EpiQuest

THE GOOD

Fun to play, plenty of diverse classes, details, mapping, easy to pick up and play, diverse skills, 200 weapons, 200 equips, mining, forging, tons of items, tons of secrets, tons of enemies, 20+ hours of gameplay each playthrough, plenty of reasons to play through 2x.

THE BAD

Plowing through enemies can get annoying, but you can avoid battles. Skill trees aren't clearly defined, not enough save slots with a game with so many branching paths, bestiary is not the best. No new graphics.

PLOTS

To be honest there isn't much of a story. You start out, do a job, rescue three boys tormenting a goblin, get declaired a hero, pick your party from a school, get a harp, and escourt someone to another town before the game really picks up. I won't spoil anything that happens after that, because it does get better.

That was my story... According to comments I've read the story changes from playthrough to playthrough. I've played it twice all the way through and it turns out you can drastically alter things at a lot of different points in the game. There are specific choices you need to make like handing over a harp to person A or person B or even keeping the harp yourself. Everything has game changing reprecussions.

To top that off, there is even a mission to either kill a necromancer or allign yourself with her and poison an entire elven council. There are perks to both and punnishments to them both. You don't walk a clear line. That's what doubles over the 20+ hours of playthrough time when you play again and there is plenty of incentive to playthrough again.

GAMMEPLAY

This is your traditional RPG with a lot of unique features. First off, the enemies find you! You can see them on the overhead map. At first they just randomly wander around and you can run past them. later in the game they hunt for you and go on patrol like in the final tower. There are guardian enemies and boss enemies too. When you bump into them or they bump into you then a traditional RPG battle begins!

You start with your 1 main character that you can customize a lot of ways. For starters, you can equip things for your body, hands, feet, legs, heck, head, cover over you, accessories and orbs to name a few. Orbs switch up the gameplay too.

You get more characters pretty quickly and then shortly after that you can assemble and pick your party with a barbarian, a warrior, a thief, a blackbelt, a black mage, a white mage, a grey mage, a farmer, a hunter, a teenager, and a few more. Oh and the most interesting of all, a mistress! Each has unique abilities, whether its throwing items, to using skills.

You get skills by equipping weapons and armor.... and by using skills... so you learn the skills by equipping stuff and you get improved version of skills by using them. Speaking of skills there is a wide arrange, everything from aim that tells you about the traditional things like spells.

The party diversity leads to multiple playthroughs and it doesn't seem like there's a weak party. Just because you pick the party doesn't mean you're stuck with them forever. You can change your party with the visit to a pub.

Those are the major gameplay features. These are what make the game so fun! There is also a supposed code system to make your second playthrough more interesting. You find these codes as you play through the game.

PRESENTATION

Epiquest offers up fresh ways of using the default RPG VX graphics and great use of color. From dreary haunted waterfalls to happy elvin meadows to beachside greens to icy blue caves. It is all a feast for the eyes especially with all of the painstaking detail. Every house is different from the last. Each house has some reason for you to go in it whether its hidden treasures, power up crystals or just some useful information. ShortStar did not skip on the details and its the little things in life that make it worth living. Blue teddy bears in the witch magic shops vs normal teddy bears everywhere else. Everything is worth your time to explore and when I've played the game 20+ hours in 2 weeks, I feel like there are still things that I may not have found from reading comments.

There is a good choice of music too. Nothing gets repetitive, because the music changes in battles from area to area and even in boss fights. It is so nice to get a fresh change every 15 minutes it seems.

FUN

This game is a heap of fun. I haven't had this much fun staying up late and exploring since Hero's Realm.