To Crime Nirvana

This Review Brought To You By Bulleit Bourbon Frontier Whiskey.


To Crime Nirvana is, relative to its quality, perhaps the single most overlooked game on rpgmaker.net. A complete, well written game with good gameplay and completely custom graphics, it deserves a lot more attention than the paltry 39 downloads and 0 Reviews it's gotten in the year or so since it came out (numbers accurate at the time of writing). It clearly slipped through the cracks somehow and this is just the kind of game I'm trying to draw attention to. Let's begin.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: SWIM is probably closer to a professional criminal than to a professional game designer, and so all of the opinions below are colored by that, as well as the fact that I'm a big fan of the hard boiled crime genre.

Story
I personally got the impression that To Crime Nirvana's story TCN walks the line between two different tones. There is a hint of relatively gritty realism and a heaping helping of whimsical absurdism. Others might argue that there is no gritty realism and ONLY whimsical absurdism. That is a perfectly fine opinion for someone to have.

What primarily appealed to me was the crime aspect; the humor and strangeness was genuinely amusing, but it distracted me from my enjoyment of the former. I am not sure if someone who came to the game attracted to the whimsical absurdity would feel it was comparatively tainted by the game's hint of relatively gritty realism. Probably not.

Ryuki is a street thug who used to work for the kingpin of crime, until "King Crimeson" got locked up for tax evasion. During the kingpin's reign, his utter domination of the criminal underworld lead paradoxically to a far lower level of chaos than the police were able to achieve. But with the King locked up the same way they got Al Capone (and other, less famous felons) Ryuki is making a half-assed effort to go kind of, sort of straight.

Ryuki soon meets Kat, who I initially thought was a girl because of both name and portrait, but who is actually a (very) gay man. And a satanist. The two become a couple and move in together, along with their cat (one of exactly two female characters in the game by my count), Salem. Which is a cool name for a cat.

The King of Crime makes an announcement from prison, a rambling incoherent screed about how if all of the city's gangs begin running riot, one will ascend to Crime Nirvana. Because this game is, in part, a comedy game, this insane rambling is indeed enough to convince the city's gangs (all of which eventually turn out to be quirky to the point of harmlessness, except for one which should have been treated more seriously, more on that later) to run riot. After their dinner date is disrupted, having nothing better to do, Ryuki, Kat, and their actual cat Salem set out to stop this nonsense by systematically tracking down all of the city's gang leaders and beating the snot out of them.

I didn't know what Crime Nirvana was when I downloaded this game and frankly I still don't after having beaten it, but I enjoyed the journey.

At this point, I want to praise the quality of the writing. It is far and away better than what is encountered in most indie and RM games. Characterization was very well done and there were several lines that were quite funny, and a great sense of humor overall.


Good writing, kind of crummy graphics, but see below.

TCN demonstrated one of my favorite things in game writing which is when it acknowledges the game mechanics, especially to humorous effect, i.e. Kat is rightfully embarrassed that he hits less hard than a housecat, and indeed, Salem's damage output is consistently better (see ACTION below for more details on gameplay).

Another aspect of the storytelling I want to draw attention to, while I'm praising the writing, is the fact that each enemy you vanquish is specifically depicted as being injured and defeated, but not KILLED. While I have to say it's a bit soft for a crime-themed game, I appreciate that thought was put into it at all, as opposed to the default approach of "our heroes murder everything and everyone that gets in their way because that's just what heroes do" murderhobo bullshit seen in 95% of RPGs.

Okay, now onto my beef with the writing. I don't know what the exact rules of IGMC 2017 (for which this was made) were, but they don't completely excuse this issue either. For a game that deals at-least-somewhat-seriously with the criminal underworld, there is a shocking LACK of profanity. If you talk to real life criminals, you're going to hear a "motherfucker" every other sentence if not every sentence. But I have a more specific issue.

The game's creators obviously live in a community or culture that is very tolerant of homosexuality and alternative lifestyles. This however was a situation where you need to write what you don't know. Perhaps being coddled by this environment even negatively impacted the game's writing. The thing is, the American criminal underworld has always been extremely conservative and reactionary in its own way, even in 2018, and is, broadly speaking, extremely intolerant of homosexuality outside of prison, for which you 'get a pass' since you're around only men for years at a time.

I can certainly believe the DJ, the Roller Derby chick, and the Graffiti artist being fine with and not giving a shit that the protagonists are openly gay (those three bosses, see below, are also incidentally the ones that I really felt like the PCs were being total assholes beating up on). However, the generic pinstripe gangster at the beginning and more importantly, Ryuki's former running mate Lopez, should absolutely have been the opposite of tolerant. The absence of any derogatory slurs for homosexuals is a fault in the game's writing IMO, as is Lopez' enthusiastic, accepting reception to Ryuki and his boyfriend. But see below.

In the original draft of this review, I did take off points in this category for the fact that none of the underworld lowlives they went to fight ever called either of them a f*****, or worse. However, it has since been brought to my attention that regardless of context, certain words simply aren't allowed in this here webzone. In my own opinion, when you make it policy to ignore the context in which a word is used and instead issue a blanket ban, that's when you step over the line from preventing hate speech into plain old censorship but...you know what, not my table guys, I don't own the site and this review's long enough already. I have gotten past the phase in my life where I had to rebel against every form of authority I encountered that enforced even one rule I had a problem with. Now I save that energy for rebelling against the ones that matter.

Anyway, the dang point is, the homophobic slurs the game 'lacked' would actually have disqualified the game itself from being on the site! I can't (won't) take off points for not breaking the site's rules so I added half a star to my review. I still think, artistically, that the inclusion of this derogatory language would have improved the game's writing, but I'm not willing to take off points for someone following the rules, even if it is a game about people who break the rules. : )

Action
So I guess, structurally, TCN is a little bit like Megaman X, if Megaman X featured gay criminals and a cat, and was a turn based RPG. What I'm getting at is, the game is a series of seven boss fights, and the middle five can be fought in any order you like. Me, for instance, I fought DJ Comet Rider, then the Roller Derby babe Rey McSkiff (the only HUMAN female character in the game), then Lopez "The Knife" Ramzes, then graffiti artist Amatoli Smalls, then greaser in chief Darryl Bishop. All I'll say about the final boss is that it wasn't who I was expecting it would be, that's for sure, and that I was planning on quitting after losing to the final boss, because frankly I didn't think that a couple of gay hoodlums and their cat should be able to beat (SPOILERS). But as it happened, with Kat and Salem both 'Retired' (Kat had 8 MP when Salem died, and Revive costs 10 MP), and Ryuki low on HP and completely out of MP, I managed to throw a punch that defeated (SPOILERS) and thus was able to view the game's epilogue and comprehensive credits.

So basically, all of the gameplay here is boss battles. The battle system is basically the default, front-view VX Ace battle system. The boss battles are good! They're well balanced and fun to play and clever, especially considering the limitation that your party never levels up or learns new skills (even in Megaman X you pick up a new weapon from each boss you beat).

Ryuki is your puncher, and is good at it, but limited by very low MP.


Crime is objectively the best battle command in any RPG ever made.

Kat has pathetic damage output but a good bucketload of MP and heals the party using satanic dark magic which incidentally is a hilarious combination. Finally, the cat, Salem, is perhaps the most crucial party member, alternating between inflicting Bleeding and restoring the party's MP. Each boss fight was challenging enough that I thought about how to spend my turns, but I wasn't really on the ropes until the final boss, who as mentioned above, I BARELY beat. There's no gameplay outside the battles and those do start to feel a little bit samey due to the lack of leveling up or gaining new skills.

The game took me almost exactly one hour to play from start to finish. My final save was at 48 minutes or so and the final cutscene and boss took around 12-15 minutes. Of course, by this point I'm real good at RPGs. If you die more, it'll take you longer. : P

Sights
As you can see above, the tilesets and character sets are entirely custom, rendered in a vaguely gameboyesque retro pixel style that I don't particularly like. However, as I may have said before, my tastes don't matter when it comes to graphic. These graphics are totally custom. They get full marks.

I thought the character's face graphics and especially the boss graphics were far better, and I liked the way the battle system was laid out aesthetically. In particular, all of the battle animations were clearly custom made for this game, and that was really cool. Again, full marks.

Sounds
The music was acceptable throughout the game. I felt like the track during the final boss fight was way better than acceptable, though: that tune was downright exhilarating and very cool. In terms of sound effects, nothing in particular stood out except for this: as a cat owner, a meow is the exact opposite of a purr. I don't think finding a royalty free or even just-plain-free sound effect of a kitty purring would have been too hard, and then Salem's two purring based abilities could have sounded like they should have.

Fun-Fact: IRL, when they're injured, the vibrations a cat creates by purring to themselves actually contributes to their healing process: that's right, in real life, cats can heal themselves by purring. I'm not sure if the game's creators knew this but there's actually a tiny but of factual basis for Salem being able to restore her MP by purring, which I thought was cool whether it was done knowingly or not.

FINAL THOUGHTS
You should play this game if you like crime, gays, cats, or turn based RPG combat with flawless intra-party synergy and tight, well designed boss battles that can be fought in any order. Actually, you should play To Crime Nirvana no matter what. It's a rad cat that no one can resist.


I was so hoping that Salem would accept the offer that Ryuki and Kat refused at the end of the game. Man that would have been awesome.