Village Brave and the Escape from Dread Mountain

Background:
The maker is the same one who made Hero's Realm. However, he says on the game profile of Village Brave to not expect much. Interested to see what, exactly, "not much" would entail, I downloaded the game.

The game begins with the main character, Red Hawkwind, trapped by Two-Face. Two-Face will allow Red Hawkwind to leave, but only if he relates the tale of how he got to where he is. While Red doesn't quite trust Two-Face, he decides to relate the story anyway.

The game flashes back to the point where Red agrees to fetch the Boon of Dread Mountain in order to save his village from a plague. Nothing truly original in this story, but I don't think the writing was was necessarily going for "epic story".

Considering that the characters are supposed to be Native Americans-esque, it makes sense for them to speak in the manner that they do (i.e. "sister boy-child" instead of "nephew"). It takes some getting used to, but it's consistent.

The puzzles in this game took a good think on my end. The one that caused me the most amount of grief involved crossing a river. I don't want to lay out the answer, but I presumed that getting a character to one side was considered having the character "clear" the puzzle. Not that simple, unfortunately.

I was able to get as far as the dragon, but he was consistently killing me. The fact that the game prompted me to save my game should have been a red flag that it wasn't just any old boss fight. I'm regretting that I overwrote my one-and-only save-file. I'd love to be able to go back and grind out some more levels before going up against that thing.

My other experiences with this game were either not particularly noteworthy, or falls into the bad/good categories below.


Why this game is BAD:

The vines on in the village houses? You can climb on them. Not a huge, tremendous, game-breaking issue, it's just... weird.

While Babby's recruitment sequence is totally hilarious in it's basically one-sided conversation, I don't understand why he's in the party outside of being another target for foes and helping the player kill things faster. Running Fox fares slightly better with, "This Boon you speak of is truly a treasure! Let's get it together!" Flimsy reasoning, but I guess it works in that "I don't care who joins or why let's just get more party-ables!" way.

In the initial encounter with Two-Face, he/she/it/whatever seems to move about at random. One of it's random move steps must have caused it to move into the square Red Hawkwind was occupying. It couldn't move into the square, causing a game freeze. Upon rebooting, and hitting the event again, the random move event decided on a different route that did not cause a game freeze. This is a weird issue, since it's based on random movement. Obviously, it can happen, but there's just as much of a chance that it won't. My humble suggestion, since the random movement seems to make an odd amount of sense, is to check the "skip if cannot move" flag.


Why this game is GOOD:

I generally enjoyed the music of the game. The Native American vibe seemed appropriate for the setting. If it were me, I'd like to have the Kayra Village music from Suikoden 3 for the village. As for song removal, there seems to be a few pieces in the BGM directory that wasn't used at all. I could be wrong, though.

If I'm supposed to take Babby at face value, an "Ice Man" who speaks in gibberish that only Red Hawkwind can understand, it's not working. Why is this a good thing? Maybe it's just me, but I find seemingly randomly typed letters hilarious.

I've never treasure hunted so much in an RPG village before. Normally, I only find own or two treasures in a town. Three if I'm lucky. With the village of this game, almost every other thing I searched had a treasure. If you enjoy treasure hunting, this can make the game an auto-playable.

For the most part, the game uses standard VX graphics. Normally, this is a non-issue for me. However, there were edits to the faces sets to include war-paint and feathers for a more Native American look. Very ingenious, actually. Kudos to the artist!


Summary:
For a game that absolutely professes itself to be mediocre (or maybe it just seemed that way), it's better than that. It's not an epic must-play-this-yesterday by any means, but it's competent at what it does.


BOTTOM LINE: 3/5