Homework Salesman (HS) is the second game developed together by the team of Diedrupo and Ronove of Star Stealing Prince fame, assisted by the talents of Rhyme and Archeia_Nessiah. The HS project is one of the more ambitious projects that I’m aware of at RMN, since it is conceived to be incorporate many features that taken together try to give the player the experience of a real life simulation, which few games here have tried to accomplish. The first chapter out of four planned was first made available for the recent Release Something Weekend. This review covers version 1.0l. How successfully is this first installment in living up to the promise of providing a real life experience? Bear with me as I go in depth.

Story/Plot:

The game starts with Reniat, a girl coming of age, returning to her home village after being away at a boarding school located in the Kingdom’s castle, where she trained to be an adventurer. She finds out that many people have been forced to leave due to two major events that occurred in her absence: a nearby mine that was the lifeblood of the economy has been shut down and is now infested with monsters; and, the Kingdom and bordering tribes have declared war, resulting in townsmen of arms bearing age being conscripted. Her father, a retired adventurer himself, issues her a challenge: to use her training to turn around the destiny of the village. The events that occur in Chapter 1 revolve around figuring out what’s going out at the caves where the mine is located.





Characters/Dialogue:


The characters in the game are very unique, given that each has its own life story, personality, skills, likes and dislikes. The only permanent party member is Reniat. She serves as the default party leader. In Chapter 1, there are up to three other recruitable party members: one of them begrudgingly joins early on, while the two others come along for the right price as hired mercenaries.

Non-player Characters (NPCs) are of two kinds: those that you can become friendlier (or less, in some cases) with by either talking/giving gifts to them or completing quests for them; and, those that you can’t befriend, but with whom you can still interact with, sometimes with unexpected results. As your relationships blossom and literally reach another level, certain events can be triggered that can have a wide range of effects, from cut scenes uncovering more on the NPC’s background to new items or services becoming available.




Give people gifts they dislike, get bad reactions.


Everything in the game seems to have been written with great care and though. I wasn’t able to find any misspells, typos or grammar issues. Dialogue is cleverly written, and, I feel, really reflects the personalities of the characters.


Gameplay:


Gameplay in Homework Salesman has quite a few aspects that need to be mastered and understood. Thankfully, an offline as well as an in-game manual are included. Whatever is not covered within them, the player can usually be learn by intuition or in the worst case scenario, trial and error.


Quests

While the player is free to do as he/she chooses with no time limits making the game a somewhat open-ended one, the main plot can be advanced by completing mandatory story quests that are given by certain NPCs and generally reporting back to them once they are done. There are also optional sidequests that appear daily on bulletin boards in town or are acquired once certain events occur, that vary from fetch quests to monster hunts and can be abandoned at any time if the player so chooses, although, in my case, I always saw them to completion. Completing a quest results in experience being earned, although sometimes you also get friendship points from the NPC requesting it, monetary or item rewards. The details of the currently active and completed quests can be accessed in a “Journal” that gets updated in real time, a handy feature that’s well implemented.


Time/Weather

Time passes by during the game counted in terms of days, each which has a defined number of Action Points (APs). APs are consumed in different amounts when different actions are performed. I found it puzzling that certain actions your party performs don’t actually cost APs, while the opposite was true for others. When the APs reach zero, most of the time, Reniat is automatically warped back to her room to rest until the next day. Another important thing to note is that certain events are set to happen on particular days, sometimes depending on the player’s game progress. Finally, each day will have a particular kind of weather that can affect the number of monsters encountered in different areas, the amount of non-permanent NPCs and their locations, and, special event frequency.


Crafting

Crafting involves one of the six possible activities: cooking, blacksmithing, tailoring, enchanting, alchemy and construction. To craft something, the party must go to the station corresponding to the activity related to the item, have the corresponding recipe, necessary ingredients and required profession skill level. Regarding the ingredients in stock, the game does an excellent job of pooling all the different inventories that a player has available, including those from the current party members, party storage as well as storage boxes. Regarding the skill level of the professions, it is curious to note that tailoring and construction were combined as one under profession (Tailor) for the purpose of accumulating skill level, while each of the other crafting activities has its own corresponding profession for that purpose. Skill points earned by crafting an item depend on the current level of the profession and the level required to craft it. APs are consumed and depend on the current level of the profession used for crafting.

There is a slight hitch in the way the APs are accounted for that works mostly to the player’s advantage: the skill points earned are added before the APs consumed are deducted; if the profession skill level is increased, the cost of crafting in APs could be actually be lower than originally “required”. However, the problem with this is that you can only craft an item is you have at least the “required” cost in APs, rather than what could be the actual one.


Battles

Battles are usually triggered as touch encounters. Whether the monsters roaming around a screen will chase or flee from your party generally depends on the difference between the levels of the monsters and party,. Battles use the default turn-based combat, consisting of choosing actions for each party member, confirming your choices and watch the turn play out. Alternatively, there’s an Auto-Battle option for most battles as well, where each party member uses their default melee attack. A couple of interesting points about this latter option are: the choice can be stopped at any time by pressing an appropriate button and each party member targets a particular enemy during their turn, so that not all of the attacks will necessary target the same enemy as they would in other games. Finally, there’s the option of fleeing the battle, which works all the time, but results in a very high AP cost compared to toughing it out.
Even though the battle system seems straightforward, there are many features that make it different, in some cases unique, from those found in other games:

- There are items that can be consumed before fights that can provide temporary stat boosts.

- Default melee attacks or certain physical or element skills have a weapon health cost associated with them. Because of this, it is necessary to repair the weapons to restore their health. If the equipped weapon’s health is reduced to zero, the weapon breaks and is lost forever.

- Another interesting feature that results in interesting tactical choices during battle is that you can choose to “Equip” another weapon before choosing an action for that party member, allowing you to simply avoid breaking your currently equipped weapon, or, better yet, access different skills or enchantments that become available with the new one.

- Each party member can choose to use an item during their turn, but only from their own, personal inventory. Having the right items on the right party members becomes paramount in mini-boss and boss fights.

- For a skill to be selectable in battle by a party member it generally requires them to have a particular weapon equipped and having the appropriate weapon health, technical precision (TP) or magic points (MP) available.

- Most skills have a certain level which improves the more often it is used.

- Magical attacks can cause critical damage.

- Certain attacks can cause undocumented status ailments that are keys to victory, especially for boss fights.

- If a party member becomes “Fallen” during a fight, after the enemy is defeated, this status disappears and the member “revives” with minimal health.

- If the whole party becomes “Fallen” during a battle there’s no dreaded “Game Over”’; instead, Reniat will reappear in her room.

- Experience and levels are the same for all party members.

- Some of the encounters are not your typical fights.

- In addition to item drops, most battles result in loot that can be sold or used for other purposes.


Graphics/Sound:


Chapter 1 mostly uses nice, custom, non RTP graphics with lots of detail. I particularly liked the glowing lighting effect used in the mines, which gives them, a somewhat trippy, surreal feel. I really enjoyed seeing all the little details of the items located in the different houses in town. I found that facesets used during dialogue expressively depicted the feelings of the person speaking very well. Finally, I found all the sprites used, even those of the enemies, had a certain unique, innocent charm to them.
The background music is non-RTP and I feel was appropriately chosen to set the mood for each of the areas/scenes of the game. Sounds in the game are used successfully in the game as auditory cues.


A Few Suggestions for Improvement:


- For the animation when mining, I would like to see a hammer rather than a pickaxe being used. I noticed that the correct animation was used during the game introduction as well as a couple of cutscenes.

- Likewise, for the animation when chopping wood, I would like to see an axe being used.

- Very rarely, the randomly placed collectibles that appear on a screen can occupy the same tile of another one (when you try to get it, you get two different animations, one per item collected) or one occupied by a static NPC (in this case, the item’s sprite is on top of the NPC’s and first, you get the conversation followed by the item collecting animation).

- It is possible to walk into and, sometimes beyond, some of the banners hanging on the wall in the two areas before the final boss.

- If you defeat the final boss during a stormy day (not sure if this applies to rainy as well), you get rain in the indoors scene that follows.

- One thing that could be explained in the manuals is what statuses mean, especially the negative ones.

- For optional quests involving items, any item that can’t be bought should be considered for them to give those quests a wider range of variety.

- The biggest issues I have with the game are regarding items and how inventories are managed. One of the more confusing things regarding items is that while they occupy one inventory slot, they can actually be more than one of that item. There are a few problems with how that currently works: the only way to “withdraw” one of them at a time from a slot is to use it in or out of battle; if you choose to Transfer to any party member or Trash something from a slot, all the contents of the slot are affected; for quests involving items, the amount of the item you have collected so far is equal to the number of slots with that item, rather than actual total in stock (as a side note, I find it strange that some Cooking recipes yield 2 items).

The system for managing party and box storage is another thing that I’m confused about. Not its mechanics per se, but the choices made. Most important of all, I wonder why the system for the individual party members’ inventories wasn’t chosen for them. The biggest pet peeve I have regarding the current system for storage that you can’t trash anything directly from those inventories. As it is, you either have to move it first to a party member’s inventory before being able to trash it, or, worse, if all party members’ inventories are full, you would have to empty a party member’s inventory slot by trashing or using items in it even before doing the earlier. Also, you don’t get an item description nor can you access one from it. I think the storages’ system should be the same as the other one with the same menu options, although it wouldn’t necessarily need the item subcategories.


Conclusion:


I found Chapter 1 of Homework Salesman to live up to the promise of a real life simulation in a fun, addictive and entertaining way. There are quite a few hidden surprises. I would say it has one of the highest replay values for a game currently in RMN. Personally, I have finished Chapter 1 over 5 times, the last being a speed-run of 11 days. In spite of that, I feel there are still things I haven’t experienced yet. There are enough loose ends left in this Chapter that really make me look forward to Chapter 2’s release. I definitely recommend anybody play Chapter 1! I think you’ll also be hooked …