Secret of Stormlot

I didn't know what to expect when I first downloaded this title; going by the screenshots it looked like it'd be your standard RM2K3 game, and in many aspects this was proven true.

However, there's a lot to like in this game, and when it comes to every aspect that is created to make a game, each one has something to like.


Story
Our story starts off with a man named Daryan, who returns home to his daughter Lyra after the completion of a special mission. Little did I know that Daryan would be the man who is murderd as described on the gamepage of this game, felled by a demi-human seeking revenge for his brother. The demi-human then steals Lyra away which helps set off the chain of events that gets our story moving.

It's after this we meet the real main character of our story, Fralon, getting intimately aquainted with monsters in order to put his training into real practice and prove his worth as a soldier. Fralon's a prince, king Al-kazar's son, and when it comes to the main plot, the story focuses on the missions and growth of Fralon as a soldier.

The game completely drops the intro's plot point until the very end, which has a very cliche reveal that once you see coming, will make you wonder how you didn't see it sooner, as it's one of the oldest cliche's in the book. (obviously not going to give it away; see for yourself if you're interested) Once the reveal is made and all hell breaks loose...the game abruptly ends. This isn't so bad though, since there's a sequel that continues where this game left off. (Another fairly long completed game at that) So if by the end you want to know more, there's much more available to you.

Personally, my favorite parts of the game's story comes from moments sprinkled in between the missions where character stories take center stage. An easy example of what I mean comes from two separate flashbacks in the game that deals with backstories for Fralon and his sister, and another for their childhood friend Razor, who despite being the most full of himself I've seen in a RM playable character, ended up being my favorite of the bunch.

Recruiting characters also tended to have interesting little distractions, like a woman mourning her husband, to a rap battle (seriously) played straight. You'll never really feel particularly close to them, about as close as you would to secondary Suikoden characters actually, but none of them are carbon copies of another in personality.


Gameplay
Let me start off by listing off what I consider the good points of the game's mechanics.

Regular battles are very standard, down to the small use of status effects, little enemy variety, average skill variety, random battles, and an attack button that loses usefulness with time. After knowing that, what could possibly be good about them?

Before that, let me elaborate on the two common forms of normal enemy combat. Battles are either standalone, in that the challenge is mainly about each and every battle on its own. So enemies kick your ass each time, but the upside is that you're usually healed afterwards so each time the strategy is to go all out and memorize attack patterns. The other form of normal battles has them fuse with the dungeon itself, not giving you ways to heal outside of items and sometimes heal/save points. In this case the enemies are only meant to scratch you, which amounts to a lot of damage over time if left unchecked.

I tend to prefer the first option, and the second option is usually much tougher to balance as each side grows stronger. Secret of Stormlot employs the second method, and does so in a way that I really enjoyed. It reminds me a lot of earlier final fantasies, where the only way to heal completely besides liberal item use, was by using a tent at a save point. This keeps you on your toes and stops you from fleeing every battle to later grind at a heal point. (making this style of normal enemies like the first option, except much easier since enemies only scratch you)

The balance of the normal enemies, especially in the beginning, is superb. People who don't like to use items in RPGs will really start to sweat by the end of the first dungeon, but the point is that even then it's possible to survive. The developer says the game is a lot like Suikoden, but besides recruitable characters and upgradable companion weapons, this game reminded me mostly of Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior/Quest. It's a good thing the random battles mostly did their job, because there's quite a lot of them.

This game also uses save points (if that wasn't obvious from what I just typed up) and they are spread at good locations, but sometimes there would only be one for the entire dungeon; right before a boss. Many people tend to hate the use of save points in this way, but with the battle method chosen, this is really the best thing to do IMO. So long as the player has the time, but dungeons are never long enough to make you worry about lost progress.

Here we get to things of not that I consider either average or something that got in the way of enjoyment.

On the flipside of the normal battles, the enemy types rarely went beyond two unique enemies throughout a whole dungeon area, so enemy variety is actually lower than JRPGs of yesteryear, which makes it easy to figure out what an enemy will do, but doesn't do much to enhancing battles. Not to mention an enemy usually only has one or two skills. This isn't so bad for regular battles as they move quickly, but even bosses only ever have two skills.

And this leaves me to the worst part about combat in this game, the boss fights. You'll seriously go through one or more of them where the boss will only use one skill, which happens to be the AOE skill that kills everyone in two hits. So your choices were to either grind (which wasn't needed for normal enemies), or keep your sister with you at all times so she could heal everyone. That's all she ever got to do, and it got really annoying near the end when the bosses grew difficult. (basically meaning their damage output was greater than my heal output, so it came down to luck.)

I wish I didn't have to, but I also have to put the huge amount of interact-able objects in this category too. It was awesome actually being able to interact with the objects around me to collect items...until you realize that if an object is the same as the last one you investigated, it will have Fralon saying the same lines. So, for example, in the castle of Stormlot, when you see several boxes and barrels, they're going to have the same event tied to each of them unless there's an item inside. (usually a stat booster or healing item)

Some normal NPC houses had like ten barrels in them, with no items, each forcing Fralon to say the same three sentences about how empty they are. That gets old super fast, to the point if there weren't any Gold Coins in them, (think Mini Medals in Dragon Quest) I would have forgone searching for items altogether.

Another thing is the large amount of characters to recruit, most of which you can't use unless you grind like crazy, since they start at half or less of your current party's level. There will be times when you need to use Fralon alone, this is possibly one of the worst parts of the game, since instead of taking the party members out manually, you'll be forced to go back to your base and talk to each one separately in order to have them leave the party. This is especially weird when you have to do it in the middle of a tournament that should be starting soon.


Graphics
First off, there are a ton of different types of faces, even a face maker face, that rarely fits the character sprite it's supposed to represent. In most cases it can work, but some, like Drakes, don't match their character at all save for hair color.

As for maps, the game uses a lot of RTP in the beginning, with a lot of rips later on for both indoor and outdoor maps. The outdoor maps were usually solid and a joy to move through, heightened by what is probably the best minimap on the map I've seen in a RM game. I was impressed by the minimap on large dungeon maps, which made it easier to move through their somewhat labyrinth nature.

Besides later dungeon maps, indoor maps are a different story. Usually being very empty except for the few crates and barrels that cause Fralon to say how empty they are.

Here's a couple examples of my favorites:

Not so bad, but that's mostly attributed to the pretty, yet clashing with all prior maps, chipset.


This map actually comes later in the game than the previous one.

At the very least, no indoor map is lacking in different shape than the average square map of most RPGs, which puts points in its favor. Also, so it doesn't seem like I'm picking on the mapping too much, here's one of the later outdoor maps:

It makes you wonder how they could be from the same game.

Other than that, most of the monsters are standard RTP; the character battlers are actually edited from their charactersets, and are my favorite aspect of the game graphically, despite having very stiff movements most of the time. It made each fight much more enjoyable to me to see the same character in and out of battle. I'm one of the odd ones who prefer the smaller characters in a sideview battle system. Of course this also means that enemies are huge in comparison, just like Final Fantasy games.


Sound
Sound effects are standard fare for the most part, while the music is a cross between RTP and Midi versions of video game songs. I pretty much recognized each one, many from the catalog of Square titles, with a couple cool surprises. My personal favorite was hearing This Machine from Sonic Heroes. Sonic strikes again when it comes to the title music, which I liked enough to listen to outside the game.

Although the songs were recognizable, they were mostly used well and the midi nature of it had me coming out of the game only for a moment to register what the song was from, and didn't ruin immersion so much. One song that didn't seem very fitting was the Adventure rtp theme being played during a few throne room events. It grows on you with use, but it's pretty jarring to start.

I should also point out that for most bosses, they share the normal battle music with the regular mobs, so the battle bgm you'll hear the most will definitely get old in time.


Bugs for the Dev
♦ "money greedy fool" would sound better as "money hungry fool" as it is the sentence sounds awkward. There's a few other awkward phrasings in the game, like "on second thoughts", but it's all few and far between.
♦ Just like with phrasing, there's a few grammar missteps as well, like the common mistake of using your instead of the correct you're for you are. Every now and then you'll also see an S missing the needed apostrophe. The misspellings are never anything too major, for example you have "ingredients" spelled as ingrediants. And with the above, all of these aren't so close together to prohibit the enjoyment of the story.
♦ Sharna's side walk is wierd since her head stays the same throughout, usually a character's head will bob up and down to convey more movement than just static leg/arm movement. Her other directions do this, so her side movements should too.
♦ The first chest with a Mys Seed says its a Mnd Seed, but every other time you find one it uses the correct name. (Mys Seed)
♦ Sole should have his hair covering one eye to match his faceset more. There's actually a few oddities about the facesets, like the clashing and all, but I'm sure you know that.
♦ In the castle, exiting through the right stairs from the topmost outside of the castle will send me to the stairs on the left side.


Stray Observations
♠ I guessed 17 on a whim and Suzy said I was right! That was a good feeling since I wasn't paying attention at all.
♠ Make sure if you plan on playing this game, that you read the explanation on how to use the blacksmith, because you can't upgrade off hand weapons. They need to be equipped on the first slot or else you're just wasting money.
♠ The Earth Spirit twist was awesome.
♠ There's several NPCs in the game named Dorothy; was this intentional?
♠ I wish I could have recruited Jury.
♠ I didn't touch upon it in the Story section, but if you like stories about someone harboring a darkness inside of them, you'll like where the story goes.

Despite its many flaws and shortcomings, I had tons of fun playing this game. I can't exactly quantify why, besides the fact that I actually wanted to finish it, not because of my arbitrary rule to finish a game before reviewing it, but because I was having fun. I enjoyed the situations the characters found themselves in, and when I have the time, although I don't know when, I'm actually looking forward to checking out the finished sequel.

Hmm...I might finally be getting the hang of this whole "review" thing.