Crimson Sky

Right off the bat, I notice something off about the game. The fancy text for the introduction goes letter by letter with a sound after each input like a type writer. Then the text changes to simply displaying a small paragraph and fading in and out. Then later in the game, the text becomes yellow and the font completely changed. Needless to say the presentation in text is really inconsistent. I know I sound picky here, but this is the sort of thing that someone implements for an extra touch, but makes it become a messy downfall. I say stick with regular game messages.

The story centers on Haos a lieutenant whose squad was ambushed and imprisoned by enemy troops. The background plot being that there is two countries at war, and that’s all there is to it. Haos then wakes up to find that the prison that he was in happens to be attacked by monsters. Then you’re given control to get out the prison.
There’s a problem though. The walking speed in this game is TOO SLOW. Never ever put the hero any slower than the normal walking speed. Some people do it for atmosphere and realism. But when you’re in a prison that’s being bombarded, you’d be running like crazy. Not to mention, it takes forever to get anywhere. Please, if you’re reading this and your game happens to have a slow walking speed. Please take it out. It slows the pace of the game, its frustrating. If you happen to have the hero at a normal speed, then your game becomes a lot more likeable. I’m serious.

The battle system is okay, but there is one glaring flaw: Balance. There is not enough items to go around. It took me 2 or 3 tries to beat the first boss, not because he was challenging but because I didn’t have enough items (like 2 or 3 herbs and 1 energy whatever). I actually had to steal an Owl Pinion (Revives a fallen person) to actually kill him. Wilton doesn’t do any damage, and Haos only a little more. The only strategy is just to spam the Chi attack til you run out of AP. Yes there is concentrate, but it’s worthless to spend 8 AP just to make your chi attack do 10 extra damage. I don’t even know why you have the sense skill in there, it’s a nice touch, but maybe the characters should actually have skills relating to the enemy weaknesses and strengths. I understand there might be skills later that might relate to that, but why not now? Why not give the player interesting skills in the beginning? The battles get way more annoying in the beach part, you eventually run out of items and AP because of that stupid bridge puzzle.

Oh right, that fucking bridge puzzle.

I love puzzles. They really enhance the RPG game play especially in an RPG Maker game where it’s really hard to develop non battle game play that doesn’t even relate to puzzles. However, this bridge puzzle is fucking horrible. I noticed the creator put a comment on the screenshot with the bridge puzzle in question, saying that he knows someone is going to rant about it. Well it’s not funny. Let me explain. The puzzle is trial and error. You cross through this bridge with many forks and turns, eventually when you step on one spot, it’ll break, and you come back to the beginning of the bridge. This is stupid. There’s absolutely no way to predict what turn or spot will break, you have to remember the way you were going (so you don’t fall in the places you past before) only to fall off the bridge when you went the wrong way. This isn’t even a puzzle, it’s a fucking chore. Remove it from the game, or make it so that there’s a warning that you’re on a spot that’s going to break and you can press a button in time to get out of the way or something. To be honest I never got past the bridge puzzle, simply because I was frustrated at the unbalanced random battles and slow ass walking speed. But most of all: I DON’T KNOW WHERE TO FUCKING GO.

The characters aren’t that fleshed out enough, who is Haos? No I know he’s a lieutenant and all, but what are his personal goals? Does he have a family? Where did he learn his abilities? What about Wilton? Sure he’s a thief and all, but does he have any personal want? Who is Tross? Where the hell did he come from? Sure all of these questions can be answered later, but I think the author needs to give some hints of the characters’ past at least. The dialogues of the characters are sometimes pointless. They add no meaningfulness about the characters and sometimes are just there to make them look cool (not to mention none of the main characters have any flaws). I think the author did try, but I think he needs to try a little harder. It’s hard to make a character for someone to be able relate to, but it really makes your story go a long way.

I forgot to mention the one aspect of this game that shines out of all these flaws. It’s the event movements. In the cut scenes, the characters are actually lively. They don’t stand around and talk, they actually have their own custom animations and sound effects for whenever they do a jump or something. I think it’s something nice to see once in awhile. I really think the author put some passion in the monster battle between the prison guards (though I thought there were too many sound effects).
The graphics are okay, but the choice of color and saturation are a little off sometimes. The animations are average. Some are well implemented, some are lazily done. However I noticed the animation for the steal command is rather delayed but animated really smoothly.

To conclude I think this game has the ground down, but it can be so much more. First thing I’d advise you to do is: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD CHANGE THE WALKING SPEED. Make the story a bit more in-depth (and I don't mean adding more HISTORY, I mean making the characters more fleshed out), balance the battles more and you got yourself a solid game.