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Would pay money for it, if I could

  • Rine
  • 02/23/2016 12:33 AM
  • 1933 views
...which is probably one of the highest praises for an RPGMaker game, at least in my opinion. I would seriously pay around ten to fifteen bucks for this game, especially if someone made it available on steam w/achievement support (hint hint? Would let me ration out playing it again!)

I Miss the Sunrise is one of the games I recommend to people who ask me if there are any good RPGMaker games out there available for free. Inevitable comparisons to Mass Effect and similar party-personality / space opera games are going to be obvious, but this game is its one little beast, and isn't trying to really rip off anyone. The majority of gameplay is split between exploration on foot, where you walk around space stations or sometimes a planet, finding items, talking to people, seeing events with your crew, etc; and space battles, where you navigate your fleets through space to accomplish various goals. Each story mission is set up so you have a certain goal, and some may be killing an enemy, but later even those are spruced up with factors such as ships in support positions that you need to take out so you can weaken the boss, or positions you need to claim within a time limit.

The battles themselves are unique and well done, in that despite on the surface being a team vs team RPG battle, the game's unique battle and movement systems make it quite fun. Your team can advance forward or retreat in a line towards the enemy ships, getting in range or backing out, and different 'races' of characters have different abilities they can activate. The ships they pilot have their own weaknesses and advantages, and you are encouraged to get somewhat close to avoid the enemy pushing you back into a corner. Each ship has three health bars, one representing the hull, systems, and the pilot. Correspondingly, each weapon uses one of those systems as ammo, and deals damage to a different system. In effect, every weapon in the game is 'cast from HP', making you balance out the weapons you have to avoid making one of the three HP bars too drained in each fight. The added factor that you can craft your own custom systems, and the game even gives you a passcode to recreate it later or share with friends gives it that much more depth. I never truly figured out the 'best' way to craft weapons, but I kludged through just fine.

Story-wise, I love it. If comparisons to Mass Effect are most suitable, it is here, mostly because the game does an amazing job of world building. Setting up the background of the universe, why people act the way they do, what happened before the story and such is all well done. You want to talk to people and read more of the story in order to understand how this world works. The basic premise (that we figured out how to stop the aging process, and effectively colonized the stars with many space stations, and at the same time killing our emotions and drives, before a bad thing happened), is one that the entire plot tent-poles very well around.

I will particularly note that I love how the game integrates gameplay and story elements. Why do you still have those ships after they get blown up in your view? Because the ships have safety-systems that no one disengages that cause them to remove themselves from combat and shut down. Why can I see what other fleets are doing and command them like a turn based game? Because your character has a special trait that lets them see and control the flow of whole battles (and one story battle has you doing this on a much grander scale than a dozen characters). How can someone call you out on a duel to the death if your ships auto-disable? Why, that's easy, he disables that on both your ships, which massively increases all your HP bars...but death is death this time.

If I had anything to nitpick about, it is that when you do need to grind, it feels like you don't get a lot of progress for the time you spend. Even though you will sometimes get stuck in spots, and need more gear, it takes a bit too long to achieve measurable progress when you do so.

Overall, this is one of the games on the site that goes past 'good for an RPGMaker game' and blasts on to just plain 'great for any game'. I highly recommend it.

Posts

Pages: 1
Deltree
doesn't live here anymore
4556
Wow, thanks for the big ol' review! No plans for a Steam port at the moment, but I do have a remake of sorts in the works.

In the future, you might even say.
Pages: 1