Name: Dungeon Master of Rangea Continent

Developer: CrazyBabi

Story: In the beginning, you step into the shoes of Philia Lioness, William Harbert, and Erika Windleigh. Erika is the Chosen One! The hero who will save the world! You find your way to Reim Dreatos, who you are suddenly playing as and hand your butt to yourself. Reim is after the power of the Dark Crystals, to heal his disease, but I don't know anything beyond that. No effort is being made to tell the player the purpose behind anything. What are the stakes? What are the goals? WHO EVEN IS THE BAD GUY? IS THERE A BAD GUY? Who's the protagonist? Who's the antagonist?



Writing: Writing is short, sweet, exactly what you want in any videogame, and it tells you what you're doing right now, but it never tries to make you care. I cannot tell you the plot because the game has yet to tell me.

Unfortunately, while this game tells you what you're doing right now, it never tells you what the game's about. You're doing things because reasons. Obviously, the game's telling you that the nobody is really good or evil, but why does that matter? What is the Dungeon Master after! Why do humans hate demons? Why did the demons decide to torture humans? Why did the Dungeon Master decide that that was bad? Why are any of the decisions being made...being made??? The game is so busy telling you what's happening right now, it's completely declining to tell you what it's actually about. You're the hero! You have to defeat the demons! Now you're the demon! You're not bad...because...? Why? What is anyone's goal? Why do the heroes just abandon Philia? Now she's a witch! Everyone wants to put her to death! THINGS! But nothing to tie any of it together. Nothing to ground the story. Nothing to direct it.

As for comedic elements, the game tries to be a comedy but doesn't put in any real effort. The cheesy, campy writing is fine, but there isn't much payoff for the fourth-wall-breaking moments or the embarrassing conversation between Philia and William that we don't really have context for. William's absurd comments are over-the-top but forced. If I had to put into a single sentence what was wrong with the comedy, I'd say, "It suffers from poor timing." I think what's bugging me is that you're carrying along in this game, doing your thing, and then suddenly, the game is like, "LOOK! Something silly just happened!" and...it's an awkward silence.

There is one comedic moment that is done well and actually works. Reim and Lyrica are trying to turn the power onto a secret laboratory in the Forest of Horror. You make it to the research room on the top floor and Reim has a flashback where he's dealing with a scientist that would prefer to make weapons of war. Continue downstairs and you'll get another flashback where that scientist is more interested in curing disease and Reim comments that he actually used to be a good man. Go downstairs to the basement, and Lyrica stops you and says, "What? No flashback?" The timing is perfect. You expect a flashback. You're not expecting to skip the flashback, and frankly, neither do the characters. This joke follows the rule of three and executes perfectly. One thing though; I suspect I could have missed this joke if I didn't try to go past the basement first before going down. The second flashback needs to trigger if this joke is going to hit properly, otherwise, it'll fall flat. I would strongly suggest adjusting the event triggers here so that the player can't skip out on the second flashback. Keep to the rule of three! It's really important in comedy!

The developer should study what was done right with this joke because the rest of the humor is missing hard.

Gameplay: Okay, here's where the game really starts to fall flat. The writing is done in a way that really needs to be able to showcase the gameplay, and it's going to really be unfortunate if gameplay is repetitive and combat is badly balanced.



Here's where I'm guilty of a few things in my own games. Where to start! The Mage usually goes down in one hit. If he doesn't he has spells that can wipe out your weaker characters. The male demon rarely attacks, usually only buffs himself, and takes a fairly reasonable amount of hits to go down. The female demon will one-shot your characters effortlessly, and while she takes a bunch of damage from one hit, it'll usually take a second round to knock her out. The abysmal balance is apparent in this particular fight. One rarely hits, constantly buffs himself, and is hard to knock down. One goes down easy but hits so hard she can completely KO Erika or Philia from max health with a single hit. Once you're over level 6, though, you can tank her a little better. The Mage has a powerful ability but doesn't use it enough to matter. He's just weak. Now, one could argue that the enemies are supposed to be low challenge on the first level, but that doesn't really fly because it's a big point that this is the heroes' first dungeon.



Then you get to the boss and the game immediately switches to their perspective and you're fighting the characters you were just playing. The player should immediately see an insurmountable problem that Reim and Lyrica has, but you might miss it because it isn't too much of a problem in this fight.

• Reim and Lyrica's standard attacks are nearly useless. (yes, there are a laundry list of problems)
• Lyrica has no offensive capability.
  
• Reim has only a single offensive spell.
  
• Reim's offensive spell is his second most expensive spell.
  
• Reim has 160 something MP to begin.
  
• Reim's only offensive spell is 50 MP to cast.
  
• At this point, expect to only have three or four MP potions.
  
• All the enemies of the second dungeon are nearly immune to Reim's and Lyrica's standard attacks.
  
• There are dozens of enemies to fight in the second dungeon.
  
• The second dungeon boss resists all of Reim's and Lyrica's offensive abilities. All. Not one or two. Not half. All. Reim's standard attack; ineffective. Reim's magical attack; ineffective. Lyrica's standard attack; ineffective. Lyrica has no magic attack. All. All are ineffective. Even if you max out his debuffs.
  
• Wait
  
• for
  
• it.
  
• You have to play as Reim and Lyrica for the second dungeon!
  
• Solution? Grind, grind, grind. If you have to grind because your characters are just ineffective against everything, you've found a game with bad balance.

So, as I write this, I am attempting to grind my levels to see if I can have a better chance of beating the Dark Lurker. Reducing his dark resistance seems to be marginal. I got the heroes up to level 12, and then it stuck me at level five with Reim and Lyrica. Again, we have the same issue with the enemies in the Forest of Horror. The mutant rats can one-shot Lyrica. Reim can only take out three enemies (not battles! Single enemies!), before he's spent and has to go back to the dungeon to rest. I'm out of MP potions. I'm going to save them up this time if the enemies start giving them. I didn't get any in my last eight health packs.

I also hope people reading this are able to see just repetitive these battles are. Now, like I said, it's not like I haven't done this before. We're all guilty of poor combat encounters. There are a lot worse and this game has a lot of good going for it. Unfortunately, as I played, I found my mind drifting to Discord, which led me to Reddit, then I remembered what this music was in the background. OH! I'm trying to review a game! Let's get back to that! Yeah, I'm still trying to figure out how to beat the dark lurker and grinding in a game with repetitive combat and I constantly have to rest. Do you see where I'm going with this? It's a chore. I don't want to do chores. I want to play a game.

Okay, at level 10, Reim gets Twin Blade, but it requires TP. I'll see what that does after I've rested. Oh, it missed. Whoa! His standard attack must have crit because he one-shot a ten-eyed spider! Huge difference between a regular hit and a critical hit. Hitting does barely any damage for Reim...unless he crits! Still don't know what Twin Blade does. There it is. It's a decent hit. Also, Lyrica can't heal. She can remove debuffs, but she can't heal. If a character's offensive ability is pathetic, she'd better be able to heal. Straight up. What's the point of having a character that only debuffs enemies and buffs you? She's only useful in a boss battle where the debuffs and buffs actually mean jack, and she basically spends most of her time dying.



Ah! At level 11, Reim has over 200 MP! I can actually use dispel strike four times before needing to replenish! Not that it'll matter for the dark lurker. Oh, Reim's standard attack is...okayish at this level. Beat the Dark Lurker at level 14! Reducing his dark resistance is still marginal. It really only added about 20 HP damage to dispel strike (which made it an okay attack) and 3 HP damage to Lyrica's standard attack. Twin Blade won this. So that was it. I needed to grind.

So, once you've sufficiently leveled up, the game becomes reasonably playable, and from time to time, the enemies can even provide a pretty fun challenge. Next, we get to The Mark of the Witch, where Philia is suddenly incredibly overpowered! You know...I give up. This game doesn't know what it wants its balance to be.



Making Sense of This:Okay, I think I've figured it out. The development didn't focus on anything. The plot was ignored. Game balance and mechanics were ignored. The game is so big, keeping enemies diverse was ignored. There are dozens of ideas and none of them have been strung together into a coherent whole. The question just needs to be asked! What has Reim done that we're invading his home? Why are we at war with these demons? What are the stakes!? What are the stakes? You know, you don't need to tell your audience really anything, but you need to tell them that.

And here we have the real problem; we've decided to do a story-telling technique where we see the story told from both sides, and what this really reminds me of is Red Nova's "Prayer of the Faithless." But where "Prayer of the Faithless" succeeds is in the fact that we have been with both sides from the beginning. We've seen that everyone are reasonably good people and then as the menace grows, the cracks beneath the facades start to show and you see that some of the characters aren't as good as you thought, and some of them are more deeply wounded than you realized, and some of them can't understand the other side of the coin. Everyone has a purpose. Everyone has a goal. Everyone has a reason. Everyone has something to fight for. I'm not getting that here.

And "Dungeon Master of Rangea Continent" has so many threads that are going off on their own tangents and nothing has been done to tie them together. Gameplay coupled with writing has abandoned any semblance of sense, and you can really see the chaos in the gameplay balance. One minute, you're advancing levels so quickly, you don't know how strong you're going to be, only to have the tables turned, and all that buildup suddenly gets thrown away because now you're playing the guy you thought was going to be the boss. Then one minute, you need to grind 10 levels to make it through a dungeon. Then one minute, you actually have reasonable balance and the boss fight is genuinely hard and fun. Then one minute, you're so powerful, you're mowing through enemies. Chaos! This game is chaos!



Graphics:Everything except for the characters appears to be RTP. The characters are a very cute, child-like style. All of my screencaps have a character bust because that's the really interesting part of the graphics. Mapping is pretty well done and the dungeons are actually structurally consistent.

Music and Sound: Music comes from a multitude of sources and is used to great effect. This game sounds like what you want an RPG of this kind to sound like. Sound effects sound RTP with a couple from Freesounds.

Conclusion: This game really needed someone to go over the story. It needed an editor. It needed someone to go through it and see what wasn't servicing the story and remove it, and it needed someone to go through and make sure it was at least telling the story. I spent way longer on this game than I wanted to. Overall play, it's not too bad if you get your level up and then skip the non-essential enemy encounters. I can't really recommend it, though. It takes a lot to get into and with a little finesse, you can get it to stop being bad, but you can't really get it to be good. The jumps from character to character weren't smooth and I spent much of the game resenting it. At the same time, this definitely isn't an amateur game, but it still feels very inexperienced. It feels rushed. It feels like not enough care was put into it, and this game is trying really hard to be great, and it could be with a lot of polish that it needed and didn't get. I don't know how to feel really good about this game. You know, I like every character in it. There's part of me that wants to score it higher. I keep feeling like I'm missing something. There are all the indicators of a very good game dev in this game. But then I think of every annoying thing about this game that could have been avoided.