Lost Story

In lieu of the Remastered Announcement, I'm removing my star count for now.

Plot Summary
Lost Story is a short RPG Adventure game about a boy and a girl. They appear to live in a present day society as right off the bat you see a car in the background. Apparently you two are planning to write a Story for some reason and end up venturing into a building which houses a strange book. Upon reading the book you are transported to a fantasy land name Lost where you're tasked to restore the pages of said strange book in order to return home. Thus begins your short journey filled with fetch quests and slime killing.

Graphics


Might as well start here, because it's what got me interested in the game. The graphics are very pretty and there is a nice use of lighting throughout. However, once you're placed into the game itself, the graphics aren't all they cracked up to be. Once you're walking around the game world, there is an instant blocky feeling to the map. There are countless invisible walls and clipping errors for both you and other tiles, which makes the environments feel very "pasted" in. Traversing the world does not feel Natural and I believe that's due to the way the maps and tiles themselves were structured. The tiles don't all work together like they should, creating awkward passibility errors throughout the game.
Here's a fairly good example of what I mean. I should have edited the image to show where you can and cannot walk, but hopefully this will show what I'm referring to on its own.



Gameplay
Technically I'm spoiling events in the game here, but they really have no impact on the little story this game has

Once you're officially in the world of Lost, your first assignment is to escort some fellow back to his village. There are slimes and chests along the road on your way to this village. Somehow you're granted the ability to cast magic spells, and the characters have literally no reaction to this fact. But I won't go into Combat right now. Once you're in the Village, you're told to find some amount of pages to fix the book you brought along so that you can return to your own world.

The process in which you gather these pages is by doing tedious quests for the villagers. The quests are the following: Find a Woman's Lost Children, Find the Ninja that wants to play Hide and Seek with you, Count the amount of Birds in the Forest, Find the Blacksmith's missing items, Kill 100 Slimes (This last one may be a spoiler, but its a bit obvious anyway). Now to rant a bit. Finding the lost children is fine, you end up exploring the whole area anyway so it doesn't take you out of your way, that also goes for the Blacksmith quest. The Hide and Seek mission is just a plain chore, you find him, he disappears then you find him again, you do that at least 5 times. It was a slightly fun the first time, that's it.

Now onto the Slimes. You are tasked to kill 100 Slimes, battles aren't too hard (again, I'll get to it later) however there is no sign of how many you've killed. Slimes can give you either 50G or 100G you can run into 1 or 2 in the field, and 1-2-3 in the Cave (as in 3 in a single battle). So what you have to do is count how far you've come based on the amount of money you have, assuming you kill at least 2 per battle, that means you'll have around 5000G. The bad thing is, Slimes give 50G and Metal Slimes give 100G, and Slimes can change forms (either basic or metal) whenever they want, so whatever form its killed in determines how much money you get, which screws up the calculation. On top of that, you can only check how much gold you have if you go to the Town and enter the shop (which happens to sell 1 item, an Herb, which you will never run out of or need to buy, is capped at 15 in the inventory and you restore all HP after each fight - also you can't open your Menu screen, you just can't).

Now for the worst quest, counting the birds in the forest. When I first picked up the quest, I assumed, alright I'll keep a count in my head while I explore the entire forest, so I did that, then returned, turns out once you return to her she will ask "How many Blue birds are there." So I just went back out and reluctantly recounted them since I wasn't keeping track of their color. You start to see various colored birds, you don't know what to keep track of, the Blue birds don't all look Blue (I marked a couple down as Green), the Yellows look Orange sometimes, which is a HUGE problem, and here's why. I returned with my bird notes and tried again. I got Blue birds wrong again. I'm going to skip ahead in the process a bit so that you understand my frustration. It turns out, she will ask for Blue birds, when you get that right, how many Yellow birds, and after that, how many Orange birds. Now, how would I have known what exactly I should be marking down for the types of birds out there, I should have been told the colors I should be checking for before taking random notes. Due to the game's lighting I ended up marking some Blues as "Green Birds" some Orange Birds were Yellow, I even had a category writted down called "Parrot." When I go to collect my reward after this hard work it turns out half these birds didn't exist. So I decided to guess the whole way through. But, if you get one bird count wrong, the quest giver vanishes for NO logical reason, and you have to leave the village then come back to retry. That's how I finished the Bird quest, guessing.

Battle/Combat


Combat is very dull and honestly not needed. You're given 4 (technically) options in Combat: Attack, Magic, Item, and Limit. Let's get this out of the way; Limit does nothing, and you can never use it. I already said this, but the only Item in the game are Herbs, they're only usable in battle (since you can't access a Menu) and heal you to full. There's a large amount of them in the World and dropped from enemies, you should never die. Slimes are the only enemy in the game, they have the ability to switch forms, they can be either the base "Slime" or "Metal Slime."

The battle system is ATB, so you wait for the bar to refill before you can act, the same goes for enemies. The Slime may use their turn to change forms, or attack you. Slimes are ONLY hurt by Attacks and Metal Slimes are ONLY hurt by magic. For some reason Slimes have the ability to Disarm you, or something of that effect, where your Attack is disabled and you have to use Magic. When there are a group of normal Slimes while you're Disarmed you just take an Herb, because there's nothing else to do and you can't Defend (Why was Defend taken OUT and Limit which does nothing ever, put INTO the game?). Also there is no Silence that Slimes use, its only the Disarm. The combat is already dry and repetitive, if Slimes could disable both Magic and Attack there could be slightly more thought in combat.

When you aren't disarmed, you just check what form the Slime is in, and Attack or use Magic on them until they die. Actually, if a Slime uses their turn to change forms, that is ALWAYS beneficial to you, and in no way to them, because they have to wait for a whole other turn to attack, and you get the chance to attack them without getting hit. I've seen a Slime switch form 4 times in a row due to the randomness of it, he never attacked, just sat in the back changing colors. When it comes to damage, that is also random, one turn you deal a single strike sending the enemy to an inch of his life bar, and the next you do next to no damage, and the same goes for Slimes. The girl in your party sometimes says "Don't get cocky" when you take an Herb, which is fitting because you never know when a Slime is going to kill you out of nowhere because you can't judge its damage. I guess you can write this down as criticals and such, but since there are no combat numbers, stats or leveling up, or equipment, I can't really tell. Combat could have been left out completely from this game and it would be the same, maybe better.

Aesthetics/Design
This could probably have been said under Graphics, but I'll put it here anyway. During the battle scene, you see the Girl and the Boy together fighting, where the Boy does the Attacking and the Girl casts spells with Magic. This is very cool, I really like that, if you went more into the combat of the game, you could have done something really great with it. I was hoping the useless Limit skill would be a sweet combination attack of the two characters. Onto something different, there are 2 save locations in the game and if you run into an unfortunate events in between the 2 you may lose some progress and possibly be deterred to ever turn this game back on, since there really isn't much that draws you in after 10 minutes of it.

In the Town it took me a while to realize that I could enter the Blacksmith's shop since it is not all that apparent. I think that's it. An overlying problem for much of the game's design is that it feels as if it was made for yourself. Meaning that there wasn't much consideration to what goes on in the player's head. This is especially clear with the design of the Bird counting quest, the player doesn't know the criteria that you want him to count the birds. This also applies to the final riddles in the end of the game.
>Actual Spoilers (Ranting Spoilers)


Conclusion
Lost Story really feels like that game we all made to test run the RPG Maker software. Except before thinking about what exactly you wanted to do with the game, you gathered a bunch of pretty graphics and called it a day. There is no Story, the synopsis alone is the story and plot of this game. The ending is boring and expected, actually nothing unexpected ever happens. That's why I compare it to our first test run with the software, there is no character progression, in fact, once you get to Lost and run the basic "Where are we?" conversation, the main characters do not talk at all (besides "We have X amount of pages to go") until you finish the game and return to your world. Combat is pointless, the quests are all dull time-sinks, the story is uninteresting and the characters are lifeless. There is not a single instance in this game where I really felt like I was having fun, or cared about anything that was happening. I feel like I wasted a lot of my time playing Lost Story, but it wouldn't sit right for me to review a game I hadn't completed. I wanted to quit so many times.

Very disappointed with this game. Hopefully it's just a teaser for what may come.