Quintessence - The Blighted Venom

Title: Quintessence - The Blighted Venom
Program: RPGMaker XP
Creator: Reives
Sample Time: just shy of two hours (the prologue and the first chapter)



Our Heroes

The hero of the game is Reivier, a hunter living in a small forest encampment with his wife, his best friend Vikon, and a handful of elderly NPCs. At least, that's who Reivier was at some point in the past; during the game's prologue he's a faceless anyhero who explores a dungeon along with his new girlfriend(?) Lunair and a sorceress named Eshe. Reivier is a pretty standard RPG hero -- he leads a simple life and has no desire to get caught up in the whirlwind of adventure until unfortunate circumstances drag him in that direction.

It's difficult to tell who else qualifies as a "hero." The game throws a ton of characters at you, from all different directions. During the prologue the "party" consists of three characters, but only has one encounter, in which only one hero participates. In the first chapter a half dozen townsfolk join and leave the "party" at various times, but have no real bearing on the gameplay. Indeed, the way the battle system works I'm not even sure you can ever feasibly control more than one person at a time.

You do get a sense for some of these characters. Vikon is Reivier's well-meaning but bumbling friend and is married to Sal, who shows her love through violence. Hmm... actually, no, that was about it. There was a cutscene towards the end of the first chapter wherein a respected villager has a conversation with his crippled sister which pointed to a mysterious and shady past, but the scene cuts away before you can learn too much.



Eye Candy

This game looks remarkable. Frame for frame, this might be one of the most visually appealing RM* games I have ever seen. At any given moment in the design process of Blighted Venom, if the author had the opportunity to make a scene look prettier, he took it. Candles give off a subtle light. The atmosphere changes from the cold, misty morning in one scene to the dark, stormy afternoon in the next. The rain subsides and the sun comes out, brightening the world back up, and does so in real time. The wind sorceress waves her hand and summons a swirling gust of wind which collects every magical orb on screen and places each in its respective niche in the wall, causing a passage to rise up from the depths so the heroes can move forward.



Note that this isn't precisely a compliment. The decision to always make the screen look prettier isn't made in a vacuum; it often comes at the expense of playability. Navigating my way through the lush, beautifully-crafted forest was fine in the morning when things were easy to see, but when I revisited the area later under cover of darkness all that decoration became a liability and I spent more time squinting at the screen and bumping into things than making actual progress.

This is a pretty common problem in graphically-intensive RM* games, and its one the author knew he'd have, so he hacked in a workaround: colored arrows on the maps denoting where the exits and other important map features are located. These arrows are helpful, but I'm not convinced they're as good a fix as just designing the maps to be functional in the first place. You'll find yourself in situations where you're walking along the very edge of a map, which is (in theory) connected to the next screen over along its entire width, but only actually teleports you over once you step on the magic tile with the arrow on it. Worse, the arrows are affected by all the shadow and lighting effects that cover the rest of the map, which means the places they're needed most (that is, areas where it's difficult to see anything) are the places you're least likely to notice them.

Cutscenes do have a tendency to reach almost ridiculous levels of complexity. There's one scene towards the end of the prologue that's rocking a weather effect, a background image, shadows and light sources, a dialogue box and a transparent overlay of a character's face. It can get pretty jarring.



Ear Candy

The soundtrack is fantastic. It's either mostly or entirely original compositions, and every note is a pleasure to listen to. My only major complaint here is that the music was often too dramatic for the scene it was accompanying, but that's really an issue with the writing, not the soundtrack.

There seemed to be times where the music would not loop properly. Spend too long on a map and you might spend a few minutes wandering around in silence until you leave the area.



Storytelling

The first thing that happens in Blighted Venom is a very pretty but very long credits sequence. The README file insists this is skippable if you hold Escape, so I did that. But it didn't work. So I jotted down "readme is a big fat liar" in my notes, then went back to the credits sequence. It kept going and going, so I tried Escape again. It didn't work again. I resigned myself to just sitting through it, rapping my fingers on the desk, until in desperation I figured I'd give Escape one last shot. After holding it down for a long time, much longer than a reasonable person might figure "hold Escape" means, it did eventually take and the credits faded out. I don't know if the author really wants you to hold down the button for ten seconds, or if some limitation in the code prevents a more intuitive solution, but my advice is to stick with it. Hold Escape like your life depends on it. It'll work eventually. Probably.



Blighted Venom falls back on the old storytelling trick of showing you the ending first, then flashing back. During the prologue the heroes (characters you don't know) are exploring an ancient tomb (a location you're not familiar with) with the aid of a magical wind lady (whose mysteriousness knows no bounds) in order to cure one of their own of some affliction (which is not adequately explained). Once the heroes fail in this task time skips back a year-and-a-half and begins telling the story of how things wound up at that point in the first place.

I'm not convinced this is a great way to start the game. The prologue scenes are very emotional and carry a lot of weight. The music builds to a very moving crescendo as the heroes see their goal slipping away from them, the afflicted woman begs for death, the wind sorceress faces off with her evil sister, and the protagonist makes a deal with the devil. These scenes all had one thing in common: they were overwhelmingly boring. Without the proper context to put all these characters and concepts and events into focus, none of it makes any sense. I'm sure it's very, very sad that the blonde lady has two different colored eyes and this means... whatever awful thing it means, but right now she's just a face in a dialogue box; there's absolutely no reason for me to care about her plight.

The first chapter (the flashback) handles this a little better. It features far more characters than the prologue, but the mood is more calm and laid back. Since we're not overtly concerned with a plot upon which the fate of the world rests, we can focus more on the townsfolk and the main character especially.. We're given little glimpses of the setting and the world here, but not a great deal, which is fine for the first few scenes of the game. If anything I'd say chapter one introduces crucial context without which the prologue makes no sense, which is the exact opposite of the intended effect. I guess my suggestion here would be to literally remove the prologue entirely. It's not necessary to set up the real story (which begins in the forest village) and it doesn't have any context in which to make sense anyway.

(There's actually a slight indication that first chapter isn't a flashback at all, but a time hiccup or something, in which case it does make sense for the prologue to come first. It still lacks the context needed to pack the punch it's trying to pack, though. There are better, less conventional ways to convey the sense of skewed time than the way Blighted Venom handles it.)

The author's sales blurb mentions that Blighted Venom is a story-focused project, and I believe it. The game is essentially a string of cutscenes that range from exquisite to adequate to completely inane. It seems your party has something to talk about every single time you switch maps, even when it's very clear they don't. Whether or not this bothers you is going to depend on how much you appreciate the quality of the writing. It's not bad, but it's not particularly great either, and honestly I'm not sure even the best writing could save the pages and pages of completely unnecessary dialogue. I'd say it would be perfectly servicable in any other RPG, but in an RPG that's trying to sell itself first and foremost on its story and cutscene direction what's on display here doesn't exactly cut it. I developed the habit of hammering the C button to skip through all the text as fast as possible, and as far as I know I didn't miss anything important going on in the plot, so make of that what you will.



My last note here says "weird mixing of comedy and tension" which really applies to one specific gag at one specific spot in the game. I got a chuckle it, but I got that chuckle at a time when the mood, music and current objective made it pretty clear I wasn't supposed to be chuckling. It's felt like the equivalent of Samus Aran slipping on a banana peel during her escape from Planet Zebes.



Gameplay

Here's some info from Blighted Venom's sales blurb:

In the past, game-play has not been a focus in the project. However, with this new release, the intro and chapter 1 has been thoroughly revamped and much improved - including the inclusion of much game-play. From puzzles to its custom battle system, game-play is an aspect that has certainly began to sink in.

I'll say this: if the chapters I played were the thoroughly revamped versions, I would hate to see what the previous version looked like. At least 75% of the "gameplay" in Blighted Venom is simply walking from one cutscene to the next -- which is usually a very short walk. In the two hours I played I encountered exactly three puzzles and four battles.

The puzzles were pretty basic stuff: match these colors, then press these switches. I'm fine with these since they were in the intro dungeon and, really, who wants to stack crates or fiddle with water levels right off the bat? The presentation in the first "spinning crescent" puzzle was particularly slick, and I'd love to see more complicated puzzles done up with that level of detail.

The last puzzle involved two characters attempting to trap an animal in a grid-like forest scene. (Blighted Venom insists this is a mini-game, but it's really not. Rather than spur a discussion on where the line is between mini-game and puzzle I'll simply say that if reflexes aren't an issue and I can deduce the solution logically from feedback given by the game, you're firmly in puzzle territory. Which is fine, since puzzles are superior to mini-games anyway.) The basic idea is to have one character set the trap on the ground, then arrange your guys in such a way that the animal has no choice but to run into the trap.

Two things bugged me about this last puzzle. First, after my first failed capture attempt the game told me to go register at the creator's forums to get the solution. I'm all for a built-in hint system that nudges you towards the solution if you're failing, but man, let me fail more than once before you assume I need help. (And, uh, give me the hints in game, not on some website I have to fill out a registration form and click a link in my e-mail to gain access to.) Second, there was no reward for victory. No items, no sack of gold, not even an interesting cutscene. You learn a little more about the two characters involved in the scene, but there are so many scenes that throwing one more on the pile doesn't really mean much.



(Technically there are no rewards for the first two puzzles either, other than the fact that they stood in your way as dungeon obstacles. I admit that doesn't bother me as much, and I'm having a hard time quantifying why except to say those happened in a dungeon (gameplay-centric) and the hunting puzzle happened in a story sequence (plot-centric). And now we're back into "fine line" territory so I'll move on to the next subject before I digress myself out of existence.)

Combat is set up as an Action Battle System, which doesn't work because ABSes built in grid-based movement systems never work. The idea here is that you want to hit enemy sprites with a ranged attack while running around trying to avoid said enemy sprites. The first character you control heals all her wounds automatically and has an attack that fires balls of death in all directions, so just stand in one spot hitting the Death Ball spell over and over and you win. The second character gets a bow and a bear trap, and in order for him to restore his health he must stand on a special Item Tile in order to access his inventory.

Here's why it doesn't work: you can fire your bow straight ahead, which is to say only in the direction you're facing, which is to say in only four directions. In order to turn and face the bad guy you want to shoot you have to take a step towards it. Even assuming you can get the bad guy to step on your bear trap (which lowers their speed) combat devolves into putting enough room between you and the enemy sprite that you can safely move towards it and fire before it hits you. Of course you don't have an infinite amount of space on the battle maps, so retreating means you're going to run out of room very quickly and will have to try and move around to the other side of the bad guy. For sufficiently speedy bad guys this means you're going to settle for trading hits.

You can see the band-aids the creator tried to stick on to keep everything together. He gives you a run button, which speeds you up considerably for a couple of seconds. With this move you don't have to settle for trading hits. Of course if you could just run all the time no enemy would ever hit you, so the speed move takes a couple seconds to recharge after you use it. Except you can't efficientlly attack-then-retreat without your speed move, so the logical thing to do is just keep your distance until it's recharged before setting up an attack, which is the functional equivalent of just being able to use it all the time. And around and around it goes.

On top of it all, there are only four battles in the first two hours of the game, and none of them are particularly difficult or important. The fast-paced, hectic battles are such a massive departure from the slow, deliberate pace of the rest of the game that it's a wonder Blighted Venom doesn't just use RMXP's default system. At least that way it wouldn't be such a chore to design each individual battle and the game could therefore feature more of them.

Heh. Gameplay turned out to be the longest section of the review, even though it's the smallest part of the game. I think that's because I literally touched on absolutely every single individual example of gameplay in the prologue and the first chapter.



Bugs! Bugs!

The game seemed pretty tight to me, except for a couple text runoffs and overlaps in the menu. Only two things jumped out at me, neither of which are game-breaking:

1) Reivier has access to the "Vikon's Trap" skill from the start of the game, even though he doesn't actually get Vikon's Trap until a ways in.

2) Lighting effects such as lens flare have a tendency to remain onscreen even through map transitions, which means instead of "fade to black" you get "fade to black, but with a lens flare".



Why I Quit

After two hours the story and characters had just utterly failed to grab me at all. I simply didn't care about these people or the world they lived in or the situations they were dealing with, largely because I have seen these characters and this world and these situations in many, many other RPGs before. Now the puzzle-y stuff I saw in the very beginning? More of that would have really snared me, providing it eventually grew out of "intro dungeon puzzle" territory and involved some actual interesting ideas.

If the prologue and first chapter of a story are supposed to set the pace for the rest of that story, the pace of Blighted Venom looked to be plodding and filled with conversations that aren't useful or interesting at all.





As Seen From Space

Quintessence: The Blighted Venom is best described as an interactive movie rather than a game. Most of the game you are simply walking from cutscene to cutscene, taking only the very briefest excursions into gameplay at certain key points. I suggest playing through the prologue and seeing whether or not you fancy the story. If you do, you'll probably have no problem spending hours and hours absorbing this game's exposition. If you're looking for a game with some more, well, game to it, I'd stay away.



"I SAID HUG ME!!!" -- Lunair, Quintessence - The Blighted Venom