Introduction

Sadly, I've really struggled with coming up with a good introduction for this game. I suppose this is because "Elf's Diary" wasn't the byproduct of an event on this site or a quick game I took a look at in order to earn an achievement for a review event. This is a game I decided to take a look at because Starmage is one of the more skilled developers on this site. Though, I will admit to not caring for his/her efforts to shoe horn Bible verses into his/her projects every now and again. An issue I'd rather not discuss because I'd probably end up bringing up bits and pieces of the Bible that Christians tend to be ashamed about. So much so, that they tend to avoid them. That being said, I should probably dig into what's good and bad about this game if you ignore that tiny aspect of this project.

Story

On the story side of things, the game is a mix of good and bad ideas in my opinion. On the positive side of the scale the game introduces friction within the group as a whole. And this is definitely needed in order to make sure the game doesn't feel like your standard quest to simply hunt down a bunch of forgettable monsters. After all, the combat system in this game can be easily exploited if you know what your doing.

On the other hand, the bulk of the drama comes from Rue being pissed off at his childhood friend for hooking up with a girl he was interested in when they were younger. A girl he was unwilling to even talk to out of fear of rejection. So, I really don't get why Rue hates the guy. If anything you'd think he'd hate himself for his lack of confidence. Though, I suppose it's a lot easier to blame others for our failings than accept our own flaws. And while this is somewhat interesting. There's also no denying that love triangles are a rather cliche method for introducing drama into fictional universes.

Outside of the mess with Rue the game also garners some short lived drama because of Faint's total ignorance when it comes to romance and relationships. An ignorance that will either amuse or annoy the player to be honest. After all, it can be really frustrating to deal with leads that come across as needlessly stupid. Especially ones who should be suffering from wet dreams and loins burning with desire.

Though to end on a more positive not, the game does include a character that leaves obvious room for making a reference to "That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime" with one of the characters insisting that she and Faint are besties. After all, who doesn't love watching that scene where Milim declares that she and Rimuru are besties?



Gameplay
Combat
"Elf's Diary" features a turn-based combat system that slightly tweaks the standard formula. Instead of each of your characters getting to perform a single action every turn. You get allocated a bunch of action points based on how many characters you have as well as how many times you've cast the move agility. Albeit, the game does hard cap the player at a maximum of 10 action points per a round. After being given your action points you can spread them between the various members of your party or merely have the same character act over and over and over again.



A design that allows the player to really abuse certain strategies. A good example of this is the hyper offensive magic blitz I have above, but you can also abuse Ven's stun skill as well. Sadly, I really didn't explore what Jinn and Madel can do, but I imagine they have some skills that can also be utilized to utterly dominate the enemy.

Difficulty

author=pianotm
. . . the game starts out easy, and only two fights in becomes ridiculously hard!

One thing I noticed about this game right away as I flipped through the comments on the summary page as well as through the reviews is that a lot of people found this game rather challenging. And while I'd like to argue that pianotm and others are wrong. After all, the whole reason I did a review of "The Little Music Box and the Daemon" was to present a counter review to the one done by pianotm. I can't in good faith argue against their position. After all, it's clear from the images used in pianotm's review for "Elf's Diary" that he played an older version of this game.

On the other hand, I can argue that the current build is pretty easy to breeze through. After all, I only ran into one battle that gave me any real trouble.
And that was the battle with Rue and Jork. This is because Jork's hyper offensive style centered around spamming group magic spells that were able to tear through my party's HP like a knife through hot butter. Of course, I eventually found an easy counter to this issue by simply setting up my speed buffs and then telling all of my characters to guard. I then countered Jork's hyper offensive magic style with my own. Suffice to say Jork folded like a deck of cards after that and I was easily able to pick off Rue. After that it was smooth sailing the rest of the way.

Graphics

On the graphical side of things the game is pretty solid in my opinion. While the game does suffer from some visual crowding at points. It never gets so bad as to be obnoxious. And, I do appreciate the effort that went into making a custom sprite for Faint as well. Though, it's hard to deny that Faint's battle sprite looks like it was cobbled together in MS Paint in the span of a few minutes rather than carefully crafted in a more advanced program like gimp.

Conclusion

"Elf's Diary" is a medium length RPG Maker project that will leave you smiling at points and leave you face palming at others. All and all the game is pretty solid in my opinion, but I do wish the game forced the player to be a bit more adaptive when it came to combat. After all, the one thing I kept reading about before I played this game was how difficult it was. Instead I found a game where you can easily crush everyone that gets in your way by spamming spells that target entire groups of enemies.