Scar of Shadows

Disclaimer: This review contains Spoilers for the story of the Demo and a lot of tongue-in-cheek humor. Please don't take it TOO seriously.

The game opens in a very unusual way, with a very important choice - asking you if you want to skip a cutscene (No/Yes). Of course, I selected No and was thus treated to a black screen with some sound effects and a few textboxes. These were random lines said by villagers as their village is apparently under attack by monsters. After these five lines of text, the game then continues by... Skip scene? (No/Yes). I click no.

The game transitions to the protagonist's room. In the first textbox, he is called simply Man until he introduces himself in the second textbox as Eldric. Nice touch I guess, but given that the location name displayed right after the transition is Eldric's room, I'm not sure what the point in this secrecy was. Turns out, the black screen represented his nightmares, presumably caused by his hometown being razed in a time honored rite of passage for most RPG heroes. The hero now has to pass a final exam to graduate from his monster hunting academy. After he does that, he can finally pursue his goal of slaying every monster in the world to avenge everyone, including that merchant with an infinite supply of healing potions and all those nameless villagers that only had one line of dialogue. Reach for the stars, I guess. After a few sentences, the scene ends, begging the question if it really needed to be skippable.

The academy itself is quite nice. The mapping is good and the tilesets used don't look like the basic RTP, yet are in the same style, so the default characters and generated characters don't clash with it. Theres also a bit of flavor dialogue. I opened the menu and noticed that it's quite nice, with a wealth of information concerning character stats and a very nice save menu. Probably the most surprising feature is the ability to choose your own window color.

Anyway, after admiring the menu, I enter the courtyard to train before the final exam. It's a tutorial fight and there I notice more things. The enemy has a health bar when selected, theres a turn order in the upper right corner and both your characters and the enemy actions happen immediately instead of after the whole party selects their actions. Definitely nice work! Funnily enough, the training dummy somehow manages to attack our hero.

After the tutorial we have... Skip scene? (No/Yes). Then, the headmaster calls Eldric to his office to tell him about his final exam. Eldric comes to his office and... Skip scene? Through some expository dialogue, we learn that Eldric's been at this academy for two years and already became one of their best students. He also only got in because he begged the headmaster, who decided to let him attend for free out of the goodness of his heart. Either that, or it involved a long, unpaid internship.

Halfway through the cutscene, the game froze (probably not helped by frequent alt-tabing) and I had to replay it back to the point where I was, with no issues this time. Eldric's final exam is the expected one: go to a cave and slay the boss monster there. At this point, this is so expected that it would actually be shocking if it turned out it's a written exam. So, off we go! In front of the Academy, we discover a healing crystal with a yet unusable teleport function, then we leave for the world map.

Upon leaving the Academy, I discover to my dismay that you can't dash on the world map, leaving you with the default walking speed. Even worse, the encounter rate seemed to be pretty high, with an encounter about every 5-15 steps, which just wasn't very fun and discouraged exploration. I just wanted to move on towards my destination with as few detours as possible due to the slow crawl of walking and constant battles. To talk a bit more positively for a bit, the locations on the world map have their names above them when you get near, which start out as a series of question marks before you enter them. Also, the monsters have custom models with a simple, cartoony style that still feels fitting for this sort of game. Even though one of the enemies is a Monty Python-esque cute vicious rabbit.

We enter the cave, which is as pretty as a drab, brown cave can be. The encounter rate is about the same as on the world map, with a swarm of vicious bats attacking at every turn and worse still, the gold and XP rewards per encounter seem to be so low that I am starting to fear that the game will require a lot of level grinding. The dungeon itself is standard, mostly linear with a few sidepaths that lead to treasure chests.

After getting to the end of the (short, despite constant random battles) dungeons, I see a blue healing crystal ahead, which signals a boss fight is incoming. So, I heal up a fight the lvl. 2 Ogre boss. The fight is pretty boring, understandably since you have 1 character with about two skills, however, the amount of HP the boss has turns it into a bit of a slog. This will get much worse as the game goes on. However, it seems that the boss actually stops attacking you if your HP gets too low, which is nice for a tutorial I guess.

Anyway, after a minute of Attack/Attack/Attack/Potion/Repeat, the boss is down, then... Skip scene? In the skippable scene, the hero is celebrating his victory, but then he is cornered by a horde of Monty Python-esque rabbits and has to fight for his life to avoid being viciously nibbled to death. The fight is unwinnable at first, as there are just too damn many rabbits. Luckily, after having his HP reduced to 1, Eldric finds strength in his promise to avenge his family and... and I am laughing so hard, I just can't, these evil bunnies are just too cute. Were he attacked by those bats the cave is swarming with, I could take it somewhat seriously, but those rabbits transform it into an unintentional comedy.

So, determined not to die such a ridiculous death, Eldric discovers his Limit Break (a skill that uses all your TP and the only use for TP in the game), which is an AoE spell that destroys all of them. Then, Clippy asks us if we want some help with skipping the next scene. We click no and learn that we dont have to backtrack through the bat-infested cave and dash-disabled world map, we can just teleport from crystal to crystal. A nice feature that makes the frustration with playing this version manageable. Immediatelly after teleporting back to the Academy, Microsoft Windows asks us if we are sure we really don't want to skip this next scene. We accidentally click no and have to suffer the consequences. In the cutscene, the hero exposits that he can teleport between the healing crystals because of an item he got from the cave boss, which are called "Haromizers". After checking the Key Item inventory, I discover an item called Harmonizer, so most likely a typo.

We continue on to Headmaster's office, so that we can not skip more scenes. The Headmaster lets Eldric graduate, gives him a +1 Strength ring as a reward and tells him to slay every monster he comes across, because judging by the encounter rate there are more of them than actual humans. He also informs him that money exists and even though he let him study at his school for free, everyone else hates a freeloader and he better find a job soon. Well, ok, dad!

Unfortunately, the only place with a suitable job market is a port town on the other side of the island. That means more default walking across the monster infested world map. Joy. In the town, Port Nyla, there's only one item shop and an inn that can't be entered, because Eldric refuses to enter buildings that don't have their doors located on the side facing down. There's also an unattended treasure chest, whose contents Eldric promptly ransacks and Lucius from the default MV heroes. Lucius is actually called Xavier, he is from some other monster slaying academy. He has a monster slaying assigment on the mainland and wants Eldric to accompany him with a promise of 1000 gold as payment. Considering that's the equivalent of about about 300 bat and rabbit battles, he accepts and Xavier joins the party.

Xavier is a Spearman, who's pretty similar statwise to Eldric, the only major diference is that he has a bit more Agility and less Strength. He also has an Analyse skill that reveals the monsters stats and weaknesses without using up a turn, which is a pretty cool mechanic. His limit break is the same as Eldric's except it does water damage instead of wind damage. He was a pretty useful character, when he wasn't constantly on the verge of KO. His Blind spell trivialized certain boss encounters.

Anyway, Eldric and Xavier take a ship to the mainland and... the game begs us to skip the next scene again. We don't and thus learn more about Eldric and Xavier and their reasons for joining their respective academies. Eldric pretty much repeats his tragic backstory, just in case we didn't get it yet, and also reiterates his plan of slaughtering every demon in the world to avenge his dead parents. Xavier is taken aback by the realization that he's now part of a JRPG plot and his boring "my grandad was the principal" backstory ain't gonna cut it here. He starts trying to make himself more interesting, but before he can finish, a random portal appears on the deck of the ship and monsters come out of it.

Here we learn another interesting fact about Xavier... since he is a default RM character and the monsters aren't, the monsters absolutely despise him. They hate him so much that 99% of the time, they just ignore Eldric and just pile their attacks on Xavier till he's down. Until I got the third party member, I think Eldric's been damaged like twice by something that wasn't an AoE attack. Not sure why, since their Aggro rate percentage is the same?

After the fight, the other passangers beg Eldric to skip the next scene, Eldric just laughs maniacally as he presses the NO button. He then jumps inside the monster portal, because of his deathwish. Xavier doesn't think it's a good idea because his Intelligence score is above absolute zero, however he succumbs to peer pressure from the other passengers and goes in anyway.

Both of them end up in the monster world, which consists of floating platforms in the middle of a starry sky parallax background. There's also skippable cutscenes. Unfortunately, the portal is located on the top of a cliff, so after falling two tiles down, they have to go all the way around the place just so they can reach the portal they arrived through in the first place. The encounter rate is as high as ever and the XP and gold rewards are still insufficient and seem to require you to fight every encounter you get into just to keep up with the bosses in levels (and that assumes you don't ignore the sidepaths leading to the treasures).

After much grinding and a boss battle that lasts longer than it should, Eldric doesn't skip more scenes and eventually they return to the ship via the portal and arrive in a port city on the eastern continent. The port city has an equipment shop that sells items so expensive it takes all of the party's gold to replace just their sword and spear. The armor stat upgrade also feels a bit too small considering its price. Theres also an Inn in the port city with no door at the visible side. Can't be entered since once again, Eldric is a devout South Door Adventurist and his religion forbids it.

Anyway, the party travels through the monster infested, dash-disabled world map to Daisy Village, where the quest giver is. Now, up to this point, all the towns in the game (including ones further in the game) have walls and the villagers keep talking about how glad they are they have them. Daisy Village is the one town in the world that doesn't have walls, nor a pallisade, not even a picket fence or something. Thus, we can see where this goes. Daisy Village also has no teleport crystal, further sealing its inevitable doom.

Eldric doesn't skip any of the scenes, including the one where the village chief tells the party to clear the monsters from a tower on the southern side of the continent for 2000 GP. Xavier thinks that if things go south, Eldric will make a useful meatshield while he escapes. Unfortunately for Xavier, he is the one that ends up being a meatshield, as the monsters continue attacking him 99% of the time. The party goes through multiple floors of the tower, battles a skeletal dragon and doesn't skip any scenes, unfortunately turns out it was too late and monsters planned an attack on the village. The monsters avoid the walled port city with guards that's much closer, instead they burned down the wall-less Daisy Village that was much further away. Points for realism!

Eldric and Xavier make their way through skippable scenes to the only survivor, the chief's daughter Callie, whom they save from fire monsters. Eldric probably sympathizes with her loss, since people in his village also probably didn't know how to build walls or fences, but it's not explored much. The game gets tired of you not skipping cutscenes and skips to three days later, which the party apparently spent at the inaccessible inn port town inn (Eldric probably slept on the pavement, because of his phobia).

After three days, it seems Callie mostly got over what happened to her village, she doesn't feel the need to study the blade for three years to eliminate all the monsters in the world like some edgelords we know. Instead, she hires Eldric and Xavier as escorts, as she wants to sell some healing herbs to a witch that lives on the other side of the mountains. She then joins the party and is basically a healer/buffer, with a laughably weak physical attack and a damage spell that only ever does good damage against undead. Unlike the other characters though, her Limit Break is actually useful in a boss fight. All the other characters have an AoE screen-clearing limit break (and pretty much all boss fights are single enemy only), while Callie has a full heal and status removal as hers.

In order to get to the witch, they have to pass a tunnel through the mountains. Theres a travelling merchant in the tunnel and the game freezes again when Eldric tries to buy a +50 HP accessory from him. After reload, it works fine.

The dungeon is mostly linear like all of the ones so far, with side paths towards treasure and the standard very high encounter rate and very small XP and gold rewards. The gold the party had barely covered upgrading Eldric and Xavier's gear, Callie just had to make do with what she already had.

After fighting a robotic dog, which was one of those bosses that were totally neutralized as a threat with Xavier's Blind spell, the party didn't skip any scenes and proceeded on their journey to not skip even more scenes. The next scene to not skip featured a witch, Mythia, the top of whose sprite was obscured by her kitchen counter till she moved away from it. By now, we had enough default characters in the party for the monsters to stop focusing poor Xavier and even Eldric got to share the damage. The witch of course joined the party after Callie paid the party 10 times less than her father promised. Sigh. The witch is a typical elemental mage and probably the strongest damage dealer even against targets that arent weak to any elements.

Anyway, for the next quest, monsters caused a disturbance in the forest and the witch wants to find out what's happening there. Eldric comes along because of his deathwish, Callie comes along, because... what else is she gonna do and Xavier doesn't even try to negotiate a payment first (something that would fit his character from what I've seen so far), instead he comes along because of peer pressure it seems.

The next dungeon is a fairy forest with a final fantasy esque hidden room, a talking monster boss with a cool element weakness switching mechanic (but waaaay too much HP), another visit to the monster world with another boss (that summons a weak minion every 10 rounds, I guess, pretty pointless like this) and of course, more opportunities for skipping cutscenes. The party is shocked when they find out that monsters are actually intelligent, make plans and can talk and decide that they must tell about it to the king, immediately.

So, they travel to the capital, which is on the other side of the world, on the western continent. They pass a walled mining village, that has no story relevance yet. It's just a bunch of shops, a guard that prevents you from accessing an apparently monster infested mine and another non-enterable inn. On the way to a northern port city and after hundreds of random encounters, they get attacked, first by another default RM character, that is easilly defeated with Blind, then, by a random Wyvern boss and get Game Over about 20 times. They mostly fail due to the boss's two actions combining a very strong AoE spell Flame Wave with AoE physical attacks that often knock out a random party member from full HP (Wyvern is immune to blind, so no cheesy tactics here). And since ressurection item costs 2000 gold, its more valuable than diamonds in this world and thus scarce. Also, even if they survive that, they get KOd by the Wyverns Deep Flame, which does 400+ damage, when Eldric has almost 300 max HP.

Eventually, they defeat the Wyvern. They do it via a combination of stacking all stat buffs and debuffs and realizing they need to all Guard after the Wyvern uses Inhale to survive the damage from Deep Flame (the Wyvern's use of the Inhale skill could be made more obvious). Thus, they eventually whittle down the Wyvern's ridiculous HP total down to 0, after about 10 minutes of trying not to fall asleep.

Exhausted, they press onward through skippable scenes and port towns with non-enterable inns, and skippable backstory-explaining ship scenes to the capital city. There's an Inn in the capital city and it has a visible door on the south side this time! Unfortunately, the innkeeper blocks it, stating that it's closed due to "Renovations". Said renovations probably involve moving the entrance to either the left or right side of the building, to conform with building regulations all the other inns in the kingdom follow. It's probably like that so Eldric doesn't come in to pillage their treasure chests, like he did in all the other towns.

We go to see the king, unfortunately, he's not seeing petitioners at the moment, as a thief stole his amulet and escaped with it to a monster-infested cave no. 3. So the party has to get the amulet back to the king to get their meeting. Thus, they go through version 3.0 cave dungeon with even more skippable scenes. Turns out, the thief survived, even though everyone thought the monsters got him. The party saves him from a boss with ridiculous HP, because default RM characters have to stick together.

They get the amulet, however Eldric decides to bring the thief, a starving young orphan boy with no money that can't even go to an orphanage because it's "full", to face justice and is all high and mighty about it. I wouldn't be throwing stones if I were you, Eldric, what with all those treasure chests in towns that you looted. I guess that the king didn't store his amulet in a red treasure chest, else it would've been legit.

So the party returns to the castle with the amulet and the thief everyone thought was dead. The thief is thrown in the dungeons, probably facing execution, because he stole from the king. Eldric seems fine with that, because he was in the same situation as him and didn't resort to stealing (treasure chests don't count)! Unlike him, that boy didn't have a headmaster of a prestigious academy take him in and train him for free, but that's irrelevant. But before we get too sympathetic towards Oliver Twist here, considering the king's subsequent attitude, I wouldn't be surprised if some guards lost more than their job over that amulet thing.

Anyway, they go to see the king, who demands them to skip this scene. Eldric refuses and the king gets very angry. He reacts to their tales of talking, intelligent monsters essentially as "Fake news, lol", though to be fair, they really don't present anything beyond their word to prove it. Callie then asks the king to release the thief from prison, pretty please. The king's like "fine, the dungeons are too crowded anyway, but if he breaks the law again, you are all going to the dungeons." Everyone's ok with this for some reason, even Xavier, who earlier thought about abandoning the party before a boss fight.

The thief, an unfortunately named Bacton, then joins the party. In a skippable cutscene, Xavier wants him to join to keep an eye on him, since after all, they are all going to be imprisoned if he messes up again. Eldric is like "promise me you will learn to survive without stealing". He then presumably teaches him about the red treasure boxes, that contain charity donations for orphans from wall-less villages. The party then decides to clear the nearby monster-infested ruins, because the king put a bounty on the monsters there.

The next part of the story... well, a new bane appears, a dungeon with puzzles, in a game that up till now had none. This dungeon defeated me. For one, it has the standard ridiculously high encounter rate and annoying enemies. Those aren't the problem however, in part because escaping from battle is ridiculously easy (you can try over and over again with every character) and failing it seems to reset the turn order sometimes for some reason (so you most likely won't get attacked if you have a full party). No, the real reason are the dreaded lever puzzles. Theres one with 3 levers, which you can complete by just activating random levers, then there's another one with a whooping 9 levers.

Unfortunately, it seems that puzzle is mandatory. After exploring the entirety of the this time actually rather sprawling dungeon, I see no other way forward and the healing crystal beyond the spikes blocking the way past the levers suggests that the boss is that way. The bad part about the puzzle is, theres no way to reset the puzzle, so you need to reload if you want to try again from its default state. And after about an hour, I still couldn't manage to find the solution and there are no clues inside the dungeon itself.

Well, it seems that Eldric's quest to avenge his parents by slaying every monster in the world has come to a close, halted by impassable spikes, for while he studied the blade for three years, he doesn't have the required intelligence for logic puzzles. And sadly, you can't skip this scene. This time, I would've definitely chosen Yes.

Still, a pretty solid game in the making. 3 out of 5 scene skips, would not skip scene again.