Iris

Iris is another game on here that I checked out mainly because I liked the name. While to me, 4 word titles are still the most evocative when done right (Gods Will Be Watching, There Came an Echo), a single, uncommon word like Iris also works well. Short yet unusual, it displays creativity on the part of the dev, which is always a good sign, and a 3-star review was just enough to get me to investigate further.

Aesthetics
It’s the rm2k RTP here, Mac and Blue and some other tiles here, used quite competently and unexceptionally. The default faces do have some edits made to them, like tears and blood stains, and they fit quite well, and so do the default battlers. The mapping occasionally has some pretty sights, like the waterfall and the plateau, but also a few passability errors, like the one here.



What sticks out the most, however, is the sound design, which is so strange it feels intentionally bad at times. Menu greets you with complete silence, and quite a few cutscenes are also devoid of music beyond the occasional sound effects. There’s a pretty cool moment in one cave cutscene when music does come in though, so there’s that. The area music is also on the mediocre-to-poor side, and gets quite annoying over time. When it gets to combat, however, the game uses actual rap song with lyrics, which is certainly unique, though not that good. However, it really ought to have had more than one, so that they could’ve been changed randomly like in Illusions of Loyalty.

As it is, hearing the speaker say “I have several…several” for the nth time can drain your patience quite a lot over time, I suggest playing the game in short bursts in between others, rather than attempting to finish it all at once. On the other hand, the main boss battle theme is some R & B (?) song that’s essentially relaxing and is outright detrimental to tension. The final boss had no soundtrack at all when I fought him, though that could've been a bug (I experienced something similar with Guardian Saga.) Either way, it did give me an opportunity to turn on some SanctuaryRPG tracks from Rafael Langoni Smith.

Storyline

The game starts off as the supposed main character enters a seedy-looking bar named The Crafty Badger, and spends the first few minutes of its running time to let us understand in no uncertain terms just how much of a loser our protagonist is. It just tries way too hard with making our Alex into a naive idiot and the other characters into these badass streetwise punks telling him how much of a waste of space he is. By the time the so-called Mystery Man was pointing to his blind eye and saying how he can “still see better than you, kid” because “he doesn’t need his eyes to see” I was on the verge of laughing out loud, and I actually did when he followed it with “I might as well tell you this so you dip your finger into your own shit ever again”

Things do look up a bit once we switch to Helen, who’s far more relatable and down-to-earth than everyone we’ve met before. She’s smart, she has sense of humour, and on the whole, she actually feels like a real person you can root for. She meets Alex soon (by rescuing him from a pair of Slimes); impressed, he tries to tell her he's looking for vast treasure, but lost the proof of it, and obviously, she doesn't listen. Again, every other line in their first conversation is her internal monologue in brackets, going “Oh wow, how come he doesn’t know this?” ,etc.,etc. Luckily, it finally gets interesting once she figures out that he really is a pampered child of a noble family, and tricks him into giving up his family ring for “safekeeping” before agreeing to follow him on the way to the Angel’s Hollow, where there’s apparently vast hoard of treasure buried. So they travel, on through the forest, and not much happens story-wise until they reach its edge. There, we meet Enryuu, one of the aforementioned streetwise punks in the bar, and he continues to “keep it real” with lines like this:



Besides other things, someone needs to tell him sugar daddies are not meant to be younger than those under their patronage.

Turns out, the proof, which disappeared from Alex (and which I honestly assumed just got burnt up when she cast a Fire spell on him in annoyance) was a will by his uncle, Kahn von Schoernmann, who was secretly a pirate captain. To his nephew he thus bestowed, the Black Diamond of Ern, the largest one in the world and consequently, the most expensive. Enryuu, who’s apparently lost his job recently, obviously isn’t going to pass up this opportunity, and so he charges forward to get it first. Luckily, he’s taken the long route while doing so, while you still have the shortcut available. Of course, that shortcut is a cave filled with zombies, skeletons and the like, but what can you do? If you’re Helen, you can only say to Alex “And remember that when there are monsters gnawing on our bones, that it was all YOUR FAULT!”

Thankfully, this is the last of the initial, annoying writing. Afterwards, things finally swing into the high gear, starting from the pep talk Helen gives to Alex in the cave. Actual character development occurs for all the people involved (including Enryuu) and it’s actually pretty good, and quite touching. It still doesn’t forget to be fun, like Helen suddenly realising that ultimately values her job experience as a Prefectural Guard, or the call-back to Mystery Man’s “don’t need eyes to see” line that’s gets quickly subverted. There’s still a twist afterwards that’s sort of predictable and makes the ending a little hollow, in a “could’ve been more” way. Nevertheless, Iris finally works, simply as entertaining, life-affirming story, almost like an episode out of some decent cartoon, though adjusted a little for language and such.

Gameplay

A lot of the story misgivings are redeemed by the battles here. You know how so many games, even new ones like BLANK, or popular ones like A Blurred Line, still decide start protagonist off with zero skills and let them spacebar-mash for a couple of levels? Well, lo and behold:



8 skills in the very first battle! There are 4 more “Amplify” skills below.

Then, she starts fighting together with Alex, and no matter how much of a loser he might be story-wise, during combat he’s the quiet badass who would put Talan, Markus or even Malu to shame. Like Helen, he also starts off with a dozen skills, although only two of those (Stunner and Cross Slash) are directly offensive. That’s because he’s built for the support role, and so he has Cure and Esuna from the get-go, and you’ll need both, and soon. However, they must be used during combat, because while Helen gets to keep her MP in between battles, Alex has his disappear after every battle due to his inexperience. Every battle has him begin with zero, and get 10 every turn + 10 more if he uses no-cost Focus skill. He can build up quite a lot of it, and to prevent it from being wasted, he can transfer it all to Helen. In fact, he will typically have to do so, since the maximum MP Helen can have is 100, and her skills costs range from 10 to 25.

In this way, Iris creatively solves one of the problems that usually affect RPGs with healer characters: they’re typically allowed to heal while on map (because why wouldn’t they be able to?) and it generally becomes more cost-efficient to do that than to ever use potions and such, especially if the MP-restoring items are of similar cost to potions. In Iris, though, this wouldn’t work, and so while the player often gets health-restoring Tonics and such drop alongside cash after combat, they must get used quite soon. In a way, that also encourages the player to keep some battles going for longer so that they can get more healing done. However, that strategy is not very effective here, because of the Field Effects. Said effects are of the rather traditional elements: Water, Fire, Earth and Thunder. What isn’t traditional is that their effects are uniformly negative, and they’re far from insubstantial, too. Fire inflicts 5-10 damage on your party every turn (recall that you start with around 50 HP, and get about 5 more per level). Water adds similar amount of health to your enemies. Thunder forces you to always move after the enemies. Earth, however, is the most dangerous one, due to its ability to inflict any status effect, from Poison to Paralysis, at any turn. About the only good thing that comes out of these fields is that Helen gets a boost if she amplifies an elemental skill corresponding to the current field. You’re also allowed to use Alex’s Field Guards to disable those effects for several turns, though the game unfortunately doesn’t tell you when it’s about to run out (it’s after 3 turns), forcing you to keep counting manually, or else just guess, and risk re-applying it when it’s still up. The whole system might seem unfair at first, but it does keep you admirably from breezing through, and mandates the regular use of healing items when they get forgotten all-too-often. Pretty much the only time you can try keeping the battle going to exploit Alex’s healing/MP transfers is with the (rare) Water fields, and even then it’s risky, because the enemies are no push-overs here.

Again, Iris does something not enough games bother with, and ensures that all enemies stronger than Slimes have a little trick up their sleeve. Whether it’s the Poison Bees, which can potentially inflict poison with every attack and change the current field to Earth, Killer Pigs and their all-party Cleave (used in place of a regular attack), or the Skeletons capable of 30+ damage Double Slash or of sharpening up their sword (Attack + 20), you most certainly cannot relax and spacebar-mash here. Sometimes the enemies have predictable AI to ensure you don’t get overwhelmed: Killer Pigs, for instance, will always defend on the odd turns, and use their area attack on even ones, which helps ensure you don’t get overwhelmed when faced with three of them in the cave encounters. Usually they don’t, however, which can lead to memorable moments like Seeping Zombie and Mummy managing to confuse Helen and stun Alex before they could do anything due to Thunder field, and then they continued to get free hits and keep them stunlocked until both died. Thankfully, the game does let you save at any time, so do that to avoid significant setbacks. All the battles are also touch encounters, and they can be escaped from as well, so that’s another plus.The three boss battles are rather underwhelming, though. It’s mainly the fault of the unfitting sound design, but they’re also just a bit too simple, and mainly rely on the Field stuff to spice things up. It would’ve been a lot better if they had stages to them, more powerful abilities when they’re heavily wounded and the like. It also wouldn’t have hurt if they were actually susceptible to any of the status effects. As it is, they’re all totally immune like the Final Fantasy bosses, which is one RPG tradition most devs have thankfully agreed to avoid by now. Save for the gag to do with “Envisioning your surroundings”, none of the boss battles are really memorable.

Then, the overall item selection is pretty good, and perhaps a little excessive for such a short RPG. The choice of supplies in particular rivals Sore Losers, both in the numbers and in the creative naming (the Confusion-curing item in both games is Sanity Pill and Ritalin Pill, respectively), in spite of Iris being about 25% its length. The equipment side is fine, though typically straight upgrades, while more creative effects are provided through Accessories, (good to see they aren’t forgotten for once!). There’s a Poison-proof Clear Gear, though Confusion-proof would’ve been a lot more helpful, given how often I got that status from Earth Field, and from Seeping Zombies’ area-effect Cry. Lastly, there some light puzzles in the caves, about pulling switches to open doors in your way. They’re easy, and the last one, where you have 4 switches in a row and a whole lot of doors, can be solved simply by pulling the two switches on the right and nothing else. Nevertheless, the fact that developer themselves appears there as a suited guy, apparently from the characters’ subconscious (“P.S. None of this is real.”) and lets you skip the puzzle is certainly a plus.

Conclusion

So, there it is. Uneven, yet still worthwhile, story, competent visuals, annoying OST, and pretty good combat all add up to a decent little game. If you’re trying to do a short RPG and are not yet prepared to handle the drama of Remnants of Isolation or Illusions of Loyalty, or step outside the template as much as Last Word, you could certainly do a lot worse than check out Iris. The Field effect stuff in particular is certainly not something done very often (I can only recall Alter Aila/Alter Aila: Genesis and the broken Oracle of Tao) so that alone is interesting, especially in a contest game like this one.