The first time I played this game was a demo that sbester released months prior to the game's completed release. I can't say I was impressed. In fact, I hated the game. The dungeons were long, boring, and loaded with battles that pitted you against the same two or three monsters again and again. The music was borked, and the story was pretty short-winded. I gave up after the first dungeon out of boredom.

Well, before you read on, from what I can tell not much has changed since that release. I did only play through about an hour and a half, but I feel like I got more than enough of the game. Frankly, I just couldn't stand to play it any longer.




GAMEPLAY

This game simply strikes out here. The game is simple, and prides itself on being simple. There's simple graphics, a simple story, and short to-the-point dialogue. The gameplay tries to continue this trend of simplicity, but falls flat on its face, and comes out only as boring and monotonous.

I liked the way the character progressed. As you level up, you "grow" from being a boy to man. Your sprite changes from Red to Link. You gain a new skillset. And by new skillset, I mean you un-learn all the skills you carefully selected before, and go back to only having one basic attack skill. Lame! Progression through digression doesn't quite work for me.

The dungeons are a chore. They're designed like mazes for lab mice, except instead of cheese at the end, there's a boss. There's treasure chests scattered around, but they were predominantly filled with potions. Exploring quickly became discouraged with the amount of monsters I had to fight and damage I had to take in order to reach the potions. Essentially, the point of the potion was to heal you from the damage you took trying to get to the potion.

There wasn't really anything interesting to see in the dungeons, or to do. Occasionally you'd hit a dead end and have to backtrack. Sometimes you'd have to go find a switch to move some rocks out of the way. Of course, that's only after you'd run into the rocks, backtrack to find the other path, hit the switch, then run back to where the rocks were in your way to begin with. I'd probably run into at least ten battles along the way. How annoying.

There was very little diversity in the monsters. There was maybe two or three monsters in a given dungeon, one of them a variation of a monster before (snake, big snake; arachnid, large arachnid...). And my, the battles were boring. Each skill I learned save for one was a variation of physical attack towards an enemy. A single enemy, mind you. Working my way around the Energy system was pretty alright, but conserving energy is too little of a mechanic to stay interesting after the first four or five random encounters. Just attack.. attack.. attack. And be attacked. Nothing more.





FLAVOR
(story, dialogue, setting, mood, etc)

This game is very dry. It throws you right into it. There is nothing subtle, no element of presentation, and very little story. Basically, you're a boy becoming a man. And there's "evil" invading from the north. That's about all we know. Time to kill things!

Talking to the citizens of towns would usually yield some helpful advice, but the dialogue had no flavor. If someone is talking, there's very little there to distinguish the dialogue from any other character in the game. Everyone delivers short statements with a small vocabulary. No exceptions. Even villains. Sure, it's simple! But it is boring.

The battle dialogue was unmodified from the RM2k shit-translation text. Since the battles had no enemy graphics, you'd think the game would focus on making the flavor text interesting and engaging. Nope! Not at all. Battles suffer another point.

The story is bland and tasteless. In this game, there is evil, and you are there, and uh, well I guess you are going to fight evil. So it goes. Towns start getting invaded, including your own home town. You start fighting bad guys. Something about a legacy and about eden. Everything storywise unfolds at a quick -- dare I say rushed -- pace, and nothing seems cohesive with what came before, other than the fact that it was evil at work. There is no draw, no hook that compels the player to want to know what's happening. There are monsters and you kill them. That's really all there is to it.





AESTHETICS
(music, sound, graphics)

The graphics are all black and white. I get it, it's a style thing, it's ironic and like a gameboy game, whatever. I don't care much for it. I can appreciate the simplicity factor, but the author just ripped a bunch of gameboy RPGs and slapped the graphics together, often times inconsistently. It was not pleasing to look at.

In combat, there are no enemy graphics. This is a stylistic choice, I understand, but combined with the fact that the in-combat dialogue is absolutely laughable, I can't for one second justify this.

The maps were laid out pretty hilariously at times. The houses were 3x3 tiles mostly, but upon entering would fill up the entire screen. There's no reason for this. The houses were usually completely empty space. One town had waterfalls flying over the town. At first I thought they were rivers, but no, you can walk under them, and you can see the rocks they stem from. Even if the graphic selection was awesome, the way the maps were put together completely negated any chance the tilesets ever had.

As far as the music goes, sbester promises the best music you've ever heard. I'm somewhat of an avid music fan, so I was hoping this would be the redeeming quality of the game. But alas, the sound is awful. Just god-awful. I muted the game after fifteen minutes or so. The music is a bunch of terrible metal bands, transformed into old "gameboy" sounding tunes. The end result is alot of really annoying rhythms and repetitive melodies. And because you'd run into a battle every two or three seconds, you get to hear the opening "epic" drumrolls of the battle music OVER and OVER and OVER again. It's nauseating. The music lacks diversity all around, and honestly, really does not fit with the mood of the game in any way shape or form. Even friendly towns have heavy bass-driven tones just like every other area in the game. The music definitely detracts from the overall enjoyment of the game moreso than adds to it.

The sound effects are the default Rm2k sound effects. Which I don't mind. But I mean, when I say default, I mean, DEFAULT. If you were to create a new project in Rm2k, you'd have a game with the exact same configuration of sound effects as this game does. How painfully drab.



THE BREAKDOWN.

PROS:
-Character growth happens upon levelups, allows you to choose your skill progression.
-"Energy" based combat is a nice breakaway from traditional battles.
-Niche graphical stylization for those who like it.

CONS:
-Combat
.Skills lack diversity.
.In-combat dialogue is terrible
.Monsters are very repetitive
.Combat mechanics rarely (or never) stray from basic attacks
-Dungeons
.Long winding maze-like caverns and hallways with frequent random encounters
.Treasure chests are almost always a potion. Exploration quickly discouraged through this alone.
.Due to the dungeon design, the player will frequently find themselves back-tracking.
-Music is a "gameboy"-ified version of awful metal bands, and the sound translates terribly.
-Poor use of graphics.
-Plot is boring, dialogue is boring. Nothing interesting!

Other notes:
-I found I could walk over many many things that probably shouldn't be walked over. Walls, barrels, more walls, cave walls, castle walls... lots of walls. It helped me traverse the first dungeon though, which I can't complain about.
-You can't talk to shop keepers over their countertops.



VERDICT:
I don't like this game. I gave it an honest chance. I died a few times, but I kept playing. Unfortunately, this game is tough to keep playing. It's repetitious and tedious, and not to mention extremely unrewarding.
I don't recommend playing it, but I guess some people like this game. Some people also enjoy walking over hot coals, or laying on a bed of nails. Perhaps playing this game will help you reach that level of enlightenment? No... No, definitely not. It's just a bad game.