TOTAL CHAOS

I just finished Total Chaos today. Wondering how long ago I started it, I checked the date stamp on my first save game: A YEAR AGO YESTERDAY. (Most of that time was stretches of not playing it at all, of course.)

I find myself looking back over the year, just like the characters in the game do, to try and piece it all together. Back then on December 28, 2008, when I for the first time saw the starfield title screen and heard the exciting riffs of Title.mid, did I have any inkling of the ordeals before me? Could I have imagined the heights of elation and the pits of disappointment? Did I have any idea how LONG this game would be?

The story of Total Chaos is a standard discover-your-true-potential-and-save-the-world affair, but it's wrapped in a unique "reality television" presentation where every other character is a celebrity of the small screen. There are appearances by Lindsay Lohan, Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, Paris Hilton, etc. Their roles range from one-line cameos (Johnny Depp) to being "summons" for the summoner character (Tyra Banks), to being principal, playable characters (Lindsay Lohan). Yeaster has watched way more reality TV than I ever will and the game is full of affectionate digs at all kinds of reality stars I've never heard of. Several of the dungeons take place in unconventional locations like a television studio (although there is bad news yet to come about these dungeons.)

Since rpgmaker.net is an amateur community, I think that the designer's effort and intentions should be acknowledged along with the actual product. (This is the main difference between amateur and professional communities IMO.) Also, I get the impression that this is a game Yeaster made Long Long Ago, so its quality shouldn't reflect on his newer projects. In the case of Total Chaos, the characters and the "reality show" angle are the strongest points, but it's dragged down by the use of default systems, impossible battles and wretchedly unfun dungeons. So what might have been an epic, multi-act adventure comes across as just tortuously long. There was one point where I thought I HAD to have reached the final battle; the characters even gave their "For love!" "For glory!" quips. Then I looked at the walk-through and discovered this was only ... halfway ...

There is a lot of relationship development among the cast, even if the cutscenes started to try my patience toward the end. It looks like the main protagonist is going to wind up shacked with Lindsay Lohan, since she IS the principal female, but he actually gets dumped by all his potential girlfriends right at the end of the game! (Sorry to spoil it.) Also noteworthy is the fact that the enemy "party" (called the Society) is almost as large as the players', and the different characters are fleshed out just as much.

The truly unique aspect of Total Chaos is the whole reality TV angle. Act 2 begins with Lindsay Lohan's publicist deciding that the rest of your adventure should be filmed as a reality show, and you gain 4 new team members by "auditioning" them. (It's refreshing and unconventional to gain a whole mess of new party members at once, as opposed to the gradual introductions typical of other RPGs.) There is ostensibly a camera crew following you around for the rest of the game, but of course they never enter into gameplay except in a few areas where you can talk to them like normal NPCs. I really really wish Yeaster had made the reality show more of an actual game mechanic instead of just a mostly-invisible part of the back story. Imagine if you didn't receive money from monster drops, but instead had to earn it from your sponsors by creating drama? Or if you had to constantly hire and fire your party members based on how much the public likes them? Or anything like that.

As it happens, the actual gameplay of Total Chaos is boilerplate RM2K3, and, I'm sad to say, it's utterly dull. And the most mind-numbingly dull aspect of the entire game is the dungeon design. Most of them look like they were created by a random dungeon-designer tool; screen after screen of empty, featureless hallways where the player's only challenge is to stay awake between random battles. When you get to the end you fight the boss. Repeat. (Repeat twenty-one times.) If you don't count the "sphinx" quizzes in the Altar caves, then I'm not exaggerating when I say there isn't a single puzzle in the entire game. Seriously. Even a dreaded guess-the-correct-combination-of-switches puzzle would have been refreshing. (Or better yet; have fewer than TWENTY-ONE DUNGEONS!#%)

I must vituperate on the monster difficulty as well. At one point I found I was up against monsters whose OPENING ATTACK was a multi-attack that instantly killed several of my party members from FULL HEALTH. What was wrong here? Was I supposed to be leveling more vigorously? You get a large number of party members who can be swapped in and out of the active party, and the problem with this system is that, if you mix up your party too often, none of your characters will be getting enough experience to keep up with the difficulty curve. Perhaps the assumption is that players should spend time grinding in dungeons, but let me tell you there is ZERO incentive to spend any more time in those dungeons than you absolutely have to. Was I supposed to be carefully considering my party and equipment for each dungeon? Sorry, but this game just doesn't have the immersiveness to make me do anything but try to get through it as fast as possible.

There are also a bunch of other sloppy bugs and problems. The jeep can drive through buildings. I mean, come on. Also, the in-game item descriptions are useless. The description for the Sunny Delight item is: "Smell so good that even your friends can taste it!" Right ... That's not useful. In the game guide it says "Sunny Delight – Restores 125 MP". Why couldn't THAT have just gone in the in-game description? Also, some dungeons contain 1-tile-wide gaps that you jump over by pressing the use key. What if you're at the edge of the platform but not facing the right direction? The player freezes permanently via a blocked move route. ARGH.

Bored and exhausted, I eventually did something tantamount to giving up: I hacked the game and set all the monsters' HP to 1, just so I could breeze through and see the ending. It was a sad thing to do, since it effectively wiped out any consideration Yeaster put into the higher-level battles (it sure made the final battle an anti-climax) but the other alternative was giving up completely. And if this were an unhackable game, that's what I would have done.

That's how today, a year and a day after I first started, barely able to remember that first fateful day when Ron Johnson went out for pastries with his friend, it's all over with.

Another note: I honestly think RM engines should start coming out with a journal/quest log as one of the default systems. Coming back to this game after several months of not playing it, I found the main character standing in his apartment, with ... no clue where I was supposed to go next. Your next destination is mentioned briefly at the end of the event following the last big accomplishment, and if you blink and miss it, or turn off the computer and forget overnight, there's nothing there to remind you.

The reality-television world is unique and Yeaster can juggle the large cast of characters well, but with default battles and phoned-in dungeon design the game just can't support a story of this size. Realizing its full potential, the reality show aspect could make for a unique (and even socially relevant!) game. If I could I would give Yeaster a million dollars to hire a game design studio like Climax Group, so that they stop ruining Silent Hill for one thing, but also so that they could buoy up this game with the kind of presentation it is so painfully lacking.

Rating:
1.5/5

The Good:
- Reality show theme.
- Large cast of characters, particularly the Society members.

The Bad:
- Coma-inducing dungeon design
- Ludicrously difficult monsters
- Too long!

Most bewildering spell description:
Sparkle: "Heals medium amount of HP all one of us."

Most incongruous charset-faceset association:
Talk to the RTP ghosts in the Celestial city, and the faceset is ... the RTP skeleton? What?

Dungeon that crawls out of the dirt:
Leanna's hill. An outdoor, field-themed dungeon. Hence, no hallways.

Who would voice Ron Johnson in the Disney-Pixar adaptation of this game?
Michael Cera

Who would play Ron Johnson in the Uwe Boll adaptation of this game?
Michael Cera

Whose career should end?
Michael Cera