NOTE: This review covers the original version. A new version that polishes a few things is on the way, I'm told, including a new font, so be on the lookout for that. This review will only be covering the original.

Trash Planet is an RPG set in the year 2250. Civilization has mostly fallen to pieces and the planet is covered in trash. But this wasteland has not completely killed humanity, and has given rise to mutants, people with strange powers that allow them to do more than the average person.

One such person is our sorta-mute protagonist Tilda, who can control people's blood and speaks mostly in dialog choices and emotion balloons. She gathers a rag-tag group of misfits and they find themselves working on a mission to preserve humanity, sort of.

First, let's get this out of the way. The game has an MS-Paint-like art style. This may turn you off from the experience. It's personally not my favorite, but I still found it plenty unique and having its own charm, not to mention it just kinda works for the feeling and mood the game is going for.



Are you going to enjoy this game? A lot of it is going to come down to whether or not you enjoy the game's sense of humor and general weirdness. Here's a few examples in the form of characters who join you: A (formerly) rich girl who owns a hippo-man slave, a guy who's class name is Edgelord whose powers include "has a gun" and teleportation, a girl who is flat out a brand mascot for a burger-place turned into a (bio?)robot.

These ideas, at first, didn't really gel with me, but several of these characters are somewhat deeper than their initial gimmick. And the rest of the game's humor is more in line with what I enjoy, with a lot of wacky and funny NPC dialog and just a lot of funny turns of phrase. There's a lot of people finding their own fun (or trying to drown their sorrows but in funny ways) in this ruined world, and that really clicked with me.

But don't let all this wackiness catch you too off-guard. The game does have its darker moments. Don't expect everyone to live through this adventure. You may find the contrast between all the wackiness and some of the darker elements to be a bit dissonant, but it didn't bother me too much. You already find yourself in a ruined world covered with monsters and a general sense of bleakness, so it works. Though with any game that can kill off main characters, it can be a bummer to lose a character you enjoyed.

The biggest highlight of the game for me is the music. There are a lot of varied songs and almost all of them are really good! Very catchy stuff, and new songs are used whenever needed, so the soundtrack feels robust. Not to mention you can literally buy records in-game and listen to little snippets of them. I'm not good at describing music, but it's all very cool and personally was the highlight of the experience for me. It's nice~!



The gameplay's not as strong as the music, but it fares fairly well. First, there is something we gotta talk about, the two difficulty modes. This game has no inns or full-restore spot equivalents. If you want to heal, you're going to have to use items, and to get items, you're going to have to search every trash can you find and spend money.

But very few monsters actually drop creds. You get paid by your mysterious benefactor and you can also earn money with odd jobs during breaks, but this still makes healing a very very limited resource, especially early on.

You cannot just save anywhere you like, either. You must talk to a cat to save. This cat appears all over the world in various locations, usually in the start of a new area.

That's where the two difficulty modes come in. In Normal difficulty, you have to scrounge for items constantly to heal yourself. In Easy mode, talking to the cats will also heal your party's HP and MP to full.



I started the game in Normal mode, and honestly, the idea of no inn equivalent annoyed me. I'm fine with hard games and games where you have to scavenge for resources. I'm fine with a game that makes an inn more costly, in money or other resources, to use. But for some reason, no full-heal spots at all rubs me the wrong way. So I restarted on Easy.

Easy is a decent enough time, and won't be a complete walk in the park. Though it's obvious that the developer intended for players to be on Normal, so I felt like I cheated myself out of some of the challenge.

On the other hand, I don't know how balanced the game would have been on Normal. I could see players that weren't as good at battle or item management reaching a dead-end, with no way to full-heal and no money to get more items. As I said earlier, you can't even grind monsters for money, so it seems like that could be a recipe for disaster.

Funny enough, the game does get more generous with items later on, and will even full-heal you (!!!) before some events and big bosses. But is that enough to make the system work? I cannot say, as I don't feel like going back and replaying the whole game on Normal right now XD;;;

Enough of that, though. The rest of the gameplay is pretty good. Each character has a unique set of moves, and some of the mutant powers get pretty creative. I really love Guuchi's time powers and Omen's fortune powers. The early characters are a little less varied in their movesets unfortunately.

The enemy monsters are the kind of stuff I love, a ton of just weird, wacky and altogether strange enemies. That's the good stuff!



Bosses aren't huge on variety, but they all work well enough, and they switch things up on you sometimes, keeping the player on their toes. Be warned though, that there are some unwinnable boss fights. Sometimes you just gotta let the boss take you out.

Something interesting about the game's party system, or kinda lack-thereof. You'll get more than your max of four characters in your party, but instead of being able to switch them out on the fly, instead the game picks who you use in any given moment.

Sometimes this makes sense, like a character going "Eeew, the next boss is a giant spider? I hate spiders, I don't wanna be in the party" but most of the time it's completely arbitrary.

On the one hand, this creates a feeling of a revolving party much like Final Fantasy 4, but without having to contrive why characters are coming and going all the time. It also forces you to use every character at some point, and try moves you might not use otherwise.

On the other hand, it's kinda annoying to have a character you really like, who is there with the party, but you can't use them just because the game said so. It's nice enough to force variety, but there's something to be said for player choice. Also, the characters' movesets aren't always interesting enough to make the forced party members thing engaging on a tactical level.

The game also has a Persona-esce social links system. Every now and then, you'll be separated from your party and be put on break. You can hang out with characters, where you're usually asked a question or two, and if you both have a good time, that characters' stats will go up in some way and their links will advance. You can also work in the local stores for cash during this break.

A few things to note: Unlike Persona, you have seemingly infinite time during these breaks, so you can bond with everyone on your team once at every break. Also, some characters you just can't max out their bond. This is a given for characters who die during the story, but even some that don't just show up too late in the game (for example, I couldn't max out Mendy no matter how hard I tried).

The world has a variety of wacky and varied locations: though most boil down to broken-down cities covered in trash, there's usually something going on in each town, from a cyborg death-bot mayor, to your usual tournament arc, to a quest in a giant abandoned mall, to a hellish circus.

When it comes to dangerous areas, any enemy encounters other than the world map are triggered by events where a shadowy enemy sprite appears and you battle. This allows for a good rate of battles that "feel" random enough.

The dungeons aren't always the most inspired in design, but you have enough various missions (sneak in here, do this tourney, break out of here etc) to keep things feeling fresh. That said, it doesn't always work. There's a warp tile puzzle in the circus that was just a lot of trial and error and wasn't exactly fun in my opinion, which is a shame because I liked the rest of that area, especially the funhouse mirrors :D



Ultimately, looking at the game as a whole, I feel like it has quite a few flaws, and a lot of its ideas are very hit or miss. However, it's got a ton of original stuff in it and a lot of custom assets, and playing through the game, it has a lot more heart than I expected and I found myself enjoying the journey. It obviously has a lot of work put into it and that shows, especially by the end.

The characters aren't hugely deep, but they felt a lot bigger than I first thought by the end. It was fun meeting and getting to know a lot of them. Their adventure was entertaining and even a lot of NPCs are memorable and funny. I may have had a lot I complained about in this review, but the whole of the game is stronger than its individual parts, and is overall quite enjoyable.

Give this game a shot! If the humor gels with you and you give the characters and world a chance, I think you'll find that there's a lot to love in Trash Planet! I give this one 4 stars! :DDD

Here's some tiny nitpicks: I'll put them under a hide-tag.