Sapphire City

Foreword

I'll admit upfront that I'm not the best person to review this game. For starters, "Sapphire City" is a visual novel, a genre of games that I'm not particularly fond of. Though why I dislike them is a lot harder for me to pin down. I'm not sure if it's because I tend to associate this genre of games with dating sims and as such see it as a vehicle for pornographic content that require more effort to obtain than it deserves. Or because most visual novels I've come across are so lacking in the graphical department that I feel you could get way more out of reading a book. And a book comes with the plus side of being a lot more portable than my desktop.

As for why I played this game if I knew I was going to dislike it on general principle. Well that boils down to the game's overall length as mentioned on the game's summary page as being somewhere between 45 to 60 minutes. As such, I thought this would be a relative short project I could play all the way through and review before going to bed. Though, I'll probably hold off on giving it a score since I don't think I could come close to offering an objective evaluation on this project.

Intro

"Sapphire City" is a short visual novel developed by Pehriska Games using RPG Maker MZ. A project whose listed status of 'completed' feels a bit dishonest since it's pretty clear that this project is just the first episode in a much larger story.



Though unless this project is going to be broken up into a bunch of small bite size chunks I'm probably going to be jumping off here. After all, this project really didn't sell me on the narrative.

Story
Summary

You play as a guy named Merc whose recently moved to the big city. Unfortunately for you it looks like an old "friend" needs a few favors. And while being around the guy dredges up memories you'd rather forget by downing the contents of the biggest, cheapest bottles of booze you can find.



Unfortunately it looks like we owe the man a few favors so were forced to help him look for the daughter of a rich businessman that owns a flat near our apartment. And of course this job quickly goes pear-shaped as we try to follow leads and figure out which of our employer's many enemies kidnapped her. Though, I'll hold off on getting into those details since I don't want to spoil too much.

Strengths/Weaknesses

On the plus side the story has a few small avenues it can take with the player having multiple ways to reach certain checkpoints within the confines of the story. On the other hand those differences really don't generate changes that are particularly meaningful since the story is very linear in nature. At least the bits we get to see.

Gameplay

On the gameplay front you spend your time walking/running around going from one objective to the next while being able to interact with NPCs for either useful hints, lore building, or help. And as previously mentioned the game allows for multiple potential solutions to a problem. A good example of this that I stumbled into is that you can either yell over a short fence at the docks in order to talk to the foreman or you can change clothes at their nearby barracks/office in order to slip past the docks security. Though you think an area as important to logistics within the confines of the city would have better guards. Oh well, I suppose the guards here work on the same logic as the ones in "Bad Guys" or "The Venture Bros.".



Outside of the usual running around to reach our next objective we also get a small section in the game where we need to avoid deadly robots within the confines of a vent. A task that will result in a lot of quick game overs, but this section is relatively short. So it's possible to work your way through the entire thing in a couple of minutes as long as you remember which paths lead to getting murdered by a flesh-eating robot.

Graphics

Graphically this project is a mess in my opinion. For starters the game uses assets that really don't blend well together. One of the more glaring examples of this issue are the character's portraits during dialogue scenes that clearly don't match up with the style of the tiles being used to build the game's environment. Secondly the game feels overly cluttered at times with a lot of objects seemingly existing for the sole purpose of taking up space. Though admittedly this may have been on purpose considering this game appears to be set within a dystopian future where cyberpunk has taken over.



But it doesn't explain why there's a female dress mannequin in the top left corner or why there are multiple full beers on the counter or at empty tables. Or why some of the tables lack chairs. Or why there's a brightly colored teddy bear just resting on the counter top being worked by the bartender. And finally some of the character portraits being used for the dialogue scenes are extremely ugly.

Sound

Sound wise the game is simply alright in my opinion. In other words I really don't have anything to complain about, but there isn't anything here worthy of praise either.

Conclusion

In my opinion "Sapphire City" is rather underwhelming since it doesn't allow the player to explore in a way that feels truly meaningful as you way the benefits and cons of certain decisions. Instead the player is basically trapped on a narrow road with nowhere to go besides East.