A DREAM DEVOURED...BY RATS
The overwhelming promise and frustrating disappointment of Solar Tear.

Solar Tear is an RPG Maker 2003 game by the talented Mr. Nemo, made (started? finished?) in 2004, at least if the title screen is telling the truth, but fortunately still relevant by 2008. Furthermore, it is exactly my kind of RPG: a dark, intelligent, atmospheric thriller, with a focus on story and mood. Needless to say, I was MEGA SUPER PSYCHED for it.

Unfortunately, at this stage in its development, its gameplay is so riddled with glitches, snags, and parts that are just plain NOT FUN, I was not even able to complete the demo, as much as I wanted to. Find out why:

Premise/Story/Dialog:
The game opens with some appropriately ominous narration by a monk who is in fear for his life of a woman known only as the Vindicator. While this opening monologue, and the short scene after it, have not been connected to the rest of the gameplay, at least not yet as far as I have played, they certainly do a good job of setting the game's dark and dreary mood.

The main story concerns a (charmingly characterized) newly unemployed professional hacker named Rebecca who is contacted by a mysterious voice from her past. While the story intrigued me, the game-play was so frustrating that I couldn't learn as much about it as I wanted to. The points that have been taken off, however, were taken off for the fairly frequent errors in grammar, spelling, and English; most commonly, the constant misspelling of sewage as "Sewege", though it also hurt my soul to see a hacker use the word "electronical". Also, I felt the writing, outside of Rebecca's dialog, was merely competent, not excellent.

Story Score: 3.5/5

Graphics/Sounds:
Gorgeous, just gorgeous. I'd cite this game as a perfect example of the reason why a lot of people will still be using rm2k3 even when the SEQUEL to RMVX comes out. There simply aren't resources like this available for the newer makers. The urban city scape that Mr. Nemo has built from rain, fog, and what looks like a tapestry of the best pieces of every futuristic and modern chipset ever made for Rm2k3, is by far the most compelling thing about this game. I was not at all surprised by this, after all, I have in the past had Mr. Nemo make maps for one of my projects, although unfortunately, it fell through. Anyway, I can see rather clearly that he is more than qualified. Although perhaps it's just my bias in favor of science fiction games talking, but this is quite possibly some of the finest mapwork I have ever seen.

All of the sounds and music were well used, too, and contributed to the overall atmosphere/mood.

Presentation points are subtracted for a problem Darken mentioned during the summer, when this thread was new. It is often hard to locate crucial gameplay objects on the maps of Solar Tear, and further more, while the maps are pretty to look at, they are almost impossible to navigate due to the unpredictable passability settings of certain objects.

Presentation Score: 4/5

Gameplay:
Mr. Nemo gets an A for effort, but a D- for execution. The game has fun puzzles and mini-games going for it, as well as a branching gameplay beginning lifted straight from A Blurred Line. This should have been a high scoring category, but alas, it isn't.

The reason, in short, is the battles. They are brutally, totally, punishingly unfair and after a point, completely impossible. At first, I thought they were merely hard. So, I fought the weakest enemies I could find (rats) until I RAN OUT OF HEALING ITEMS AND COULDN'T AFFORD TO BUY ANY MORE, which happened BEFORE I COULD LEVEL UP. Essentially, I was in a dead end, and out of options, I hadn't leveled up, I couldn't afford to heal, and enemies don't drop money. So I had to quit playing.

More on the battles: every enemy in the game is capable of inflicting a status effect that completely fucks you. This is compounded by the fact your character starts with NO useful skills (a definite pet peeve of mine, I likes me the skills) and that she's not particularly good at attacking, either. The worst are the robots, which are totally impervious to harm, and the only enemies in the first dungeon. Perhaps they would have been weak to electrical weapons, but I couldn't afford one, and even if I could, none of the item descriptions had helpful text like "This electrical weapon is effective against robots."

As bad as, or worse than, the battles, are the glitches, which range from annoying to game ending. After playing the "sneak past the gang" minigame, I found my facing locked, and had to crack open rm2k3 and put an event to fix it. This was annoying. After an awesome minigame/puzzle where I built a bridge with across an abandoned scrapyard with short and long construction rails, when I arrived outside the sewage treatment plant, Rebecca remarked that I should restock on items. I agreed with her. Seeing nothing resembling a shop around, I tried to go back across my bridge to the first town and spend some of the credits I'd found. Of course, the teleport took me automatically to the other side of the bridge, to the map before the bridge. I thought, hmm, that's strange, and tried to make sure I could back. I found myself teleported to the first side of the bridge...but my bridge was gone, and so were the rails I used to make it. LOL GAME OVER. (I suppose I could have solved the puzzle again...but why should I have to?)

Looking at Nemo's comments in this thread, it seems that there were other options I could have taken, one of which maybe would have involved adding an NPC in my party, which sounds like it would have made the battle difficulty infinitely more bearable...but if you're going to make different paths through an area, don't make one right and one wrong. I feel like I was punished, very badly, for not taking a path that involved getting an NPC on my side. And this is not a good feeling.

In short, the battles need a lot of work, there are a lot of glitches to fix, and as intriguing and good looking as this game is...the "fun factor" just isn't there yet. I wanted badly to finish this, but couldn't bring myself to.

Gameplay Score: 1/5

In closing, I am still extremely interested in this project, and I eagerly look forward to a new, more playable, more forgiving edition of it. The effort that Mr. Nemo has put into everything is obvious, and I really want it to pan out.

Final Score (NOT AN AVERAGE): 3/5