Diablocide

Diablocide: Demon Tower
Dungeon Crawler RPG for RPGMaker VX

Fourteen heroes, fourteen souls, fourteen stories, fourteen goals... We're all in this together.

Amount Played:
The demo(n) being reviewed here consists of the first ten floors of the titular Demon Tower. It features two out of the planned nine demons, according to maker Craze.
Gameplay to Story Ratio:
Massively skewed towards gameplay. The scenes for dialog often don't exceed five message boxes.
Legality:
Fully. The resources all open-license, be they shipped with RPGMaker 2003/VX or original works created to be distributed freely.

Description:
Charge through the Demon Tower with fourteen distinct characters. Kill enemies. Get killed by demons. Watch quick scenes. Find loot Essence. It's a full-fledged CrazeGame(tm), complete with a gay couple.



Gameplay


Learning Curve: 5/10
Craze quite literally dumps the player in the middle of a dungeon with an army of fourteen characters, each with four distinct and atypical skills, and expects the player to cope. And he expects them to cope fast. The beginning enemies, while not murderous, certainly put up a fight, and poor party management can see five or six of your characters on their asses in any given encounter.

Things aren't nearly as bad after the immediate beginning, thankfully. Skill and item descriptions are clear and concise, detailing exactly what something does and what it costs to do so. Posters found in various places give helpful information as to various mechanics, such as stacking regenerative effects or the nature of certain enemy types. Each character is labeled with a general role for quick reference in a heated battle - Tanks are walls, Fighters hurt things, Mages make boom, and Healers... yeah. Rather than having utterly different stats for the player to ignore, characters all have the same stats as others with the same role, excluding a massive boost listed as a skill. Apnis, for example, has Wisdom Boost - which astonishly enough boosts her wisdom far beyond the other healers. This all works out to make the easing-in a far easier process than it could be. Nevertheless, learning the ins and outs of fourteen characters by the third fight is still rather daunting.

Battle Mechanics: 8/10
Diablocide uses a tweaked version of the default battle system, introducing his own statistics and his own damage and hit rate algorithms. There's also few interface changes, such as damage popup, that make following what's going on an easier task, helpful considering how hectic the game can get. The key change, a freely-licensed party-changing script, is used as the center of the battle mechanism. Swapping in various characters to perform various tasks such as blasting all enemies or granting a character regen or stealing a foe's SP or eating a bunch of hits is crucial to success.

SP is fixed at 500 regardless of level, which means expensive skills stay expensive and cheap skills stay cheap over time - a nice touch for making each skill usable. In my three hours I only uncovered a single piece of equipment that raises SP by 50, which I take to mean SP will be a tightly regulated commodity in future releases - preventing extremely damaging characters like Princess from outstripping the rest of the cast.

There is no attack command - every action excluding Charge, Defend, and Item is a skill. Some skills range from 10-25 SP, effectively serving in the stead of a standard attack, but the better half of the army wield skills with more metagame effects, such as low damage with high critical hit rates, inflicting degens, lowering stats, or hitting all foes. This means that there exists a large amount of character synergy that has to go into your thought process when forming a party. Who do you boost the healability* of: the meat wall that eats 50% of enemy attacks, or the knight that pays HP to nuke an enemy? The lack of a standard attack command also limits the amount of time a character can remain effective in battle. There is a charge command to resort to if a character is vital to the battle, but for the most part you can swap one tank for another with little issue except the loss of some character synergy or some such.

Battle Balance: 9/10
The battles and enemies are well-built, and are really the main reason this game is as entertaining as it is. Monsters work together in a way you won't normally find in other RPGs - and enemy with boost a healer's wisdom to receive more healing, or boost the defense of the main beatstick. In fact, enemy troops are often laid out like a typical Tank/Fighter/Mage/Healer party, working as such to attempt to shut down the army's attempts to form a strategy. Tanks will be poisoned, Fighters will be blinded, Mages will have their SP sapped, and Healers will be silenced. On the other hand, enemies are rarely any more powerful than player characters in terms of health and defense. Meaning that encounters, while potentially grueling, are far from drawn-out affairs.

Boss battles are another story. They are grueling. They are brutal. They will punch your face into oblivion, separate from your body. And after they do all that, then they'll get mean. Each Demon (with capital D and all) comes in three stages, with the first being rather easy and the second two ramping up difficulty quickly. Additional attacks are introduced, global effects and conditions are introduced, multiple turns are introduced. The music even changes in each stage. Demons aren't so much one overly long boss as it is three bosses in succession that happen to share a battler and certain moves. It's all put together in a way that makes them intensely satisfying experiences. There's a satisfaction you get from toppling a Demon that rivals the entertainment of watching Mythbusters.



Narrative


Story: Irrelevant
There isn't much of an overarching story, by any means. Instead, the narrative is largely character-driven - each character has their own dilemmas, goals, and motives that provide them a reason to scale the Demon Tower and earn a wish. There's very little plot to be had with Diablocide, but due to the structure of the narrative, the lack of a predominant story has very little impact on the game, and thus, little impact on the score.

Setting: 7/10
The Demon Tower itself is revealed to be a fascinating location over the length of the demo(n). I can't say much about it exactly, but it explains those vanities in the ice caves. I can't speak much for how this will develop over the course of the game, but it's definitely a positive start.

Characters: 8/10
This is the main draw, outside of combat. The army interacts with one another on a regular basis, both in and out of battle, leading to both humor and intrigue. Characters' plots intertwine and unravel one another in a very well-thought-out fashion. Right from the get go, certain characters are shown to be inseparable (Eon Feather and Never-Age), romantically attracted (Kristoph and Princess), mentor-and student (Goldurn and Felix), or downright unfriendly (Darren and Illinois). The interplay is always entertaining, and will leave you with plenty of laughs and questions.



Aesthetics


Graphics 6/10
The vast majority of the game's visual aspect consists of resources for RPGMaker 2003, stretched 200% to accommodate VX's resolution. This works well, for the most part. The normal-scale windows and double-scale faces, sprites, etc. actually don't look too bad together. Once you enter battle, however, you encounter Etoiler's VX-resolution enemy battlers, and the VX RTP's animations. The mash of custom, default, and pixelated might not fly with you. If you're anything like me, though (my condolences if you are) you won't give two shits as long as you can tell what everything is.

Audio: 7/10
This game's entire soundtrack consists of music from the audio portal at Newgrounds. Considering it has just shy of 300,000 songs, odds are strong you've never heard a given track from this game. It's all well-chosen enough, well-composed enough, and well-placed enough. One thing that cost this category two full points was the stage three Demon battle theme. Techno key-mashing does not an epic confrontation with an eldritch horror make. MAKE IT GO AWAY. : (

Interface: 6/10
The window graphic is great - white on black is inherently legible, and the font is clean and clear. Most of the windows are default with VX; those that aren't hold all of the necessary information without any clutter. The reason this isn't higher is because most of the scripts used come this way.




Overall Score