My Home Town

My Home Town ( ぼくのすむまち) was initially created for the mobile phone market but has been translated both from the original Japanese, with all the expected Engrish translational errors, and into RPGVX, though on first glance, and indeed with a prolonged exposure the look of the game is more in line with a RPG2K3 look and feel with a very retro style.

That being said, all of the graphics are custom, all of them, tile-sets, faces, sprites and battlers. In the case of the latter they are heavily pixellated but you’ve got to give points for effort, if not actual achievement.

Still the game is set, predictably, in a small Japanese town populated by an odd mix of prepubescent school children (which make up your party of adventurers), anthropomorphic talking animals, a couple of authority figures and a nun who occasionally turns into a monster for no reason.


Ah, the universal kindness of children

So our main character with a penchant for yellow hats, Hajime is universally disliked by his classmates, or at the very least by the popular ones, and generally ignored by his teachers. Sounds like the recipe for a budding serial killer to me, or within the frame of an RPG, hero material in the making. Into this lonely boy's life comes Madoka, and a friendship is formed, over little more it seems than the fact they both appear to have eyes that take up half their face, but when you've been acknowledged as a freak by everyone you meet finding something in common is a good enough reason to form a partnership.

So soon after our dynamic duo join forces one of the other children in the town, Ryuji, goes missing in the sewer, ditched by a group of fair-weather friends and left to his fate in the disease and monster ridden darkness, so of course off you go to rescue him, playing truant from school in the process.

The sewers, just like all the maps incorporate a handy directional arrow to show some of the pathways available to the characters, however not all paths are shown and there are a few 'secret' passage ways that can only be reached by traversing tunnels and pipes rather than following the walkways that rise just above the flowing, though apparently remarkably clean, sewers.


Dr. Moreau must be around here somewhere.

Encounters are random, and set just a little too frequently, but as the drops are nonexistent and the experience and money relatively low the frequency is a blessing since it allows you to build up enough Yen to get those all important upgrades. The battle system is front view turn-based without any customisation, but the rampant Engrish does offer a little bit of unintended humour here with such well named skills as 'numb off' for the removal of paralysis and Mudball, which darkens all enemies, one assumes, correctly, that's blind, though I imagine being hit with a mudball would both darken your colour and your mood. Though I do like 'tailwind' and 'headwind' as a speed and defence buff and de-buff respectively

So after traversing the sewers to some jaunty tunes, which like the graphics are both retro in feel and custom in design and wiping out such monsters as electric clouds and sobbing ghosts, then again if I was stuck underground in a sewer with midi music playing all day I'd probably sob too, you come face to face with the creature who took your classmate and soon to be friend.

…and then of course, there is a secret base.


All your base are belong to us…you know I just had to.

After a fight and an explanation, you bid a fond farewell to Eidos, the misunderstood 'kidnapper' and head back to school to find that Ryuji's mother is on a rampage and your nonchalant and frankly delinquent teacher is the target of her fury. Once Ryuji is returned safe and sound she calms down but the upshot is that your teacher gets suspended, for basically being a lazy sod that didn’t bother to look for either the missing child or the other two who played truant to look for him. This works pretty well for most people as he really wasn't a very good teacher, but the teacher's pet has other ideas and convinces the class that none of you are heroes and that Ryuji's disappearance and rescue was all a plot to get the teacher suspended, and that you are actually bad people. So off you go up the mountain to find the now suspended teacher and try to put things right.

Unfortunately the jerk of a teacher has decided that all of his problems are due to a poor little balloon on a string monster called Snicker and sets out to throw him off the top of a mountain. Luckily for Snicker whilst he may be small and frankly funny looking, defenceless he is not and he kicks the teacher to the curb and scares off his pet and cronies in the process and you get to waltz in and be the hero you truly are. You free the teacher, get Snicker and Eidos to become friends, get the teacher unsuspended and have everybody recognise the heroes you are in a heartfelt ending cut scene. Well I assume it’s a heartfelt ending cut scene but unfortunately it's the only part of the game the developers never got around to translating so it's just a series of unicode boxes as the heroes and their erstwhile nasty classmates reconcile.

Still the game does end on a high note


I couldn’t agree more.

Which did make me smile at the very least. My Home Town isn’t a great game, it needs a serious edit and a clean translation, a coherent story with some plausible reasoning and motivation for the characters, beyond the normal level of all school children are cruel that is, a better balance in battles and a much lower encounter rate. But it did have an almost childlike charm to it. This game never professed to be anything more than it was. A short story set in a small town with the message of acceptance and friendship as its driving themes, in that it succeeded if not admirably then at least with enthusiasm.