Astoria: The Holders of Power Saga

Astoria: The Holders of Power is a commercial RPG made by GoldenUnicornGaming, using RPG Maker VX Ace. Being a commercial game I will be judging it on a higher standard than I do most indie games.

The low-down is this: Astoria is a game fraught with issues that stop it from becoming a gem of a game. The biggest of these issues is the large amount of default assets in the game. Now, when I say assets, I do not mean the RTP graphics or sounds. Indeed, anyone who knows me knows that I like RTP and I encourage its use. Yes, even commercially.

So what do I mean when I say that the biggest issue is its use of default assets? Why, only the laziest of excercises when it comes to creating a game - the constant use of sample maps.

For those who do not know of what I speak, some of the engines in the RPG Maker series came with a series of maps pre-installed for examples of how to use the tiles. It was expected that people would learn through looking at these maps in a more kinetic way. Astoria makes use of these maps, albeit with some minor editing here and there, which is, in a word, lazy.

It's one of the biggest things that I look out for when it comes to making game pages and something I notice straight away when playing a game. And it's a pity that this game does this because, apart from that, it's a pretty decent game.

Is it worthy of 5 stars? Hell no. Is it an average RPG with basic controls, story and gameplay? Yes. Is it sad to see that what could have been a pretty good game fall to being lazy? Very yes.

But let's break this down a bit more, shall we?

Story-wise the game is pretty good. There's a few spelling and grammar errors here and there, but the writing is quite solid and tells the tale of a group of people who are trying to stop an evil from taking over the land... and the consequences of failing. The start was a bit rocky but it soon picked up and the characters and story did a good job of keeping me playing. There were some tropes, but a lot of thought and care obviously went in to crafting interesting characters involved in interesting goings-on.

The gameplay was a bit of a mixed bag. You won't find anything really revolutionary going on - it's pretty much a bog-standard jRPG in how it handles things. Battles aren't too different to the typical genre, nothing really stands out, but it also doesn't do a bad job of fitting the pieces together to make a fairly coherent whole that wasn't boring, at least.

Battles kept you on your toes most of the time, providing perhaps a bit too much challenge sometimes. Trash mobs didn't give you much in the way of experience and if they got lucky, could wipe your party easily, especially in some dungeons where the amount of enemies outweighed your ability to handle them. I found myself having to leave in order to stay at an inn and rest up fairly often, as well as replenish supplies a lot.

This led to some issues. See, one of the balancing issues in this game revolved around money - you couldn't get enough. You'd try to grind up some levels and gold in order to get enough money to gird your loins and rest at an inn, but when enemies are doing so much damage that you have to heal all the time, it gets to be troublesome. At one point I was going back to trash mobs from the area before just to get enough money to buy some healing items... and those mobs weren't giving much in the way of gold, but I had little choice as they were the only ones I could reliably kill without worry that I'd be getting a game over after a battle or two.

On top of that, there were some dungeons where you could get screwed over big time - you would get locked into the dungeons (with no logical reason) and be stuck with only the goods you brought in with you. One dungeon I had to do three times because I kept dying at a boss. Each do-over I would grind for more money on mobs that paid a pittance just to get another potion added to the stockpile, just so I could last a bit longer in the locked dungeon. It made no sense when it would have been easy to just allow you to leave and come back (even thought that's annoying in and of itself to have to do) but that was not an option.

The game was relatively bug free, thankfully, though at one point I remember getting a crash that puzzled me. I can't recall the details exactly, but it was around the time of the fist big town getting taken over and I got stuck in an event which when interacted with, crashed the game. I wish I'd taken a note so I could tell you more about it.

Sound... was there. It wasn't anything I could recall, really, and nothing was memorable. It existed.

Graphics was something I touched on before but will do so again. I will say that there was some effort made to try and make the sample maps used look a little more spiced up, however this presented another issue - the over-use of decoration tiles. Sometimes you couldn't see where you were going due to the sheer amount of decoration tiles used all over the place. A few times I got stuck in dungeons because I couldn't figure out where I was supposed to go... thanks to decoration tiles making the way forward impossible to discern. There were just too many.

And this is the other issue - take away the decoration tiles and maps were bland empty rooms full of big space and nothingness. The decoration tiles were used as a bandaid fix to try and hide that mapping just wasn't all that great. It was serviceable enough and there were some areas that legitimately looked pretty good, but the overuse of certain tiles just made it into a jumble of colour instead of enhancing the map and guiding the players' eye as it should have done.

And let's not start on the complete mix and match of the various graphical styles used in the game. There are very few people who can do the old "I'll use this and this together and they'll look good because I'm editing them to fit each other" thing, and this game is not one of them.

Honestly, I do recommend people play the game, if only for the characters and plot. If people like a challenge in battles, they'll probably enjoy it, despite the balance issues when it comes to money and items. And it's a decent game... but that's all it is. Decent.

You did a good job, dev, but next time don't take the lazy route - you've made some of your own maps in this game, there was really no reason to use the sample ones too. After all, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.