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A RPG Full of Features Where the Player Can Choose How the Storyline and Gameplay Develop

  • edchuy
  • 05/03/2010 05:26 AM
  • 4901 views
Summary:

ShortStar’s EpiQuest (Version 2B, current one is 2C) is a complete game full of features, most which are well-implemented, but its uniqueness comes from the player’s ability to choose how the storyline and gameplay develop, making its replay value the highest of all RM games I have played so far.

Overall Score: 3.3/5


Background to Review:

After submitting my RS! X wrap-up to RMN, playing the first demo of EpiQuest was among the first things I did. What attracted me to it was the many features promised, especially the offer of “Branching quest paths with different outcomes”. Another selling point was its intended audience, “Fragmasters, Treasure Hunters, Naval Gazers, Tourists”, which showed me the developer actually had bothered to read a certain article written by kentona (http://rpgmaker.net/articles/23/ ).

After I finished the demo, I provided ShortStar with some feedback about it and noted bugs that required fixing. I also suggested a general idea of what he could do regarding a certain area that was present in the demo but unfinished. To my surprise, in just over a week after that, ShortStar had submitted a completed version of the game to RMN. After finishing playing all the major branches, I sent ShortStar a comparison between most of the classes that you can choose from in the game. So did the completed version live up to the promise that the demo showed?


Story/Plot/Dialogue:

The game starts with an unnamed main character in a room of a house in a village. After naming your character, getting some basic gear and making the first two of many choices that can be made during the game, you can proceed to talk to the NPCs of the village. You discover a simple fetch and deliver quest that when completed opens up a major mandatory quest. After finishing that latter quest, you are declared the village’s hero and are assigned a quest that you can decide whether to complete or not, with different (there are at least 4 I can think of) approaches resulting in different outcomes.
After making that choice and following through it, to finish the game you need to visit a couple of areas to get parts of something that’ll allow you access to the final area and battle. In between that and the initial part of the game, there are a lot of optional areas and quests you can do, which define the missing parts of the storyline and that sometimes involve choices that can affect gameplay as well. In my main playthrough, I probably chose to do all the obvious things. Using some saves, I was also able to try some of the other branches of play and do some optional areas. That said, the game could be presumably played as open-ended one after your main character becomes a hero if you chose to do so.

Although the game’s developer has confessed that dialogue is not his “strong point”, there a couple of things I would like to mention about it. There was a definite improvement in the usefulness of what most NPCs say to you from the demo to the completed version of the game, which is important, since many of them now give you valuable information or hints regarding optional quests or areas you might want to explore, so that you’ll want to talk to everybody you can and pay attention to what they say. There is actually a particular character that might your party whose dialogue shows her independence and strong will.

Score: 3.5/5


Gameplay:

The battles are traditional, front-view, turn-based battles, most of which result from non-random encounters, although, outdoors you’ll find random ones. Battles feature some HP/MP recovery if you use guard during of your party member’s turn.

Early in the game your main character is on its own. A short time later, a couple of additional members join the party. Once the main character becomes a hero, the ability to choose the other party members becomes available. The only other member that becomes a mandatory one joins the party after following through one of the many choices you can make for a quest, and only temporarily depending on the choices made after that. All party members who have been recruited for it but are not currently in the party earn a fraction of the experience points gained by those in it. That allows all recruits to maintain a somewhat similar level, which I found unique compared to other RM games I have played featuring switchable parties. The parties can only be changed by particular NPCs in the game, so putting together a good party becomes vital, since you’re probably stuck with it for a while.

My personal strategy with regards to party members was the following: have each recruit at least once in a party and keeping them there for at least 1 dungeon; change party members once arriving or returning to a village. Once I had gone through all of them once, I matched them up in parties differently so by the end of the game, I had pretty much had gone through all the recruits twice. Really hardcore players could choose to have less than the maximum number of members, a choice I could see would make battles very challenging.

There are quite a variety of Classes for characters in the game with differing skills, stats, pros and cons:

http://rpgmaker.net/games/1986/Classes/

Two particular classes that merit mention are the versatile Grey, who can serve either as magician or healer, while still being able to do some decent physical damage, and, Mistress, which has some of the sane attributes of the Grey, in addition to being able to dual wield weapons. There are two other hidden classes (not listed) that require you to find and equip an item to transform a party member into that class.

Each class has particular types of equipment that they can use. There are a total of 12 equipment slots (2 which go unused in the game) and equipping each particular item has an Equipment Points (EPs) cost so that you can’t simply equip the best gear and are forced to make some compromises. This well-implemented equipment management system is highly reminiscent of that used in the Starseed: Blood Machine demo (http://rpgmaker.net/games/1946/ ), except instead of EPs there is a battery cost limitation in equipping items.

Basic skills are learned by party members from the equipment used. However, the more the skills are used by a character, the more chance there is to learn a higher level, permanent skills upon leveling up. Here are some of the skill trees available:

http://rpgmaker.net/games/1986/Skill_Trees/

In my playthrough, for most party members, I was only to reach the second level of these trees. This was probably due to my party switching strategy. A player keeping mostly the same party ought to be able to reach at least the third or fourth level easily.

A unique feature, I haven’t seen before in a RM game before is that in this complete version ShortStar implemented enemies with levels that adjust to your parties’ level. This resulted in some added challenge in some battles, so that while I finished the original demo in 4.5 hours, it took me about 6 hours to reach the same point in this completed version.

Another interesting feature is mining ores. You need to have a pick particular to the metal in the cave you’re mining to even try. There are some particular walls which can be mined. Once you have some ore, you can take it to a forge to process it. Once processed, it can then be used to make a variety of weapons and armors, some which can’t be bought in stores.

You can brew potions at magic shops and churches. Usually you first learn the recipe for a particular item in exchange for some items and then do the same to synthesize the item.

As you’ll discover early on, while some treasures can be found, as expected, in chests, others will be shown as intermittently flashing stars or can be seen lying on the floor, just waiting to be picked up.

The game also offers some puzzles that are relatively easy and that need to be solved in order to proceed. There are many optional areas that offer unique treasures if you are willing to go out of your way and explore. As mentioned in the dialogue paragraph of this review, NPCs provide the information about them, although keeping an eye for apparently unreachable areas also helps.

At some points in the game, you’ll get some notes that appear in the main menu’s Notebook, which give tutorials to help you along.

While I could go on and on about other issues regarding gameplay in EpiQuest, the final one that I believe merits a special mention is the way ShortStar constructed some of his dungeons, which unlike most RMVX dungeons, offers some unique ways of getting to places within them.

Score: 5/5


Graphics

While I most of the graphics in EpiQuest seem to be standard RTP, there appear to be some custom sprites especially for some of the bosses (if not all) you end up fighting. In spite of this, ShortStar has done a gob job of integrating his graphical elements into the different environments in which the game takes place to make them well-laid out and consistent, so that seldom does anything look out of place. My two favorite graphical elements are: the live, moving title screen courtesy of the Dangor script (although strangely the title of the game is missing in it) and the changing lighting conditions that show the passage of the time whenever you are outdoors. My less favorite one is his choice of using walls behind doorways in some places where I would have chosen black doorway instead, making it appear that leading character is walking through a wall like some ghost. Also, I found it indoors sometimes while raining outdoors, which is probably a script issue.

Score: 3.5/5


Sound:

Most, if not all, of the sound and music included in the game is standard RTP. One nice thing to point out is that whenever you are outdoors in any place and it’s nighttime you’ll get a lullaby. Also, the background music varies from area to area, so that it doesn’t become too tedious and repetitive.

Score: 3/5


Characters:

Given that EpiQuest lacks any cutscenes and since dialogue serves mostly to inform, as expected, most of its characters seem to lack any strong personality, except the one mentioned in the paragraph discussing dialogue earlier in this review. The only chances that most party members have of displaying some personality are the comments they make after battles or when leveling up. Some of the NPCs do display some strong personalities, especially if you end up on their bad side as a result of your choices.

Score: 2.5/5


Other:

I found a slightly higher amount of spelling mistakes or typos compared to other RMN games and sometimes grammar that was unusual. A few times, I found text cut off the right side of the box.

One feature that I would like to have seen improved is the bestiary, since I am certain it doesn’t have every enemy available in the game listed. Even though I have all the slots except for one full from my playthrough, it reports I have only over 3% completion, which seems extremely low. It should be mentioned that ShortStar chose unusual names for some familiar foes.

Regarding bugs, I found quite a few which I have been reporting as I played along and should have been fixed by the developer in the current version. While writing this review, it seems he has become aware of others, so that he’ll probably be releasing yet another version to address them. I have recommended him that, in the future, he should beta test his game using a team so that most of the bugs are caught and fixed before his game is released to the public. That being said, once a bug or a group of them is detected, he has provided a fix promptly and effectively from what I’ve seen.

Even though I ended up playing a total of 21 hours in my straight playthrough, I am aware that they were some optional things in the game that I didn’t do, so I have gone back since to do some of them. I also foresee replaying the newer version game in the future to just do minimum to finish it or making some other choices along the way to see how it plays.

Finally, while ShortStar has not given me any confirmation regarding his decision yet, but it appears he’s considering a sequel or extending the game. I know there’s at least one loose end in the playthrough I did that needs to be addressed.

Score: 2.5/5

Posts

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Thanks for the review.
Rereading this review. I read a lot of tutorials from this site. Probably all of them. I owe everything to those tutorials :-)
I really want to play this game. Hope you can rehost your game soon, ShortStar. I'm especially fascinated by the "no cut-scenes" thing since I'm a strong believer that people shouldn't use cut-scenes as their crutch for story telling and character development.
I do have another download on file factory.

http://www.filefactory.com/file/b15e704/n/EpiQuest2C.exe

I'm not a big fan of cut scenes either. When I want to watch a dramatic story unfold, I'll sit down and watch an hour or two of television. When I want to play a game, I will play a game. Don't mix the two :-)
There was a lot to like about this game. Maybe I missed somehow being able to stop it, but the constant battling just ground me down and I gave up. Take a step, battle take another step battle and oh goodie by the time you've taken the third step monster group one has respawned and on and on it goes.

Did love the dogs though.

I would highly recommend this game to anyone who likes contant battling.

edchuy
You the practice of self-promotion
1624
Yes, liza. To the avoid the encounters, you have to able to dodge or run away from the sprites that generate the battles, which is not always possible, especially in some dungeons, where they actually chase you or the paths are very narrow. The rate of respawning seems to vary a lot from dungeon to dungeon.

I also loved all the attention you got from the dogs as well!
Ever plan Dragon Quest games? You were lucky to walk 4 steps without a battle and those enemies really took it out of you!

I've heard a lot of people complaining about the enemies. Funny thing is they're totally avoidable, but if you want to plow into them, you can. The respawn is 10 seconds unless it is a boss or mini boss, then there is no respawn.

At later parts of the game, the enemies hunt you down when they see you, just like the dogs do! However, there is more room to run :-)
comment=30905
Ever plan Dragon Quest games? You were lucky to walk 4 steps without a battle and those enemies really took it out of you!

I've heard a lot of people complaining about the enemies. Funny thing is they're totally avoidable, but if you want to plow into them, you can. The respawn is 10 seconds unless it is a boss or mini boss, then there is no respawn.

At later parts of the game, the enemies hunt you down when they see you, just like the dogs do! However, there is more room to run :-)


Yes, I found out that avoiding enemies can be mini game in itself. For example, early in the game when your character is still a "teenager" he gains less HP/MP than a hero character which means it is actually slightly detrimental to level up before being officially recognized as a hero. So during the first goblin cave, I avoided every enemy except the forced battles. To be honest, I found that to be pretty fun in itself. Of course, once I got the password to avoid the first quest, things got easier.
I like that mini game part. Things are easy when you shoot arrows and disarm enemies.
Im at the first cave in this game, and I agree with everyone about the constant battles but thats what keeps the game going and makes it more challenging. It can get anoyying but for me, its helpful because i need the money.
Yep, enemies in every RPG are helpful, because they give money :-)
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