White December

Little Wing Guy plays White December an Rm2k3 game made by Sam0el. Demo Version 2 (the fixed up version).

Why should you play this game?
- No random encounters and sprites on the field reflect the monster graphic you encounter.
- There are no game breaking bugs and… I’m sorry, I can’t do many pros for this game. Please read the review.

Why should you give it a miss?
- Battle balance is not good. I hope you like game over screens!
- There is no direction whatsoever. It’s impossible to know where you are going and exits to areas are not obvious.
- The story is hard to follow. What is going on? Themes are picked up, then abandoned.

Review:

In White December you take control of two of the characters from the film Village of the Damned. Ark and Ayana, two adopted, white-haired, pale skinned children with demonic, blood red eyes. Yep! They’re our heroes! The pair are being trained by Kazu, a blind man who can predict the future, in which the world will become a bleak snow covered wasteland. I originally thought; while looking at the game page “What an interesting idea!”, because the heroes are up against an enemy they can’t necessarily fight, they’re on an adventure against the climate! There’s also quite a promising introduction sequence, nothing amazing happens, the screen just pans around a very well-mapped forest while bunnies cross bridges, but it set the tone for what I thought was going to happen very well. However, as the game begins, and after viewing his skills with the program for longer than three minutes, you kind of have to wonder which direction the game will take:

A) The heroes begin a pilgrimage in a bid to prepare the citizens of the world from an inevitable future. The heroes struggle against their uncertain destiny, but proceed with their noble goal and develop as the game proceeds.

B) A witch inexplicably jumps out of nowhere “Bwahaha! After a thousand years I’m free! It’s time to conquer Earth!”

If you guessed B, you’re obviously right. I’m not saying that it’s the wrong way to go with this idea, the setting and themes could still quite interesting and the project itself is far less (for lack of better word) ambitious this way, but it’s handled so wrong and the idea that winter is the enemy, is completely thrown away before long. During the first dungeon, snow begins to fall and quickly the entire place is covered in white. A strange witch appears, right on cue and after the heroes engage in a battle with her, I can only assume she is killed, because she completely disappears along with all traces of snow. Shortly after, the characters return to their home village, burning to the ground and being attacked by soldiers (with Halo’s Master Chief face graphics) looking for our two characters. You may now roll your eyes. So we’ve already killed our main antagonist twenty minutes in. Are you confused? Me too. It’s not only that however, the whole game follows this inconsistently with the story, and there’s general lack of direction, characters are introduced very suddenly, and overall there’s a terrible pacing. There’s only a few places to go in the demo, but you’re back and forth all the time, forced to revisit areas again and again, to advance the story which is usually discovering a very minor detail or a random plot twist that does not add anything at all! At one point after traipsing around all day, you have to gain the help of a musician in town called Xus (whose battle character is inexplicably a DRAGON). The point of this being, to teach the characters how to fight while timing attacks to the beat of music. Does this affect gameplay? No. Does it affect the story? No. Is it mentioned again? Yes…Only kidding! It never is. Also, there is seriously a cutscene where Kazu, the blind teacher…reveals he is blind. About half the cutscenes in this demo could be removed. Not altered. Removed. Whatever cutscenes are left, need to be tweaked, quite possibly lengthened.



The dialogue in this game is absolutely chock full of spelling and grammar mistakes. It’s so bad and unprofessional, that I can’t believe the author didn’t notice any of it. It’s not like he misspelled “immunoelectrophoretically”, it’s that he misspelled “Hello” or “This”. The dialogue itself isn’t truly awful for the most part, but it doesn’t flow naturally and characters tend to say the most random thing totally unprovoked.

First of all, the most bizarre thing about our characters, is that they are carbon copies of each other. They have the exact same stats and the same skills (or a skill I should say), they‘re absolutely identical. There is an idea behind this though, because you can tailor your characters stats and skills by finding Ambrosias scatted around dungeons. Basically, you give them to a party member and different stats will increase and skills will be learnt depending on which Ambrosia you found. So, every Speed Ambrosia you find could be given to Ark and every Attack Ambrosia could be given to Ayana, and eventually they would branch out from each other. In this half an hour or so demo, this doesn’t really happen! They’re still pretty similar. The game only bothers to devotes about two sentences explaining this to you. Another thing that is strange about this: both the characters excel in Magic and Defence, it’s not like they’re blank states and we can customise them however we want, their attack power and health are both severely lacking and agility is fixed for every character. I think the whole thing you’re trying to do with these stat increases needs to go back to the drawing board, especially since characters also level up normally too. I can see what you tried to do with this and you certainly get brownie points for trying.

So! We have two characters who are exactly the same, what kind of battles does this lead to? Boring ones of course. The first thing you’ll notice is the battle music. “What on earth is this?” I thought to myself. It’s slow and certainly does not get you in the mood for a fight whatsoever. Please change it. The only skill available to our heroes is Quick Heal, a no MP cost spell that can only be used inside of battle, for obvious reasons. Quick Heal dos not restore enough HP compared to the damage you are dealt every turn, and it can only be cast on the user, making it more useless. Enemies you encounter are relentless, attack is pretty much all they have which deals very high damage anyway, I will admit, one enemy does have a silencing ability, so if you were even thinking about attempting to waste a turn using Quick Heal, you can think again mister! Because the enemies are so tough and unfair, I found myself going back to the town to rest at an inn and restock my potions more than once. Perhaps a travelling merchant at the start of the dungeon to ease any backtracking (seriously this game loves making you walk back and forward) and a save point somewhere at the start wouldn’t go a miss either! I think there are two in the entire demo. I really do wish I could say more about the battles themselves, but there’s really nothing to them; they are too difficult, there are no enough skills available (even after the boss) or gimmicks to make them interesting in the slightest.

Enemies appear on the map, which is always welcome, especially in this game. Not to be rude, but the fact that the battles can be skipped altogether is undoubtedly the best thing about them. They are not coded particularly well though, I think they’re just set to “Move to Hero” set to the same movement speed as you, so they just endlessly target you with pure bloodlust. When you’re walking around the dungeon, if you engage with a snake; you fight a snake! If you engage with a wolf; you fight a wolf! I’ve actually never see that done before in an RPG Maker game and it was a really nice touch, I thought!




This is where I talk a bit about navigation and level design. Well, usually it is. But it’s almost like I can’t in this review, because there isn’t any! This is where the real meat of the problems lie. At the start, you select New Game, as you do; and you’re lulled into the false sense of security. The first map you view looks great! It’s not playable at all, but it looks like he has his head screwed on. Then we begin the game for real. Hey, the first map looks a little bit blank, but that’s okay with me! Then you wander around. Then you wander around some more. And then you’re still wandering around. Wait where am I going again? I’ll talk to an NPC, maybe he’ll help me. “I love violins” he says. So, okay, he was useless… Hey! But what about her over there? “I’m pretty” she replies. Wow! What a vain bitch!

The problem is, you’re not ever pointed in the right direction to head, and that‘s not even the worse part! The exits and entrances to some maps are either tucked away or it doesn’t look like and exit at all, just a little bit of grass that touches the edge of the map. The creator doesn’t use any path. Seriously, in the entire game, there is no pathway; not even a square of path (at this point I opened it up in editor and my worst fears were confirmed). Nearly every map in this game is a total nightmare because of this. I got stuck right of the beginning of the game looking for Ayana. I’m thirty seconds into the game and I’m stuck! The dungeon in the demo literally works like this:

- Where the hell do I enter?
- Okay, now which direction do I head?
- Where’s the way out? I’m lost =(
- I won’t exit the game. I won’t. You’re stronger than this Greg.
- Okay, I’m going back to the start.
- Ooh, I found an Ambrosia!
- Wait, where did I enter this bloody map from?
- Halp.

Dungeon design is not 100 x 100 map, fill with grass tool, zoom out and place trees everywhere. It needs thought and care, we have to both look at this and walk through it. The creator totally forgot that other people will play his game! I’m sure HE knows where to go, but he hasn’t put any thought to his audience. If you’re incapable of putting yourself in the shoes of a new player, this is what honest beta testers and friends are for! The game forces you to search every conrner of the map to find where you need to go but it never rewards you for doing so, the only thing you can find are Ambrosias normally. There are about two treasure chests in the entire demo! And they are both in the same dungeon, so exploring the massive town and what other areas on offer are pointless, because you don’t find a single thing. Every map does pull graphics from the same source (or it fits with the style nicely) so there’s never a jarring sense that it doesn’t look like the same game you were playing five minutes ago. The best map in the game is probably the town. It lacks any interesting features, there are no paths or grass, just houses and trees scattered randomly around, but it is easy to walk through and the entrances are placed sensibly. The NPCs that plague the town are so awful. They say one sentence of strange dialogue, and that’s it! None of them say anything remotely helpful, interesting, relevant or add life to the barren town. It felt like more of a “I have to add NPCs before I release this” rather than “I want to add some NPCs to this town. I wonder what I’ll make them say or do…”

Conclusion:

Man, this is so clearly a first game and it falls into every trap ever written. To be frank with you, It’s damn near unplayable and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone I actually like. The game hasn’t been though out and such simple things like having sufficient amount save points, correct spelling, clear exits to areas and even some item descriptions are non-existent (You heard me, some items seriously do not have descriptions). I mean, did you even play test this game? We’re all here because we love and play RPG’s, so ask yourself what’s your favourite RPG and what sort of things does it do that this game doesn’t? I guarantee you that no item descriptions are missing. But! First games are all about learning and most don’t even get to a demo stage, so that‘s something right there! You have a lot to learn my friend. Chin up. Try again.

SCORE NOT AVAILABLE, AS IT IS ONLY A DEMO.