Razkertim

Gameplay 3.5
Imagine a generic RMXP game. Now throw in a lot of features like a Day/Night system, character creation, alchemy, skill trainers, torches which lights up caves, equipment durability and other features which makes this game more advetureish and you have Razkertim in a nutshell. The good news is that the features does often successfully keep the game from feeling to generic. The bad news is that none of the features are particularly well-implemented. The game is like a soup with a lot of ingredients which tastes good enough, but not as good as a soup with more carefully selected ingredients would. Let's go over some of the most prominent features.

Day/night: The Day/Night system does what you expect it to do, except this game takes it one step further and gives the NPCs schedules dependent on what hour it is instead of just whether it's day or night. However, while for example the Dragon Warrior games, tend to have content during the night not available during the day, nights in Razertim mostly serves to make towns useless. Shopkeepers and most other NPCs are asleep and there's little to no new content available at nighttime.

Equipment durability: Equipment will degrade and eventually break. Armor degrade presumable by getting hit, but you can ignore that element since you will have replaced your armor by something better long before it has any chance of breaking. Weapon durability is however much more important. It will go down with one every time you attack, and whenever you use a skill it will go down with as many points of durability the skill costs. In practice this means that whenever you use a physical skill you lose money. As a consequence, magic is godly since spells only costs MP which can be replenished at a negligible cost at any inn. All in all, the system mainly serves to nerf fighters and discourages the player from using them.

Skill learning: You can learn new skills from skill trainers. In order to be able to learn the skills they can teach you, you have to have enough Common, Battle, Magic and Special exp. Any character who survives a battle gets one Common exp for every enemy killed regardless of their participation. Anyone who attacks even once gets the same amount of Battle exp and anyone who uses either magic or, surprisingly (bugingly?) enough, weapon skills, even once gets the same amount of Magic Exp. I don't know what grants Special exp, but at some point my characters had some.

Battle exp is used for weapon skills, Magic exp for magic, Special exp for skills which the game creator decided can be considered special and common exp for pretty much everything. This is a fun system for mages. There are quite a lot of spells you want and unless you're comfortable with grinding like crazy, you will have to prioritize. Unfortunately, fighters getting Magic exp from weapons skills coupled with the game discouraging the use of fighters period means they get less out this system. Fighters doesn't need as much Battle exp as spellcasters need Magic exp though since there's very few weapons kills which are actually useful, but that doesn't really make the system any more fun for fighters.

Story 2/5
A princess has been kidnapped and you are supposed to find her. The story starts out well enough with the king taking the shotgun approach and simple sending as many heroes as he can find to go rescue her. However, you spend the rest of the demo doing roadblock quests which has no relation to the main story. Heck, I'm not sure if the game even has a main story. The story isn't really the focus of this game though.

Characters 1.5/5
You can pick the name and gender of the hero and you get to answer a personality quiz (which fortunately doesn't affect the stats of the main character thus saving you from the trouble of figuring out which answer corresponds to which stat) when starting the game, but the hero will still default to a personality which can be summarized by "I want to give the hero business a try". Your companions display a personality when they join you, but after that they end up just being there and occasionally say something unimportant. One of them will without a second thought help you kill an NPC she previously demanded you show respect to.

The NPCs are however surprisingly complex. As mentioned, they have schedules and will do different things depending on which time it is. A lot of them also allows you to ask them many different question. This is unfortunately somewhat undermined by the game giving way to many NPCs negative or nonsensical traits. After a while you will expect the NPCs to shamelessly admit to being jerks, being useless, having an inane hobby like collecting bat-shit or mentioning others who has those traits. So, while the game gives the NPCs a lot to say, it also makes talking to them unappealing.

Visuals 2/5
Monsters are very hand drawn and clashes with the rest of the graphics. Other than that, the game is neither remarkable good or bad looking when it comes to mapping, graphics or anything else eye candy related.

Audio 2.5/5
Nothing about sound or music is remarkable in either a good or bad way.

Overall 3/5
Razkertim has a number of good ideas going for it. Most of those ideas only improves the game by a little. Giving NPCs more to say than "Welcome to Corneria" is good, but it would have been better if they were more appealing to talk to in the first place. The skill learning system is fun for mages, but it would have been even more fun if the skill learning system worked just as well for fighters. This is a common pattern for Razkertim as it has taken a quantity over quality approach. Still, most of the various features does improve the game, even if by only a little.