorities. Saying that, the maps are pretty well detailed.
I'm not a huge fan of the style in which these face-sets were made in, but at least the attempt to deviate from relying on the RTP face-sets was there. The monsters were okay, except for the Giant Rat. That was just plain awful.


Audio:
I listened a bit to the music before playing the game. What popped out at me most in this respect was that the Earthbound, Final Fantasy IV, and Secret of Mana 3 tracks sounded especially way off-kilter from what I recall them sounding like. Maybe I'm just weird. The Titanic tracks also put me off-balance.


Story:
Vera (VX - Grappler) is shipwrecked on an island with Eric (VX Ace - Soldier), Ralph (VX - Paladin), Bennett (VX - Priest), and Oscar (VX - Dark Knight). Vera just wants to make it out alive, but the others have illusions of grandeur.


Playing the game:
While I try to be as general as possible, there could be some spoilers in here.

I'm not really sure what's with this opening sequence. Is this even relevant to this game, or is this just trying to show us what kind of person Vera is? I half-suspect the latter, but we'll see.
Okay, that area transition between beach and forest made no sense whatsoever.
Huh. Maybe there is something to that opening sequence.
Whoa. How does a fully-equipped Ralph be level 15 and have worse stats then the virtually unequipped Vera? I think this is supposed to be poking a joke, but...
Combat's pretty decent, though. The ATB bars fill amazingly fast. Though, I did set the combat speed to "7", which might have something to do with it.
Was somebody playing Final Fantasy Tactics lately? There's JP in this game, and you spend JP to learn skills. I'm not sure if there's a way to chance class (probably not), but there's no indication of how much JP you earn, or when it's earned.
Oh. We're not gaining any EXP. Or money, for that matter. Innnteresting.
Since the in-game characters are making commentary about how strong Vera is, despite her non-hero status, I'm inclined to believe that her being better than them is social commentary/humor value.



General Observations:
Having the game pop up at full screen was a bit surprising. A bit annoying too, but setting it to windowed mode wasn't a huge issue.
The writing was certainly not perfect by any means. Given the time-frame, though, I'm not sure if getting someone to fix up the grammar was possible.
The Monsta-Dex (I presume Pokemon was the reference the game wanted to make) fails to increment it's "defeated" counter when I defeat foes. It lists the enemies as "encountered" with all the stats set to "?" though.
Now here's an odd note. Enemies wonder the screen and approach the character on-sight. Not a new concept, but the execution is a bit weird. If more than one enemy is on the screen when you get into an encounter, all the visible enemies are removed/defeated after the battle ends. I'm not sure if this was intended (otherwise, players would find themselves in another battle with little chance for reprieve), or an actual bug.
Somewhere around the half-way point (approximately), the game felt like it was dragging. It wasn't long after that I just up and quit.


Summary:
I get the impression that this game is some kind of response to (a fan-game of?) You Are Not the Hero with it's characters and their commentary. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Either way, the game didn't really get it's hooks into me, and the experience just fell flat.


BOTTOM LINE: 2/5


Side note on ratings (since there is/was/will be somewhat of a spate on what rating means what between each user):
1/5 -> Terrible. Forget about hitting an audience. The game is so bug-ridden, or otherwise unplayable, that what entertainment can be found in the game has a hard time coming to the surface.

2/5 -> Bad but playable. I had a poor experience with the game. When played by a player the game actually caters to, it would serve it's purpose.

3/5 -> Average. A solid experience, but snags somewhere along the line cause it to be held back from being "good".

4/5 -> Good. I enjoyed the experience, and have no qualms supporting it if was considered for a featured game (if it wasn't featured already).

5/5 -> Excellent. Among the paragons of gaming experiences, and instant feature material in my humble opinion (if it wasn't featured already).

Posts

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Thanks a lot for the review. The game's story wasn't meant to be taken seriously and ,since I had just a week to make the game, there were a lot of things that I would have done better. Or at least I wanted to do better. For example I wanted to draw a battler for the rat but it was complicated and ended up wasting too much time just with the design. So I decided to make 'that' for a battler. I wanted to add more tutorials and the last parts of the game were really rushed.
Also I'm not a native speaker so I probably had a lot of spelling/grammar mistakes.
Anyway, thanks for playing it and writing this review :).
Marrend
Guardian of the Description Thread
21781

There we go! Now this is readable with this CSS! I frankly wasn't sure how it would look.

Anyway, yeah, I think I could tell that the story was meant to be humorous, but the humor fell flat on me. Also, I guess I was a bit harsh about the giant rat's battler graphic, considering.
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