My playtime: 09:02:23

Intro
The year is 2250. The world is polluted and humans have mutated to survive the environment. Trash Planet tells a story about what will happen in the future with excessive trash and waste on the planet. You'll play as Tilda, a mutated human with the ability to control blood, that is going on a mission to get money. Or at least, that's how it began.

Graphics
Trash Planet has "trash" graphics. Perhaps it is meant as a joke to the game title, but most graphics, especially the cutscenes, look like it was made in MS Paint. It took me some time to get used to the graphics and when I did, I found that the environment and characters look cute. The game has its appeal, that's for sure.

Maps are small and there is no screen transition between areas. However, the tiles are big enough to compensate for it. It's also easy to do a full check on each area since there are only one or two types of object of interest, which is usually a trash can, where you can rummage through it and hopefully find something usable. However, some floors tend to have similar colors with human skin, making it hard to distinguish.



Story
The story starts by explaining how the world has become to its current state. It was then shifted to the main protagonist and her friends that are looking for money.

More characters will be introduced as the story goes and if you think you're in for a light-hearted story, you're wrong. Kill or be killed is the rule in this world, and your party is no exception. As more characters join your party, more characters will also die, including those side characters that you don't want to lose. Sometimes you're given with two choices which are either to live by sacrificing someone or die with a game over screen.

Luckily, the ending isn't that gloomy. The game revealed all of its secrets except for one, the thing that Gucchi does with the Lady and the potion that she drank, which is never explained in the story.

The Game
Party Members
You'll start with 4 party members and more characters will join your party as you progress the story. Sadly, you only can bring 4 members in battle and the game will decide which party members will have their turn, which will happen several times in the story. It's a nice idea to make sure that all party members are not ignored. However, I found it odd that I couldn't access the equipment of inactive party members to switch their gears sometimes.

The game mostly has a simple fetch quest, where you have to go to point A to do something before something else happens. However, I didn't find the game to be repetitive, especially with the interesting dialogues.

Break Time
There are times where you are on break and free to do anything you want. You can go to a store and buy some break-exclusive items, work to get money, do some sidequests, or bond with your party members. Bonding will give you a chance to increase your party members' stat and their relationship with you. A special skill for a party member will be unlocked after you max out your bond with him/her. However, you can only bond once with each party member every time you have a break and it's impossible to max out the bond with some members because of this.

One thing that I noticed during break time is that there are different characters in every break time. Trash cans are also refilled, enabling you to rummage through it again. Some characters will also speak differently based on what you did in either main story, job, or sidequest.

Enemies
Enemies are usually invisible. They will suddenly come out and surprise you when you walk to a certain tile, initiating a battle. The same doesn't happen in world map though; it's a pure random encounter out there. The encounter rate is mostly fine, except in one area (on the way to Sunshine city) because I always encountered an enemy after a few steps. However, enemies tend to not give anything except EXP, making it hard to obtain money to buy supplies and gears.

Battles are turn-based and each character has a unique skill based on their mutation. The game seems to differentiate between DPS and tank very well since it's noted a lot in the game. However, tanks are usually nothing except someone with a high HP since they tend to not have a taunt skill. Even if they have one, enemies will still have a chance to hit other party members, making it to be useless.

Bosses in this game are not memorable. Most of them can be killed in the same combo, except for one (Slash). Some bosses are unbeatable, some are not. Sometimes, the game will also allow you to retry some bosses instead of getting a game over screen, especially near the end of the game.

Difficulty
The game has two difficulties that you can choose at the beginning of the game: easy and normal. The only difference between both modes is the ability to heal your party to full health before you save. Speaking of saving, saving can only be done by talking to Save Cats, which are scattered across the game, or Proto-Bot, which you'll encounter later. I played in the easy mode and to be honest, I don't think I'll be able to beat the normal mode because of how hard it is to gather resources. Heck, there were times where I had a problem to deal with random encounters because they dealt too much damage.

Problem
The only problem that I had is that the text is hard to read. It took me a while before I got used to it although there were still times where I couldn't read some texts since they were too small. Some dialogues are also automatically advanced when you hold the Shift button, which I usually hold by habit, in case the text will move faster that way (which didn't happen).



Pros:
- A lot of party members that will change as you play
- 2 difficulties
- Bonding with party members to unlock a special skill or increase their stat

Cons:
- Text is hard to read
- Sometimes you can't take out gears that were used by your inactive party members

Conclusion
The game might not look that appealing, but you should try it for a minute or two before deciding to continue the game. The game has an interesting concept from other mainstream RPG Maker games, and it delivers. Two difficulties are also provided for casual and hardcore gamers.

Final Rating: 4/5
I wasn't sure whether to give it 4 or 5 stars, but I decided to go with 4 instead. The game is enjoyable enough to spend some hours in although the resource limitation might be a problem for some people. Heck, I even hesitated to buy gears for my party members since I'm afraid they will die in the future.

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Typo:
- When you board The Queen: "We're here to get that stupid propeller for the inventer girl." should be "We're here to get that stupid propeller for the inventor girl."