Aurora Magica

Aurora Magic is an RPG Maker MV game made by Failsauce Studios. This review is of the demo available as of early 2018, and as such will be marked as N/A until a full version of the game is released. That said, I will give the game a personal score at the bottom of the review.

Note that this review has story spoilers so if you want to experience the story for yourself, play the game first.

Aurora Magic follows the story of Varek and his band of friends consisting of his sister, a cute catgirl and an annoying tsundere. The story of the demo itself isn't anything too exciting - Varek and gang go out to find catgirl's stolen sword, then check the forest for some backstory as to why catgirl is living in his attic. From there you get a boat and... well, the demo ends.

As introductions to the characters go, it's decent. We learn enough to get their basic personalities down and understand that there's going to be conflict between tsundere, who has a thing for Varek, and catgirl, who is blissfully unaware enough to not see the trouble coming her way. God help her if tsundere is really a yandere, though.

That said, we also get a big helping of a possible future plot, and it plays into one of the main issues with having a catgirl around - in this world there are beast people who are all women. The only way they can breed is by using human males as breeding stock. Initially there was a treaty in place between the beast people and some human nations that allows volunteers to marry beast women, however the amount of volunteers was far too few to beget a functional society. Thus, the ruler of the beast people tribes decided that kidnapping was the way to go.

This ties in to the plot well with the dialogue about the catgirl when she joins your party. There's low-end racism at work, where people will comment about how you shouldn't marry catgirl, that tsundere is such a nice girl hint hint wink wink and various other comments. Honestly, it made me cheer catgirl on even more (even without the fact that tsundere was annoying and bland).

Aside from the story and the characterisation, the technical writing was well done - I didn't notice any spelling or grammatical errors and the writing didn't feel stilted or odd, bar a few instances of SHOUTING that didn't fit too well.

The gab window is useful for showing in-party interactions and was used to good effect to give the characters more personality without stopping the progress as you went, so kudos for using that script.

There were some issues, though - the mapping, whilst pretty decent, had some issues when it came to portraying certain aspects. Sometimes there were some height discrepancies, and there were some pretty bland areas of empty ground tiles which felt odd. Also, some tiles that had passability problems and a couple of oddly mapped areas. Otherwise, the mapping was decent for what it was.

Gameplay was a bit on the too-easy side. The biggest example of this were the bounties you needed to defeat during the story - each was quite easy and got knocked down quite quickly despite the fact that they were built up as hard to kill since they had bounties on them. To be fair, in comparison to the other couple of monsters you fight in the demo, they were a bit harder, but not enough to pose as any kind of challenge. For example, they were doing about 20 damage when I have over 400 HP. Using magic it takes 2 turns to kill them.

On top of that, the characters use skills that are default database additions and if I didn't know better I could have sworn that the characters were pretty much just default classes with a script used to make the battles seem less default. There had been some effort to add more skillsets to the characters, however there was nothing under them - magic was only found through the Magic skillset menu.

There was also an issue in that there was an onscreen menu (often found in mobile games) which got in the way of playing on the computer, with no way to turn it off. It got quite bothersome to deal with and though you could minimise it, there was still a button on screen that was annoying to deal with.

That aside, there were a few small bugs in the game. Chickens jumped infinitely for some weird reason, landing on weird places (like, say, house walls). Enemies disappeared if you killed the Orc first (though that might have been deliberate, it was still annoying if you wanted to grind a bit of money/exp before fighting the Minotaur). Said Minotaur could only be fought after the Orc - otherwise you had a character pop up and tell you it wasn't available in the demo (even though it was and collecting its bounty served as the cut-off point). Passability issues were around, such as the ruins and forest on the world map being set above hero.

Overall, I enjoyed the story and (most of) the characters in the game. The setting is interesting and I look forward to seeing how that plays into the plans of the party. The mapping could use a bit of sprucing and there's some definite issues when it comes to the gameplay that need fixing. That said, it's a decent start and I hope you continue on with it.

I'd give it a 2/5 so far. It has promise but it needs a fair bit of work. Go for it dev! >.<)b