Project1

I'll admit it is a bit of a challenge to crank out a 500 plus word review for "Project1" or "Dragon Ball Z: Goku's Revenge". This is because the game is both extremely short with it being possible to beat the game in under 45 seconds and because any lengthy review is either going to be based on missing the point of this project or needlessly nitpicky to the point it ruins the game's jokes.

Unfortunately the site is apparently of the opinion that a non serious game in a non serious event deserves an overly detailed and serious review. The kind that reminds me of one my professor's in college complaining about page requirements being pointless since it just leads to people coming up with long winded ways to convey the same information. For example, you suddenly go from a simple sentence like "I'm holding a pen." to "I'm holding a writing utensil that uses black ink held within a plastic container and has a ballpoint tip.". In other words page requirements or in this case word count requirements just lead to people coming up with a more verbose way of communicating basic information and in some cases provides information that people could have probably guessed anyway. Though, I suppose I'll just have to concede to the site's guidelines in the most malicious way possible by making this review over 1,000 words long. In other words this review needs to take longer to read then it takes to beat the game.



Story
Summary

We play as gok (spelling is correct) whose on a quest to get revenge on an unspecified target with some help from his friends. Along the way we can greet numerous dogs and maybe even stumble into a secret ending.

Spelling Errors

In a classic nod to old school game making the game contains a few notable spelling errors. Though most of these errors center around the playable cast with Goku being spelt "gok", Vegeta being spelt "begeta", and Killin being spelt "Crillin". Though, I suppose I should take some solace in that the first letter of Krillin's name is capitalized since Goku and Vegeta's names begin with a lower case letter.

Cut-Off Text
The game also features several words that are only partially visible to the player.



And this is another classic issue found in first projects since it takes practice to get used to when you should place a hard return to avoid these sorts of issues. Though why a character on a quest for revenge would stop to take care of dogs in anyone's guess. If anything you'd think he would be on the hunt for someone that killed his dog like John Wick was.

Narrative Inconsistences

The game starts out with the player being tasked to save a village, but ends with us saving the universe. I suppose this could be used as a clue to narrow down who Goku's target is, but that assumes Goku's target was a threat that could destroy the universe and not someone like Emperor Pilaf for tricking him into eating one of Bulma's PP Candy's and forcing him to repeatedly run into the bushes to take a dump in order to avoid soiling himself. Admittedly one of the more powerful villains of Dragon Ball Z would make more sense, but a game like this should probably feature an antagonist that has become a joke over the years.

Greatest Strength/Weakness

It's pretty obvious from the outset that were not meant to take this absolutely awful game seriously. That the entire point of this game is to be awful and bask in it's awfulness. In other words the only reason to play this game is the same reason people watch something like Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010). After all, it's hard not to enjoy an absolute shit show of incompetence. Admittedly these sorts of projects work best when people think it was unintentional, but it still works in the context of this game since a lot of the errors are jokes about the community and what their first projects were like. As such, I don't have any real complaint about the game's narrative.

Gameplay

The game features the default combat system that comes with RPG Maker 2003. As such the combat is extremely slow. This is made even worse by the playable cast lacking special skills. After all, you can't expect to perform everyone's favorite moves like the "Kamehameha" or "Galick Gun" at level one. Though leveling up in this game is both time consuming and utterly pointless since the only enemies you can fight are weak trash mobs that can barely hurt the player. The only reason to even engage with these enemies that randomly pop up as you traverse the world is to pad out the game's playtime. So my advice is to simply run away from them as soon as possible.

Graphics

On the graphical side of things the game relies entirely on the RTP which is normally a bit of weakness in my opinion. After all, I've played a lot of games over the years that have used the assets found within the confines of the RTP for RPG Maker 2003. On the other hard this game is meant to be a nod to most people's first project. So making a fan game based on a popular franchise is an obvious choice. And many first time developers are either unable to create their own assets or unaware of just how many free packs they can find online for certain franchise. So using the default character's in place of sprites found online makes perfect sense. Though I think the game could have been slightly improved if dosmaen had badly ripped the faces for the characters from the anime especially from a grainy online image and used them to make facesets that could be used for conversations as well as in the menu.



After all, the worse this game looks the better it is in my opinion. And using a faceset that doesn't match the character's sprite at all is a great way to make this game look worse. After all, that turns this project into a hodgepodge of graphical assets.

Mapping

In another nod to just how bad most first projects are the mapping in this game is absolutely awful in various ways. This ranges from using objects in ways that make no sense like using barrels to divide the game's only map up into various sections.



The game also uses a ton of copies of the same tile next to each other which makes the map extremely boring to look at. Which is a classic mistake that still pops up on a regular basis. After all, most first time developers aren't aware of the three tile-rule. So they tend to just spam a large number of the same tile over a large area. Though a few oddballs over the years have argued this looks better since it's more realistic, but realism tends to suck when your making a world that looks like something you'd see in a 8 or 16-bit game.

Sound

On the sound side of things the game breaks away from the RTP which would normally be a good thing since I've heard those tracks more times than I care to count, but in this case the choice in song is absolutely awful. Which is brilliant since it pulls from another popular franchise since the game's only background track is the theme song for "Halo" which doesn't match up with any of the stuff that is happening on screen in this game. It's a move that is absolutely brilliant since it showcases how a lot of first time developers rely on stuff from already popular games. It also sounds completely out of place since you'd expect a fan game to rely on songs from the franchise it's based on. Which in the case of this game would mean using stuff by Bruce Faulconer or the original Japanese soundtrack depending on how big of anime fan the person making this game was.

Minor Bug

You can endlessly pilfer a pot for a potion.



Of course this is just another nod to first time developers having not mastered the engine and how to use it. So this pot can be infinitely pilfered do to dosmaen pretending to not understand how switches work. So this minor bug is entirely on purpose.

Conclusion

"Project1" or "Dragon Ball Z: Goku's Revenge" is an absolutely awful game on every level imaginable, but in doing so it manages to encapsulate just about every first time error you'd expect to see in someone's first project. And this makes this game the best game to come out of the "Boulevard of Broken 2K3 Dreams" for it's specific category. After all, it would be hard to surpass a game that digs this deep into first time errors without including a bunch of horny teenage nonsense involving everyone's favorite pairings that never happened within the cannon timeline.

5/5