A Home Far Away

Once again I find myself in a difficult position. Here is a respected game made by a well-known community member. Strangeluv, the creator, wrote a rather lengthy article about the art of writing for games. I read this article and found myself agreeing with a lot of it. Here was someone who seemed to know what he was talking about. Surely, then, his game would feature excellent writing.

I found, much to my distress, that this was not the case at all. I am going to analyze this game very-closely to see what I think went wrong here, so this review will probably be very long and well almost undoubtedly feature spoilers, so if you haven’t played the game yet or in any way care about having plot points spoiled for you, this is your only warning.

Let us take an in-depth look at A Home Far Away, the game that has captured the hearts of many, yet broke my own.


A Home Far Away presents itself on a simple scale. There are no epic quests to complete or prophecies to fulfill or evils to destroy. You simply take on the role of two children, Danais and Farrah, ordinary, simple folk living in a small village with their parents. Danais wants to buy a present from his friend’s birthday, but an encounter with a wily thief leads him far from the village. Farrah, his older sister, leaves in search of him, and from there circumstances conspire (sometimes implausibly ) to carry them far away from their home in Everdale, and their attempts to return home to their family form most of the rest of the story.

One the one hand, this premise is in itself refreshing. It’s a simple game with a simple story without any of the requisite world-annihilating foes or fantastic battles with powerful well-equipped heroes. It is just an everyday sort of setting and the “heroes” are everyday sort of people. They are skilled enough at magic to defend themselves in the wild, but these two are certainly no legendary heroes destined to save the world.

On the other hand, this game makes for a pretty compelling argument for why most RPGs DO focus on epic-scale conflicts and high adventure. I’m not saying this game has an inherently bland or uninteresting premise, far from it, but the execution of this premise ultimately failed to engage me, simply because it never seemed like what I was doing was meaningful or important in even an immediate sense. I shall try to deconstruct this as best as I can in the following review.



Balance 2/5

First of all, while combat is frequent in A Home Far Away, it is never really played as a central aspect of the game. I would consider it more akin to an adventure-style game than a real RPG. As such, the combat is never really impressive or engaging. Some attempts to give the DBS of RM2k3 a refreshing spin, such as the isometric point of view, and giving all the heroes unique commands. Danais and Farrah have the unique “charge” command that allows them to fire bursts of magic at an enemy, and by charging twice they can attack all enemies. Unfortunately, thanks to the eccentricities of RM2k3’s battle system ,these custom commands have an annoying tendency to bug out or simply not work properly. This is especially true of the various other characters who occasionally join the kids on their quest.

Mostly, charging your staff twice will annihilate most enemies for the first half of the game, which is fine because for much of the early game you’ll have only one character at a time. Later in the game, however, the difficulty spikes quickly and you’ll be required to grind or find certain items to defeat some of the bosses. Since I never felt like combat was meant to be a focus (encounters are non-random and most are completely skippable) this felt like an odd choice to make some of the fights such brick walls. Enemies are pretty nice about leaving items behind though, so you’ll rarely have issues with recovery items, which is good because you’ll likely need them later.

Level Design 3/5

Probably the highlight of the game. The game is divided into what I would describe as two “phases” of a sort. The first phase is highly linear, and the second is highly non-linear. The first can get tedious quickly, as it involves, at certain points, having to clear dungeons with one character that you already cleared with another five minutes ago. Once you reach the non-linear portion, the game will likely either become amazing or an absolute chore depending on what kind of playing style you prefer.

The game puts a lot of attention to detail on its maps, with moving panoramas and fireflies flitting about on almost every screen. Although this game is often praised for its graphical quality, it in fact mixes together so many resources form so many different sources that the graphics actually tend to clash quite a bit. You’ll see PSX RPG Maker sprites mixed with Seiken Densetsu 3 and Chrono Trigger sprites occasionally even on the same screen.

The game makes use of a map and waypoint system as well to help deal with the long slogs through the wilderness you’d be dealing with otherwise, which is good because you spend a lot of this game just wandering around looking for things. These waypoints go a long way towards making travel more tolerable. The game does throw in a few other touches that make the game a little different. Shops, for instance, forgo the usual shopping screen in favor of a Zelda style “touch the item you want” system. This makes it problematic if you want to buy multiple items though. A quantity selector would have helped here.

The most stand-out feature, however, is the abundance of mini-games found throughout the game. Fishing, swimming, archery, the game obvious takes quite a few cues from Legend of Zelda (in more ways than one, I’ll explain later) in terms of the variety of activities available to you. The creator obviously went to a great deal of trouble to try to make the game an entertaining experience, with mixed success, but if you need a break from the “main quest” there’s likely no shortage of things to do.



The game features a day and night system which seems cool at first but I quickly found frustrating. Once you reach the “non-linear” portion of the game, time will pass whenever you walk around outside. During the day, the town will be bustling, shops will be open, at night the city is quiet and deserted, and various people can be found at certain points in time throughout the day. While this does work at making the town feel a bit more alive, it also adds a lot of arbitrary barriers. If you want to go to a store at night, you’re obliged to simply wait until morning. Similarly, if an NPC is only available at certain times or you need to go to a certain place that keeps certain hours, you have a very narrow window of time to find them, as the time advances rather quickly. I often found myself just passing time or returning to my home “base,” which is quite a walk from the town square, in order to sleep until morning.

Anyway, once you reach the nonlinear portion of the game, your goal is to complete a number of quests, which can be completed in any order. This ranges from killing monsters to mini-games to typical RPG fetch quests and lots of wandering through wilderness. I found this portion of the game very off-putting because the player is not eased into this portion of the game at all, the mayor simply drops a list of twenty-five or so missions you must complete for the people of town. Finding these people was sometimes a hassle, as the list only tells you where to find people in fairly general terms and the ever present clock threatens to lock areas or send NPCs to distant locations based on the time of day. If you need to give someone an item, just having the item isn’t enough, you must have one of your characters equip the item. This extra step seemed pointless and once in a while it can be tricky to figure out exactly what item is needed to accomplish something. Moreover, these quests proposed another problem which I will explain more in depth soon.

Characters 1/5
This part of the game really baffled me. As I mentioned before, the creator of this game, Strangeluv, has written a fairly lengthy “manifesto” on the process of writing for games. Really, at its heart it is little more than the condensed notes of a creative writing class, but it was still a fairly good read and filled with what I thought was sound advice. Which is why I was very confused that the writing was so weak here. Did Strangeluv not take his own advice?

At the heart of this matter lie the two protagonists, Danais and Farrah, two children whom we must bond with and guide through a series of travails on their quest to get home. The problem is that there just isn’t enough between these two characters to form one interesting protagonist, let alone two.

At the top of this page, you’ll probably notice a character tab. If you click on it, (go ahead, I’ll wait) you’ll see a short blurb on both Danais and Farrah. Congratulations. If you’ve read these two short paragraphs, you know absolutely everything about these two characters. There is no further depth or substance to them at all. But even these small character traits regarding these two are not conveyed through their actions at all, but instead because Farrah apparently likes to explain things, as evidenced by the fact that she explains to Danais that she is his older sister and that he likes to wander away from the village.



Other than these traits that we have to take Farrah’s word for them having, these two have no personality at all. They never say or do anything particularly interesting, and in fact rarely do anything that someone doesn’t tell them to do. And that is really this game’s most fatal flaw. In a traditional adventure game it is acceptable sometimes to have a bland central character who serves merely as a cipher for the player to interact with the setting. But Danais and Farrah’s plight is at the heart of the narrative. Empathizing with them and wanting to help them is essential. And since there’s just not enough to these characters to like them, I found it impossible to care about them, or if they ever got home or not. They never change, grow, or seem to learn anything from their quest, never seem to establish any new understanding for each other, and never develop as characters. They are exactly the same at the end as they were at the beginning. Frankly, they’re both just boring.

And if you’re hoping those other characters on that list make up for it, you’ll be disappointed there too. Baines joins your party for five minutes, has about three lines, and is never heard from again. Jaden actually does exhibit some interesting traits but he too vanishes into the mist before you can really start to like him.

Skarsgaard, on the other hand, actually does stick around. You see, Skarsgaard is the thief who instigates the entire plot of the game. However, later in the game he will join your party. This is the same character who, a few hours earlier, attempted to murder Danais over a stuffed doll, threw him off a 600 foot cliff, and then followed him for ten minutes pelting him with rocks to make sure he died. But never mind that. Farrah “I will protect you” Sierran will insist that this cutthroat join your party over Danais’ horrified protests. I guess expecting Farrah to stay true to the sole personality trait she has ever expressed was asking too much. And here I thought she didn’t have a personality. Instead it just turns out that she is mind-blowingly stupid.

However, for some reason your party will not be brutally murdered in their sleep and instead Skarasgaard sticks around and turns out to be a thief with a heart of gold. I guess he was just having a bad day when he attempted to murder a small child over a toy. Or maybe “throwing rocks at swimming children” is a rad new sport popular in Montrose. Everyone needs a hobby.

You’ll also meet Captain Grizzlybeard and his crew, who manage to have more personality than the rest of the cast combined. The fact that they accomplish this by acting like an absolutely stock band of generic pirates speaks volumes. Grizzlybeard is perhaps the only truly interesting character in the entire cast, since he actually says and does funny and/or interesting things, and actually has motives and goals that are at the heart of both who he is and his role in the story. If there were more characters like him in the game I probably wouldn’t have gone off on this rant. I mean, so far we’ve written off practically the entire main cast as being either boring or practically non-existent, and I’m still not done complaining.

The latter half of the game consists of running around doing odd jobs for random people. You’ll be given a quest log to keep track of the people you’ve helped out. Combining this with the clock system and it’s easy to see this is an obvious allusion to Majora’s Mask. Sometimes a bit too obvious. For example, you’ll meet the Mayor of Willow in the midst of a heated meeting in which h is surrounded by angry townsfolk demanding he deal with a crisis. The poor mayor cannot even get a word in edgewise. This scene ends with him complaining about his wife. If you’ve played Majora’s Mask you probably realized that this is the exact same scenario that faces the Mayor of Clock Town. Even the layout of his office building is obviously taken from it. So, blatant scene-stealing aside, there is no question what this game is trying to emulate here. Anyone who has played Majora’s Mask will recognize it instantly since the game practically beats you over the head with the parallels.

Majora’s Mask was an interesting game in this respect. The game was full of people who needed Link's help, just like here. But there are a few problems with A Home Far Away’s take on this idea that take what was a fun premise in one game and make it a chore here. Who wasn’t immediately taken with Anju, the timid innkeeper in Clock Town whose fiancé mysteriously disappeared? Or her senile (or was she?) grandmother who could read Link a story? Or Romani, the adorable girl at the ranch who needs Link’s help to defend her cows from flying saucers? These characters had soul and wit. They made us want to help them. If you fail to help Anju or Romani, you might even feel bad that you let them down. Completing these quests was rewarding on its own, and the ominous sense that these people were all going to die if you didn't complete your quest was a great driving force to make you want to finish the game. But in A Home Far Away, you don’t really get any opportunity to like these characters. Most of them have no real personality. They just have demands. They tell you to go do something, and you go out and do it and check them off your list, and you’re one step closer to…what? The end of the game? The quests here lack a feeling of “accomplishment,” that you actually helped someone. Helping some people, like the postman, at least had visible effects on the game world, but a lot of these people don’t grant you any sense of satisfaction. Your list literally feels like a list of chores you have to do to finish the game. They are not rewarding in an individual sense. Since the game also dumps all twenty-some-odd quests on you at once, it can feel downright overwhelming to have to track all these people down without any clear idea where some of them might even be! When I first opened that quest log, I questioned just how much I wanted to finish this game. For over a week.

Basically, the second half of this game amounted to me having two characters I didn’t like having to do a bunch of quests I didn’t like for a bunch of other characters I also didn’t like. That is a lot of things to not like.

Story 1/5

The main narrative also suffers from a lot of really odd problems. For one thing for much of the first part of the game revolves around switching back and forth between Farrah and Danais, sometimes involving having to explore areas I just got done exploring with the other character. Naturally, this would be a short game if they found each other, so the narrative conspires to keep them apart. At one point Danais was resting at a town when Farrah arrives. I know exactly where Danais is but Farrah will not let me go there and get him. Instead, she insists I go check out the inn to see if he is there. This results in a lot of time wasted (I know he’s not at the inn) as I wander around pointlessly doing arbitrary things until the plot actually starts advancing again.

Once your two protagonists actually meet up and work together, the game enters its non-linear phase. I usually enjoy non-linearity, but as I explained earlier I think this part of the game suffered from poor plot pacing. You’re simply given an enormous list of things to do and told to go away until they’re done. While some of the quests are interrelated and contain what might be the closest this game gets to story arcs, it can be very hard to know where to start. The game offers a few suggestions, but once those leads run out its back to dashing around the town hoping you meet someone who you have to help.

This set-up also wreaks havoc on the game’s story structure. There is, essentially, no climax to the overall story, you simply complete all your quests and you’re done with the game and into the resolution phase. Once again, I’m not saying that games need to revolve around some huge world-altering conflict, or even have a villain. But this game demonstrates aptly why these sorts of things are so ubiquitous, because trying to make a good game with a good story arc without a central conflict or antagonist is very hard.

As mentioned, the game alludes heavily to Majora’s Mask, and by “alludes,” I mean “took scenes nearly verbatim.” The game also makes a few allusions to other games, and once again, by “allusions” I mean “steal scenes almost entirely.” Near the middle of the game, Danais and Farrah are ship-wrecked and riding a raft. They are cold, starving, alone, and scared. They eventually resort to eating raw fish and nearly die from scurvy. This scene was ripped directly from Illusion of Gaia right down to the graphics for the raft itself. I mean, did the creator really not expect people to recognize this? There are, however, some key differences in these two scenes. In Illusion of Gaia, Will and Kara use this time to get to know one another and undergo character development. Danais and Farrah do not have characters to develop, so the entire scene is rather pointless.

I have no problem with homages and references. Those can be great when properly applied. In fact, a lot of you probably noticed that I used quotes from Futurama and Con Air up there. But there's a difference between that and stealing an entire scene and playing it in the exact same way for the exact same effect. If your player recognizes where it came from, the effect is lost entirely. Really, drawing from such great source material, the game should have a lot going for it. But instead, it feels as though it were awkwardly stitched together from those games’ corpses, a weird sort of “Frankengame” that attempts a lot of things but doesn’t really do any of them as well as it could have had it focused on just one.

Music and Sound 3/5:
The game also draws from a wide variety of well-known sources, from Grandia to Final Fantasy. There was nothing wrong with these tracks, though such well-known music might be distracting to some. However, the game does have a few unique musical tracks for it, the most notable being its main theme, a beautiful if somewhat haunting melody that I enjoyed. I also liked the sound effect that occurs when you charge a staff twice. Makes for a nice “everything’s about to die” moment.

Overall 2/5:
Overall, this game disappointed me. It should have been a fun experience. Indeed, it is made up of individual pieces of fun, like the various minigames that are very common throughout the whole game. The game has a few striking graphical achievements and even some custom music. But it does not quite come together as a whole. The game seemed to ask or expect me to care about a lot of things that I there simply wasn’t justification for. On the surface, this looks like a cute game, but underneath, we have a half-game stitched together from several other games starring two thoroughly bland protagonists who go through a plot made up mostly of contrived coincidences that ultimately has no climax. Given Strangeluv’s demonstrated understanding of writing, I was very sad to see this game end up this way, but I hold out hope that he is capable of better.