Short Comedy Romp Quest - The funny-but-not-very-long journey
(Note: Recently changed rating from 4/5 -> 3.5/5 due to scaling of my reviews)

Although you probably already knew that.

Pre-warning: beware -- may contain spoilers or spoiler-esque comments. pls be warned

What Is It, Though?

Final Quest - The disciple's journey is a short comedic RPG made by Indrah, Fomar and Hirei revolving around skill and item use. You are Ulrika, the master, taking Ernest out to train in some forest and, eventually, a castle. You fight monsters, deal powerful skills, and trek through areas mapped beautifully for your pleasure.



Graphics

Final Quest has the nice polished maps going on, with RTP mapping used well. The custom facesets drawn by Hirei are beautiful, done for Ulrika, Ernest and the Demon King in the space of the week that it was created. They have different facial expressions which are seen throughout dialogue, that enhance the story. Mapping is decent as is expected from a collaboration between Indrah/Fomar. What I liked is the structure of the maps. What Indrah and Fomar failed with the illogical structuring of the maps in Dead Moon Night, they have succeeded in this game to provide a good mixture of risk and reward when designing their maps. I'm not sure how many of the battlers are custom, but they are used nicely too.



Gameplay

Battles are really interesting in this game. Ernest is a mage-type class and Ulrika is most likely a warrior. But this was only in my playthrough, since both characters have three possible skill trees you can master. I found it hard to understand how that worked, however, so I just tried to level each one evenly until all 3 skill trees were 10/10 mastered. There are a lot of really good design decisions in this game. Items replenish after each battle, so you don't have to "use them wisely", i.e. don't use them at all. I think more RPGs should use this method, if it didn't break the concept of reality so much. Perhaps it works better for shorter games.

However this "unlimited item replenishment" mechanic only really works well if there's less items, in my opinion. I didn't ever need to worry about which items I was using, since there were so many in my backpack they wouldn't run out. I think we could have been given less Potions, Antidotes and the such like because it meant less that there were so many. Although it is a good way to provide a reward for risk, it's no use if the items are not useful.

Also, there were too many ATK UP and MAT UP and those type of accessories and not enough of the unique ones got from bosses. Because you had so many accessory/miscellaneous items, it does not matter which ones you equip because they all increase the stat by the same amount. I would have been nicer if there were several grades of equips, such as ATK UP II and ATK UP III, so you could keep equipping stronger combinations of the equips.

There are also a good combination of nuanced spells to choose from, ranging from status buffs to freezers and stunners. There should be more healing spells though. The party is restored between fights, which makes for less anxiety about switching to the menu and back constantly. I found the descriptions for each skill amazing, since they say exactly what the skill does. "200% PHY DMG. Reduces DEF by 50%" is a fantastic way to annotate your skills, and more people should do it in that blatant way instead of saying vague descriptions like "A fireball that does more damage but reduces your shield". The shortly annotated way is more compact and easier to read. I also discovered that it doesn't really matter if you follow the lore in that description, because people are more worried about the gameplay in battles than fancy descriptions.

Other than that, the encounter rate may be a little too high, but it was bearable for this kind of game. Overall, the game had fairly solid gameplay, if not a bit repetitive.



Story & Presentation

The game is a comedy game, and has lots of funny lines in it. "The bears deserved punching! It was all a dream, anyway! And I refuse to bring that up again!" is a nod to Makio-Kuta's game Punch Bears title in which Ulrika dreams about punching bears in an apocalyptic dream setting. The characters Ulrika and Ernest were your standard comedic duo: the comedy genius and the straight man. Here Ulrika is a boisterous female lead (much like most of Indrah's other productions), supported by Ernest, a bumbling male who is less competent in every way, more submissive, yet complainy. The pacing of this game is quick, making it short and sweet, devoid of fluff.

The ending made me confused though, I wasn't sure about (spoilers):



Anyway, the story was still interesting even if the characters were a bit overly light-hearted and nonsensical.



Conclusion
Final Quest - The disciple's journey is a funny and clever story with passable gameplay attached. It has a good balance of skills and items and some very good design decisions. Its short game length is only chalked up to it being a contest entry, and besides short games are good games. It could be better, maybe chalked up to a couple of chinks in the armour, and slight feeling of repetitiveness. But I came away happy nonetheless.

Love to hear from anyone about what they think of this review.

Thanks for reading.