Black Bird

Game Title: Black Bird
Engine: RPG Toolkit
Status at review: Complete

Background:
Made during the Indie Game Maker Contest, it stood out to me because it was the one game I saw on the event-page that was made in this engine. Maybe there are other games made in this engine on the contest page proper, but, my attention is on RMN's event-page.

Unfortunately, I did not complete the game. The reasoning for that can be found underneath the hide-tag in the "Playing the Game" section.


Graphics/Audio:
In respect to the graphics, the game sorta screams "old school" to me. Though, maybe it's just the character portraits, and the nostalgia that they induce. Seeing XP RTP tilesets caused me to quirk an eyebrow a bit, but, I ultimately didn't mind the mapping. The world map has a different tileset that I don't think I've seen before, but, I had no issues with the map itself.

In respect to the audio, I can't really say much about it. I mean, it's not bad, but it's not really memorable either.


Story:
Crowin is a butler-prince of the house of Askigaga Eirinschwartz. After finishing a training session of archery with Princess Chlorie, he's called to meet the Queen by her furious attendant (a stray arrow narrowly missed the Queen). Upon his arrival, the Queen abashedly admits to wishing to see Chlorie, rather than Crowin. Because of the mix-up with the attendant, the princess had already left to be with her friends. So, it's up to Crowin, in his capacity as butler, to go and fetch her!


Playing the game:
Getting this game to actually run was it's own oddity. Just booting up the game gave me a good ten or so error messages as the title screen popped up. I got even more error messages I tried to move the cursor, or perform an action. None of them caused the game to automatically close, but, what really made me want to just stop trying was getting an error message when each character of a textbox is displayed.

At some point, I realized that I didn't do a few things that could have made this work. For one, there was a "part2.exe" that I never touched. I made a facepalm, then ran that. From what I could tell, though, it installed the same stuff as the the initial setup file? That seemed pretty pointless. Then, I recalled something I was asked to do for Draug's Resurrection, another game made with RPG Toolkit. Running it as an administrator seemed to clear off the initial error messages, and I was ready to play!

Once the game actually started up, there's a bit of dialog, then, the combat tutorial is thrown into your face. So, let's cover that a bit. Like Draug's Resurrection, combat occurs on a grid. The grid is subdivided into two 3X3 grids that are color-coded, more than suggesting a starting area for enemies and allies alike. Movement is also restricted to these zones, though, I've seen enemies jump into the "ally zone" more to prevent cheap wins (such as players staying one cell away from the divider, just out-of-reach from melee-only attackers, and pinging them to death with arrows) than anything else. Though, game sorta implies that the cheap win is possible, as it expressly said that enemy movement is bound to their zone without mentioning that they can ignore this binding on a temporary basis.

Combat occurs in real-time. I'm not sure what the cool-down rate is on regular attacks, but one does seem to exist. I'm definitely not 100% sold on the controls, though. The best example is the use of "C". Under normal circumstances, that's the "cancel" button. While combat is running, that's the button for a ranged attack. Strange as it may sound, you have no idea how many times I've pressed "C" outside of combat, expecting something to happen, then realizing that I actually wanted to press "F" (Which uses the active skill in combat, and is the "do everything" button normally).

To the game's credit, accessing the menu in combat causes the game to pause. Players are only able to access the menu when a bar fills up. Obviously, the bar empties after the menu is closed. In an attempt to explain this as simply as possible, the menu calls up your hand of skill-cards. Multiple cards can be chosen, but require that either that they share a name, or a "skill code", which is delineated as a letter on the card.

Some might think that being able to choose multiple skills should form some manner of combo attack. It does not, as far as I can tell. What does happen is that the icons are put on their own section of the screen, and players can cycle between the available options. I noted that using the left-most skill does not automatically move the other skills one slot to the left. The used skill becomes an empty slot, and players would have to move the skill cursor (out of lack of a better term) manually. As an additional side-note, should players open the menu when a skill is still in an "active" slot, it gets discarded.

Enough of all that. Let's get to actually playing this thing! Below are notes about the game as I played it. They can be rather stream-of-consciousness in nature, and will probably contain spoilers.




General observances:
Scenes are sometimes in the awkward position of seeming to not know when to end. The one at the witch's house seems particularly bad in this respect (If she's so bent on being efficient, why not mention Crow Forest, and start her own fetch-quest, all before going back into her hut?), but the opening scene does this a bit too (Darigazz, man, just get to the Queen's room already!).


Summary:
Between the sluggish nature of the scenes, and the bugs I came across (even after running it as an admin), it's as if the game doesn't actually want me to explore it's mechanics, or experience it's story. Maybe someone else can have a better experience with this, but, for my own part, I'd have to suggest giving this a pass.


BOTTOM LINE: 1/5


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).