Meteo Chronicles (Demo)

Intro

"Meteo Chronicles" is a game riddled with major and minor issues. So much so that KrimsonKatt, the game's developer, has decided to abandon this project in favor of creating a longer version of the game in RPG Maker MZ. And while I hope the remaster/remake will at least be beatable.

The sad truth is this cycle of releasing a broken game and then promising a superior remake is becoming highly predictable when it comes to KrimsonKatt. This is because KrimsonKatt has made a few other games over the years that had similar issues such as "Zero Gear Fighters" and "Dragon Ascension". And KrimsonKatt promised he/she would remake those games at some point in the future under the names "Zero Gear Chronicles" and "Ebony Chronicles".

I suppose one can put a positive spin on this by saying "Zero Gear Fighters", "Dragon Ascension, and "Meteo Chronicles" are prime examples why you should regularly test your games for eventing errors. Especially when your putting together a game that is meant to take over a dozen hours to complete. After all you really don't want to go back in search of an eventing mistake you made weeks ago.

Story

You play as Koro a man whose been chosen to save the world from disaster. In order to do this you'll need to collect the four elements and have them forged into a sword that can slay even the Gods themselves. Of course along the way you'll gain additional allies whose backgrounds may be a bit shadier then you expect in some cases. You'll also get a love story that I managed to completely skip over because of a crazy glitch, but as I result I can't tell you if the romance is any good or not. And considering this game is never going to be fully operational I'd suggest taking a look at "Luxaren Allure" if you need a RPG with some romance.

Crazy Glitch



If you talk to the blacksmith a second time after he forged the legendary sword your party will become invisible and be able to walk through and on solid objects like water. A factoid that is very useful when you consider you can still activate the events that cause your character to switch to a new map. Though, I'll admit being invisible does make it a bit more challenging to hit those switches.

Though, I'd say the crazier part is the game is still unbeatable even with this glitch. This is because of an eventing error that occurs during an unavoidable cut scene before the final boss fight. As for why this cut scene causes the game to soft lock.

As for why this causes the game to lock up. I'm going to have to assume that KrimsonKatt forgot the cut scene triggers as soon as you appear on the map, but the cut scene itself plays out in the middle of the map. So your location data might actually appear in two places instead of one. At least that's my best educated guess for why the game soft locks at this point.

Minor Issues

I suppose after the craziness of the last section we should touch up on some more minor issues. That being the game is missing a lot of sound and image files for some reason. In fact, I ran into several battles where the developer forgot to include a sprite for the boss. So I was forced to randomly copy images and then give the file the correct name in order to advance to the boss fight. If you weren't aware you could do something like that then the game would actually soft lock on you fairly early on.

As for the sound files you need to remember that %20 translates to there being a space in the file's name. Though the sound file issues can be ignored in my experience. You'll just get annoying messages from the game about certain audio files missing, but you can otherwise continue to play like normal. Though why the game is missing around half a dozen songs is beyond me.

The In-Game Economy

According to aquatorrent money is really scare in this game as illustrated by this quote from their review:

Money is scarce. You'll eventually have a party of the size of 4-5, and buying equipment for everyone is almost impossible due to their expensive cost. You need to either grind money to afford them or ignore it, hoping that you are strong enough for the next dungeon.

And while I mostly agree with this assessment. There actually is a way to make infinite money in this game as well as gain an infinite amount of stat boosts. Albeit this method is something you could easily miss since it's a little unintuitive. After all, why would you sell stat boosters in a game like this?
Well you'll want to sell them since you can buy them at such a heavy discount from an enemy/merchant in Banna Woods that you can actually make money doing so.

But if you don't discover this trick then grinding for the money you'll need buy gear for your team can be quite prohibitive.

Combat Balance

Combat in this game places heavy emphasis on melee attacks in my opinion. Though my opinion was shaped by being able to max my attack stat. Combine that with a crossbow you can buy in the mid-game that delivers 9 normal hits and the sheer amount of damage you can inflict on bosses is insane. So much so that most will cave before you even finish attacking. And if your willing to go even bigger on farming stat boosters then I did and you can have the ability to start boss fights by hitting them 36 times before they get a chance to do anything for at least 36,000 points of damage. And you'll probably get a few critical hits in during that barrage.

About the only downside to the crossbow is that they can only hit a single target. So they aren't as useful for dealing with groups of enemies, but that isn't going to be a major problem since you can buy an accessory that turns off random encounters. An accessory I'd recommend you get since you'll probably hit level 99 rather early on if you don't.

Conclusion

I suppose I could go on about other issues, but everything else seems rather minor in comparison to the stuff I've already covered. As it stands, I'd recommend avoiding this project since all your getting is a game that is utterly unbeatable because of eventing errors. And while aquatorrent was nice enough to consider this project to be effectively a long 15 hour plus long demo for the remake/remaster that is in development. I'm of the opinion that this is simply a broken game and thus I'm free to give it a low review score.