Complete Chaos

Gameplay: 2.5/5
Battles are pretty run-of-the-mill for RPG Maker 2003 games. There's nothing that stood out about them in the 2 hours I played the game. They start out very fast-paced when you're only controlling the protagonist. At this point, you can kill any enemy with one attack and you can usually get through battles without taking any damage. Early in the game, I found myself thinking that the battles were so easy as to be trivial, but as soon as I fought the first boss, I saw that I was wrong. The problem with the battles is that the difficulty is all over the place.

The first enemies you fight are laughably easy, and then you're thrown against an extremely difficult first boss that had me scrambling to keep my health high enough so as to not be two-shotted by him, leaving me with little time to counterattack. It almost completely busted my item reserves. In the second dungeon, the enemies are all much more difficult (but net roughly the same EXP as the pitiful first dungeon's) and its boss is frustratingly powerful.

Because the difficulty is so all over the place, it's hard to determine what level you should be at in a given area. I found myself mindlessly killing enemies in the first dungeon over and over because it was so trivial a task before getting bored and challenging the boss. I was blown away by how difficult the boss was. I figured that if the regular enemies are far weaker than me, then I must be at about the right level to finish the dungeon.

Another gripe about the battle system is that as soon as you finish the first dungeon, you gain two new party members. Why is this a complaint? Because the battles are very fast-paced...when you're actually doing something, that is. Your ATB bars charge maddeningly slowly, leaving you spending at least three quarters of every battle staring at the crawling gauges as you wait for your turns to come up. Everyone's turn comes up at roughly the same time, which is usually about the same time that the enemies take their turn. As a result, whenever your ATB bar fully charges, you're assaulted by a clusterfuck of animations and numbers, making it hard to figure out exactly what happened and who's suddenly at low health or has a status ailment. After you finish entering your commands, it's back to waiting for the gauges to charge again before anything happens.

From what I played, the game plays rather linearly and there were no sidequests that I encountered. This isn't necessarily a flaw, but a few times I found myself unclear about where I had to go. Even when you're instructed where to go, you're rarely given a more specific direction than "at the very edge of town." The town is pretty well-populated and expansive, so it's eay to get lost wandering the streets and searching for which building you can walk into. After beating the first dungeon, I was told about who I had to meet next, but I don't recall being told where they lived. As a result, I ended up wandering the city for at least 45 minutes trying to find out where I was supposed to go. It was rather frustrating and brought me close to giving up the game.

One more complaint I have is that frequently, a character (usually the protagonist) will say "........", which takes a long time to write on the screen and for some reason, you can never skip it by pressing enter. It's rather annoying.

Story/Writing: 2.5/5
The writing is pretty mediocre. There are a couple minor spelling and grammatical errors, but it's not bad enough to stand out. The characters are all pretty bland and uninteresting. I can't remember any of their names, so I'll refer to them as Cop, Chick, Cousin, and Chief. Cop is your typical protagonist of a police drama, a stoic and bitter guy whose dialog consists of roughly 50% unfunny one-liners and 50% complaining. For some as of yet unexplored reason, he uses a magical sword and can shoot fireballs.

Your sidekicks are a little more interesting. Chick is your partner, the obligatory smart girl who catches onto things faster than you do and wants Cop to take it easy. Cousin is your not-very-intelligent cousin who wears a bright red hat and wants in every girl's pants. These two join you as you pursue the mysterious stalker who appears to have the power to summon demons. Chief is your staple black guy in a police drama, he's your hardass boss who takes no shit and keeps you on your toes.

The story showed a little more promise than the characters. Cop is charged with protecting a jazz singer who has been harrassed by a stalker called Face. After rescuing her from Face, you meet up with a local black gang that Cousin (who is white) is a member of. This gang is a ragtag group of anti-demon freedom fighters who know something about what happened ten years ago, which may tie into the motives of the mysterious Face. In the beginning of the game, there's an intriguing air of mystery surrounding the story, as you're given vague hints about what happened in the past, which left me curious to find out what they were building up to.

Disappointingly, the story turns out to be pretty generic: all-powerful crystals, uniting them bringing about the end of the world, et cetera. The promise of a mature and unique story was what kept me playing in spite of the lackluster combat, so my interest in the game quickly began to wane after it was made clear.



Speaking of a mature story, that reminds me of another complaint I have with the writing. Alcohol and sex jokes do not make your game more mature. They came across as very juvenile and hurt what was otherwise not bad dialog.

Graphics/Level Design: 2.5/5
The tilesets are pretty consistent. They don't look out of place and don't stand out, for better or for worse. Mapping in general is acceptable and functional. The addition of flashing arrows to show which buildings you can enter is a great feature that other games should have. I would've been very frustrated without them, as Complete Chaos sports a large city with many unenterable buildings that look alike.

The facesets are pretty poor. Aside from being pixelated and washed out due to poor color compression, they're also extremely inconsistent. The facesets of the main cast use real people, whereas the people you find in the streets have faces of anime and video game characters.

Sprites are acceptable, although I do have a complaint with the townspeople. In what's otherwise a realistic modern setting, why are there random townspeople with purple hair? Also, I found the presence of recognizable anime characters casually walking around town very jarring. At least twice, I walked past Nappa from Dragonball Z. Also, I'm pretty sure that one of your enemies has an AT-AT in his house.

Audio: 2.5/5
The audio is pretty average. The music and sound effects are what you'd expect from an RPG Maker game and nothing stands out as particularly good or bad. There's not much else to say about it.
Suggestions:
-Get rid of the facesets or make them more consistent. Also, use a program like Photoshop or the GIMP to make sure that you don't end up with washed out colors when you compress the images.
-Make the difficulty more consistent or at least give the player some indicator about how strong they should be to fight bosses.
-The time it takes to get through a door after pressing enter is too long. Shorten the animation.
-Give the player a map of the city with key locations indicated.
-Spread out the turns in the battle system so that you don't wait forever doing nothing and then give commands for all your party members at once.
-Don't use sprites or faces of recognizable people or characters.
-Shorten the "............" messages to just "..." or make them skippable.

Bottom Line:
Complete Chaos offers a modern setting which is a breath of fresh air, but it still can't escape overdone cliches which hamper the enjoyment of an otherwise intriguing and mysterious story. In spite of its fast-paced battles, the game takes patience and trial and error due to the unpredictable difficuly of the enemies you encounter.