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Antiques & amulets!

Hello and welcome to a review for one of the games submitted to the Indie Game Making Contest: Rebirth of 2022! I'll probably review some other game, but this was one that immediately attracted me!
Phina is a RPG Maker MZ game with graphics by Caz and Marimo, with music by Karugamo... and I want to emphasize the really nice custom graphics and very good music!

The game is listed as Simulation, and it's partially true, because there are many elements that made me consider it more like a sort of visual novel. Anyway let's start with the plot: Phina is a Phoenix, and she must perform the rite of rebirth on sunday... or it will mean death! The problem is that the amulet needed for the ritual was lost. OR stolen. Who knows? For this reason Phina decides to set a shop and buy antiques from travellers, with some luck the thief will sell her amulet! If not, she can still make money during the day and investigate in town during the night!


Yes, the plot is very simple. find that amulet! N-O-W!!!

The game is divided in seven days, and we can save at the end of each one. Each day we can buy an item from one of the three sellers (or skip to the evening, but I do not know why I should do that... maybe this unlocks another ending?), then in the afternoon we've to clean the item and sell it.
The cleaning minigame is very simple, we just have to press the arrows quickly to clean the various parts of the items (there are vases, old clocks, hourglasses and so on, and they can be of different qualities and colors) before the time runs out.
Anyway I found the time limit rather generous, so I never failed, even without the upgrades that you can buy after completing the game the first time.

Then there is the investigative part, and that's when I mean that the game becomes a visual novel: you walk arount town and speak with people, even if only three are really useful. Two for the story, the other is a farmer that will ask to help him removing weeds from his field, each time each night. There are 100 weeds and you get one gold for each one, but if you remove them all you get a bonus and the reward is doubled! Anyway it was a pretty boring thing to do each night, and not really that useful from what I saw, still better having more than less!


What is this? What is this? Press the arrows , quick! And remove that grime!

I won't spoil the story, the characters you can find and everything else, also because I'm on my second playthrough and I've still to see if I can get a different ending. The first one surprised me. A lot, really but I cannot say more so I will talk about something else...

The graphics! Well this game is beautiful and I loved all the little details. Ok, it's a small world and there are not many interactions, still the custom assets are colorful and competently made, the maps are very well done and there is also 8-direction movement. This is something I like, but ok, not as much as the portraits of the characters that are few, but they are really beautiful! Phina of course, being the protagonist, gets different versions of both charsets and portraits, poses and more. It's really a pity this is a little game for a contest, since the quality is high, and professional. The sounds and music? Excellent too. I also liked the intro.

If I had to say something bad is that apparently getting lots of money is largely pointless, since I did not see the need for upgrades, anyway who knows? Maybe that's me!


I usually got enough money selling items, still if you need more and you're patient you can "fight"... weeds!

Final Verdict
Ok, this was a game made for the IGMC 2022 contest, so I did not expect much at all. And I was surprised, I mean besides the cool graphics, sounds and music that I already praised, there's an interesting game concept (this looks like the rpgmaker version of the recent Renovator simulator, Workshop simulator, and so on!). The only thing that would have made this game even better would have been more characters, choices, interactions, maps and locations (the minigames were enough, the farmer sub-quest was also a nice addition but not really a must to make the game enjoyable, anyway that's ok!), but I know, time restraints of the events are terrible, and you can't everything, I mean the game is good, simple but I did not notice typos or bugs of any sort. So good that is 4/5 of course!

Posts

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Caz
LET'SBIAN DO THIS.
6813
Thanks for the kind review, Addict! Really appreciate you taking the time to play and give such awesome feedback! <3
author=Caz
Thanks for the kind review, Addict! Really appreciate you taking the time to play and give such awesome feedback! <3


^_^ always a pleasure to play high qualiy games! Only issues are due to the restricted time of course so I cannot find real flaws here!
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