This game was created for the Revive the Dead event hosted here at RMN, where you took an old idea and breathed new life into it. This was done for Halloween, which is the exact day of the time I wrote this review.

Of course since this is a pretty short demo, taking me between 30min-1 hour to play through, (I was at 32 min just before the demo's only boss fight near the end) I won't be throwing stars around like it's Christmas.


Story
You can choose whether or not to watch an intro about the game's world leading up to current events where the game takes place in. I decided to watch, and was met by a nice looking world map with hard to read purple text, which would be readable with the Dark window, instead of using no window at all for it. This plays into anytime the world map is shown, and with text moving at it's own pace couple with being hard to read, you might have trouble reading what it says in the beginning.

However, if you do read the intro, you're given a number of easy to remember points of lore that sets up the major settings. Instead of magic concepts and lesser town names, you'll be greeted with the religious history and two major bodies of land that harbor what looks like black and white "Good" and "Evil". If the quote in the beginning tells us anything, is that what we stereotype as good and evil will at most be turned upside on its head.

Anyways, the plot starts out with our hero Garinol, nicknamed Lionheart, being called by the church seer thanks to his stunning reputation for purging things with fire and sword. He's to be sent by the church with a far reach, on a journey far north to a land called Nod-Gamorra. It is time for a good old-fashioned crusade, with a High Fantasy twist of course, because the first stops on the journey require our hero to recruit both dwarves and elves to the cause.

Sadly this is pretty glossed over, and you never actually get to see the places you visit to recruit them; also from view are the dwarves and elves themselves. Instead as if part of a strategy meeting, we see more of the world map, and drawn paths that Garinol and his men take in order to get to Nod-Gamorra. This looks pretty nice, but I still would have rather met the major dwarf and elven members spoken about during the journey. Human/Dwarf conversations have always been fun in western styled RPGs.

The real story begins once we actually make it to our destination, and the other two party members are introduced as well. Lucan, a warrior who desires honorable combat to seek glory for his house. And Lila, a woman chosen by the church for how devout she is to Iocus, who is known as the First True Saint.

The writing is very well done, and will leave you interested in what happens next, despite the rather short demo length.

Gameplay
The small maps leave much of the gameplay in battle, so luckily battles are pretty diverse in nature. There's a good enemy variety, and tons of skills to choose from. I always started off doing what I could to lower enemy stats while doing damage to them and building up my physical attacker's BP for Break Arts.

BP is basically the TP system of Ace, but isn't randomized and always set to 0 before every battle. It helps that there's still stat lowering damage skills you can use while your characters build BP to use the more deadly skills. Also after each battle you'll gain AP similar to games like Final Fantasy IX. Skills are obtained solely through the weapons a player equips, and aren't usable until the AP is maxed out for that particular skill, in which case it's usable even if the weapon is unequipped. This makes me wonder, since each character already has more than six skills, if skills will bloat to large proportions by game's end.

Magic was usually relegated to stat buffing and healing, but by the next level Lila gets a monster summon that can be used in battle as the 4th party member. It's already max level so doesn't get EXP with the rest, but I thought it was a really nice touch to throw the summon at tougher enemies. I assume there will be more to choose from as she levels up.

Enemies themselves have a middling amount of HP in that you can't one shot them, but you can kill a lot of them with two hits. The game is on the easy side, but it's never too easy, which should be a draw to many players. The enemy graphics are also seen on the map, so there's no random battles to be had, but I think because of this and the graphics used, the player characters never get to dash on the maps.

Navigation rarely feels annoyingly slow however, partly because maps aren't too large and the enemies keep you company throughout.


Graphics
Background graphics and the title graphic look good, although perhaps it would be best if the titlescreen graphic matched the size of the game window. It looks fine for others, but the black borders surrounding the title screen look a little odd seeing as it's the first thing you see.

Everything else is from Pioneer Valley Games and their graphics packs, including the free iconset on their site. Because of this, you can expect characters to be pretty stiff, but at least Max used the complete walk cycle instead of the three frame movements.

You can also expect the graphics to make the mapping pretty interesting to look at, although passability is usually a challenge with these tiles. I didn't notice any bad passability issues though, instead focusing on how the maps themselves looked. Other than needing a more variety of ground tiles at times, maps were compact and without large amounts of empty space relative to character size.



I did think the mountain map looked weird, because of a lack of cliffs:


There's no cliff ridges, so everything looks like one flat geometric plane.

As you can't actually see in either image, if you're stepping on pure snow, your character's footprints will show up, which I thought a nice addition.


Sound
The first tune you're greeted with is a violin/cello cover of Metallica's fade to black. After hitting new game, the same song plays again. You can do a quick script edit by taking or commenting out "fadeout_all" on line 110 of Scene_Title that will allow the title music to keep playing after you hit new game. It's perfect for situations like this.

Aside from the song being super recognizable, the music did fit the scenes very well, more-so than usual. The only problem is that sometimes they'd take you out of a scene because none of them loop, and the song takes a few seconds to start up again.

The sound effects for the cursor are different from the default, and pleasing to the ears. As were a bunch of other sound effects for events. You'll even get the stepping sounds of your characters as they step on stone or snow.


Bugs for the Dev
♦ As I said in the story section, text is really hard to read when showcasing the world map. It can be fixed by giving each text a dark window, like what you did with all other scenes on a background image.
♦ No matter what happened during battle, Lila would never gain any AP, which is odd since her starting weapon only requires 10 AP to gain the skill. This weapon can only be equipped by her, so I assume her getting 0AP after battle isn't intended.


Stray Observations
♠ You made it very obvious that a certain church official has dark plans. The extra bit of text in blue after you finish talking to him being the biggest hint.
♠ Besides the dark elf, you never actually see any dwarves or elves throughout the demo.
♠ Lore was easy to follow. Normally I'm afraid I won't be able to keep up with various names of terms and places.
♠ Least awkward I've ever seen the PVGames graphics used, no small feat.


There's not much going on in the demo yet, as it's more of an intro. An intro to the story, and an intro into the game's various systems, but it does keep the player wanting more; as long as Max, the developer, has the motivation, (he says as much after the end) we'll be able to get much more than a taste.

If you want battles with a good number of skill choice, and reading often times well written dialogue, give the demo a try and see if you'll want the full package in the future.