As a note, this is a review I originally wrote and posted on my personal blog, which is typically read by exactly one online friend and involves brief reviews of the games I've been playing lately. The review was written in terms of the broad range of games available in the commercial market, but the star-score I'm giving it on here is in context of the type of games posted on rpgmaker.net.

*****

This one's another free game that was tossed in the RPG Maker Humble Bundle. I actually skipped over a couple others after getting a little ways into them. So many games, so little time (especially when it comes to RPGs, they're time vacuums :P). But this one held my interest long enough to complete it.

Mechanics-wise, it's a fairly standard JRPG for the most part. It plays a lot with status conditions, having some skills that slather tons of them on a target (or all targets!) at once. They also have a some items that act as skills, and a few of them are reusable as many times as you like. I found the Child's Coronet, which inflicts Attack and Speed-reducing conditions on an enemy for a few turns, to be indispensible for surviving some of the bosses. Considering it's something you pick up by thoroughly exploring the town where you start the game, I have to wonder what I'd have done if I'd been the sort to pursue the meat of the story first. -.-; Finally, some of the skills in the game use not MP, but IP, which I assume stands for Injury Points because it accumulates when a character takes damage. It's a rather interesting mechanic, giving you a little more power in situations where things are tough enough to drain your HP quickly.

As hinted at above, some of the bosses in this game are extremely tough. In a way I like that, it makes the game something you actually have to figure out and optimize in order to win instead of just an activity that will go slower if you don't do it right. On the other hand, the fact that there's little margin for error means there's also little margin for bad luck, and until you've tried and died enough times to figure out little things like, "Oh, I can actually stop the boss from getting two actions every turn by inflicting a speed-reducing status" and "Ah, he does his super-whammy attack every five turns, I need to brace my party for that", it feels like you're just getting unfairly trounced with nothing you can do about it. :P Definitely a lesson I need to bear strongly in mind for my own game design, communicate to the player what they're doing wrong (or at least that there is something they can do to improve their chances besides go grind against mooks for a couple hours).

The story takes place in a world of magic-as-science similar to that of In Search of Immortality, although it's not as humorous. It follows the adventure of the prince of a small kingdom on a snow-covered island, as he discovers that the tranquility of his kingdom rests on a spell that his parents placed to keep it essentially ageless and tied to his own well-being. A lot of effort was poured into the graphics of the game, which evoke an old-time, paper-rough book illustration feel with a bit of anime influence. Most of the game has rather subdued, solemn feel, in keeping with the snowy setting where it takes place. It definitely seems like one of the more serious and well-crafted RPG Maker games, perhaps even more so than the commercial ones I've seen.

Bottom line? If you like RPGs enough to spend the requisite time on them, this is a pretty good one, and yeah, it's free, so check it out.