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Sacred Reviews: Skinkers Quest

Intro

"Skinkers Quest" is a short, turn-based RPG developed by Muffle, LockeZ, and Mirak using RPG Maker VX Ace that was created for a One Dungeon Game event. Though this event game really seems to drive home why RPGs are typically built around parties of three or four characters. Though before I get into why I fundamentally hate this game I should probably cover the narrative.

Story
Summary

You play as a female lizard whose owner has been captured by bad people. And your owner is the source of your happiness so its up to you to save him and get your happiness back. And while I could probably try to go for some sort of long winded joke about the main character being a slave trying to once more put herself under the yoke of being property. I doubt the lizard at the heart of this game would really think of their relationship as being that way. After all, we don't usually confer sapience to most animals.

Strengths/Weaknesses

There really isn't that much story to this game beyond the initial setup.



As such it's pretty hard to come up with strengths or weaknesses for this game. After all, this game is meant to be a short little adventure that can be completed in under 60 minutes. Though I suppose the main character being mostly silent is either a strength or weaknesses depending on how much you like being the voice for your character.

Gameplay

As previously mentioned this game is a turn-based RPG. The problem here is that Skinker is all on her own in this game which really limits what she can do during battle. For starters her opening moves are a mixed bag of ideas in my opinion. Skinker's first option is to go into rage mode using the skill rage. This skill protects the player from status effects and damage for two turns which is extremely useful if used at the right time, but timing the activation of this move correctly is pretty difficult since you can only use your debuffing and offensive moves while in this state. As a result you'll usually want to go into rage mode right at the start of a fight.

Your second move is calm which removes status effects, but also removes the rage state as well. So while you can use calm to get rid of effects that reduce your health recovery from items or inflict damage overtime. It's usually a skill you don't want to use since it takes away your offensive options. Your third skill is flurry which does three random attacks, but inflicts half of the damage of your regular attack. On the plus side it makes getting rid of a single enemy a lot easier, but the random nature of this move means if an enemy died on your first or second attack and additional attacks were aimed at that enemy they won't be redirected elsewhere. As a result the full brunt of this attack can be utterly wasted if all of your attacks are aimed at an opponent that is at death's door.

And your fourth skill upon starting up the game is "Head Bob" which decreases the defense of a specific target for two rounds. A move that sounds good on paper if you activate it while your invulnerable, but the random nature of flurry's slices means this is only useful in a one on one situation. After all, you really want to make sure you exploit such a defense drop to the fullest.

And while Skinker's options aren't that great in my opinion. They could work if boss battles in this game were built around one on one fights. Instead they tend to feel like they are built for two on one or three on one. A good example of this is the dragon boss, the first boss in the game. The dragon is faster than your character at level four and can potentially respond to suffering a defense drop by flying high in the sky or summoning allies to absorb your attacks. If the dragon goes with the first option you'll be forced to guard since it's flying attack inflicts massive amounts of damage. And if it goes with the second option your attempt at severally weakening it will be greatly undermined by your flurry probably being wasted on the will-o-wisps.

I suppose you could try and drop it with your basic attack. That would get around the fiery annoyances, but do nothing for it's flying attack. To make matters worse each of your individual flurry strikes can be critical. And the move has a semi decent critical hit rate. So landing two critical strikes while performing this move isn't that unlikely. So it's hard to deny just how useful this skill would be if it connected. To make matters worse this boss can also inflict multiple status ailments on the player from burn to defense drop to reducing the effectiveness of items.

As it stands it just feels like the game should have either gotten rid of status conditions entirely are gone all in with Skinker getting access to moves that inflict negative status conditions like poison, burn, and bleed. That way you can inflict a little damage near the start of a fight and then spend the bulk of your remaining time on guarding and using healing items as needed. Even giving the player the ability to buy substances that can inflict these states would have been a huge boon.

To make matters worse the game features the default random encounter system which is a problem since you can quickly find yourself in a fight you can't win where you'll need to defeat four random enemies by yourself. And even some of the random enemies in this game after faster than the player and can inflict status effects and damage before your status and damage buff can be activated at the start of a fight.

And all of this just adds up to the game being really frustrating to get through since you basically need the enemy to oblige you at times for you to win certain fights. And hoping for good RNG is something I really don't like to count on now a days. I really like my strategies to be a bit more consistent than that time I beat Clair's Kingdra with Vulpix using a combination of confuse ray and headbutt.

Graphics

The game features almost entirely original graphics. And while these assets are rather simple in terms of design. They do posses certain charm to them because of it.

Sound

On the plus side I really don't have anything particularly negative to say about this aspect of the game. On the negative side of the scale I really don't have anything I really want to praise either, but I'm a pretty hard man to please considering I'll usually only notice background music when I truly enjoy it.

Conclusion

"Skinkers Quest" is a very challenging game and might appeal to the hardcore, but in my opinion this game is hard for all of the wrong reasons. As a result I find the game highly frustrating. So much so that I couldn't even bring myself to fully beat the game again before I did this review.

Posts

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LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
Sorry for no enjoy :(

Glad you enjoyed the parts of the game that weren't my fault, at least!
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