Little Wing Guy plays Adventure Ace an RPGMaker VX game made by a lot of people. Demo version, but the only release we are likely to see.

Why should you play this game?

- A totally unique game here on RMN, in both terms of game play and ambition. It’s worth your time to get a breath of fresh air from saving the world.
- A lot of talented developers contributed to this game, and it’s incredibly impressive what the team managed to create in a short space of time.
- Although some of the mechanics and information could be displayed clearer, it is quick and easy to pick up and start playing. The game wants you to be playing as quick as you do.

Why should you give it a miss?

- It’s a 100% menu based game. If you’re expecting to walk around the base and interact with NPCs you will be disappointed.
- Although it’s perfectly playable, it does have a few bugs and hiccups that crop up from time to time which may force you to select the wrong decisions.
- Unfortunately you’re never going to get a resolution to this game. It’s painfully short and the assumption from most of the developers is that it will never be completed.



This is a Secret Santa review for Psy_wombats. I’ve been somewhat of a Psy_wombats stalker, having played most of his games already. I was drawn to review Adventure Ace over anything else, firstly because I had no idea he was a lead developer, and secondly because surprisingly this game didn’t have a review. This game has well over a 1000 downloads and yet no one has really given any in depth feedback. That sparked my curiosity. I did a bit of investigation on the game page and it’s unfortunate this game is practically dead. I normally wouldn’t review, let alone score a game that isn’t complete, but in this case it feels appropriate. Adventure Ace is far from your everyday RPG you see on RMN (except for that fact that it’s doomed to wander the halls of development forever). This is a purely menu based strategy game in which you are tasked to bring back a museum from the brink of bankruptcy. Ironically, it’s the player that will feel the most robbed.

Adventure Ace doesn’t really have a story to tell. There’s a very brief opening which serves to set the scene and motivate you to begin, after that it relies only on its game play to carry you through and hold your interest. I liked that the game didn’t try and bog you down with pointless back story and cut scenes. This isn’t a game that needed to be story heavy; it would have hurt the pace. It’s especially important because the accessibility and swift nature compliments multiple plays through, which I assume the game was originally intended for. At the very beginning you’re introduced to Maria Kelley, a character who seems to be important, but after the initial conversation she is no different from the rest of the recruits, and actually you can fire her on day one and never see her again. The introduction does state that she’s there to help and any questions you need you can ask her, but unfortunately you can’t do any of that. Apart from the recruits, the game effectively has zero characters, as the person you’re playing as is never seen nor has any spoken dialogue - a decision that makes a great deal of sense so you can really feel like you’re the character here, and it’s really you making these choices. Still, I certainly wouldn’t have minded if Maria Kelley was a permanent adventurer or even just a museum curator that stuck around. Having one character a little fleshed out or with a real purpose wouldn’t have hurt the game in the slightest. Maybe should could have popped up from time to time to give general tips, perhaps a progress report at the end of each month. When you’re on the treasure guild main menu there is a bit of dead space where it simply shows the room you’re in, nothing wrong with that because it means it’s not cluttered, but certainly there is plenty of room for her to appear - even if it’s just every now and then. You wouldn’t have to mash the enter button for her to talk, or sit though the dialogue, she could be there to listen to if you wanted.



Although generally the characters are treated as nothing more than a means to an end, there are still things you need to pay attention to when choosing adventurers. They each have five stats; Bravery, Luck, Acrobatics, Charisma and Wit. When choosing a new mission from the list, there is a mission type and a brief summary of what the mission entails. It’s never spelt out to you how you should approach these missions. I would simply read the mission description and try and figure out what stat would be needed the most, then send a recruit with the highest number in that area. There is so much emphasis put on the world, where the missions take place and where the treasures are from, but what about the recruits themselves? For example, what about changing one of those five stats to their country of origin instead? There are stats that ultimately seem arbitrary and could have been conveyed to the player in a more sensible way. For example, a mission success rate could be slightly improved when you send someone from Europe back into Europe. It’s not necessarily changing a stat, but it is displaying it in a way that makes more sense for the theme of the game. Until a recruit returns there is no way of knowing the chances of whether the mission will fail or not, but I assume there are some “behind the scenes” percentages governing the success rate. The developers must have decided at some point to keep this unknown to the player, but I think there’s a couple of different ways this could have been approached. As I said before, Maria Kelley could have been made into a permanent assistant or curator at the museum. As you’re about to send someone on a mission she could have piped up with her own opinion of the candidate and how they might perform, it could have been rather vague just to guide you and give a helpful hint - or it could have been rather telling. It could have even been done in a straight up accurate percentage giving the player all the knowledge and letting them decide for themselves. It’s important to remember that showing an accurate percentage isn’t a win button for a game like this. I can think of plenty of tactical and strategy games that provide the exact hit chance of an attack, or the amount of damage it will do. It doesn’t break the game at all; it’s part of the bigger picture. Having that knowledge and choosing what to do with that information will provide fairness when you mess up and realise the game didn’t hide things from you; it was you that took the risk. Finally, you could have given the decision to the player themselves. Introducing something like a Beginner mode or Challenge mode where this particular information can be toggled on and off. I don’t think that hiding that information is outright wrong or bad design, it can totally work, but it does take a layer of icing off the cake. You have to be careful about have many layers you take off. No one wants to be left with the plain sponge.



To hire new recruits and accept missions you need to spend money. The game starts you with a decent amount to get you going, but the only way to actually increase your funds beyond that is by collecting treasures received from certain missions. This also adds to your collection value and is your main and only objective of the game. What the game doesn’t tell you is that you must display your treasures in the museum first before they start generating income. You must manually set them up, and of course the earlier on you do this; the better it will be for you. The main problem here is that there are no tutorials in the game, and normally I wouldn’t care since that’s not uncommon for a game on RMN, but it does create some issues for Adventure Ace. Most of us are familiar with the engines and an overwhelming majority of games play quite similar to one another. If it isn’t already clear, Adventure Ace is a very original game with its own rules and systems created just for this project. I suppose the word tutorial puts a lot of people off. You download the game and you just want to get playing - that’s fine, because a tutorial doesn’t have to be forced on a player, it can be viewed at their own leisure or it can take the form of a simple instruction manual. Even if this wasn’t included in the game itself, something could have been included as a Read Me file or some sort of information on the game page itself. From the menu you can select to view a “Legend” and that’s rather helpful because it tells you what certain things are such as; mission types, obtainable prizes and objectives. It’s still missing some important information though. I played through the game twice fully, and reloaded certain saves to play through for this review and there are still things I don’t fully understand. I honestly don’t think it’s me being stupid or missing obvious clues either.

For example; what is fame? What does it do exactly? Certainly I can infer what it does, but there isn’t anything concrete to back that up, I’m just assuming and hoping. Some developers shy away from hand holding but telling us things like that doesn’t insult the player’s intelligence because; it’s totally unique to your game, it allows us to make an informed decision and viewing it could be optional anyway. The actual objective of the game reads “Raise the worth of your collections as high as you can before the year is over”. So how important is fame in the grand scheme of things then? We don’t know. Can the objective be reached without any fame? We don’t know that either. Completing missions that grant you treasures also generate your income and add to your collection worth; therefore it makes sense to prioritize those missions instead of fame, surely? Again, we don’t actually know that for certain. If we don’t have all the relevant information in some accessible way, then we can’t fairly play a game about decision making properly. Now, excuse me while I go sign a bunch of forms without reading them first.

The menus generally perform very well, and the overall look is clear and concise. I also thought it had a great opening. It was simple, to the point and accompanied by well put together sound effects. Each recruit has a lovingly crafted original portrait (albeit not enough), and it’s easy to absorb the information that game does put in front of you. The UI is pretty much everything you could hope for, it focuses on usability instead of over the top or flashy effects. It is prone to some slowness - but nothing that really hampered the experience for me. However, there a few glitches in the menus, and honestly they didn’t bother me too much at first as none are game breaking, but on the odd occasion I ended up making irreversible choices by accident. If you want to check out the special skills of the available recruits in the afternoon club, sometimes the cursor vanishes, if you hit enter after that you then recruit them without meaning to. There’s no such thing as a back button if you want to reverse something quickly; such as recalling an adventurer before the day is over. I wouldn’t imagine it would be too difficult to add some sort of “reset the day button” so you can go back to the start of the day and undo all your choices. If you hire a new recruit by mistake, you can’t get simply get rid of them to get your money back, so I quickly learned to save constantly.

I did find that the menus make you jump through a couple of unnecessary hoops. Firstly, when it comes to showcasing treasures at the museum, all treasures you obtain come from somewhere in the world, and when you choose a mission it will show you which country the mission will take place. Sometimes I wasn’t always sure exactly where a treasure came from, so I would just end up hitting every continent until I found the treasure I just obtained. I couldn’t really figure out the significance of treasures being categorised by location, I assume this was again, a planned feature for the future but as it stands currently I feel a single list would have sufficed. Secondly, there’s no way of knowing if any new recruits want to be hired unless you actually check. To be fair, it’s far from a massive pain to go and look but you end up getting into a routine of checking constantly just in case you miss someone. From my understanding all potential recruits are randomised each day, and some days you don’t get any available to hire anyway. I certainly wouldn’t have minded some sort of notification pop up or icon next to it just to give an “at a glance” view that there’s potential recruits without manually going in each time and seeing no one. Eventually, recruiting new adventurers loses some if it’s impact. Although the artwork for each character is beautifully done, there’s only about five different looks for them and none of them have any different or customisable abilities. This is clearly something that was planned, as it is almost entirely implanted in the code so it’s a bit of a shame it didn’t manage to make the cut before the release, I was definitely starting to appreciate the benefits it could of brought for that extra layer of strategy. In summary, I almost feel like I could delete this paragraph as I realise it borders on nitpicking, but in a game that is essentially one constant menu, you would expect it to perform a bit tighter.



I didn’t particularly feel like my decisions in this game carry a lot of weight and the risk of losing money didn’t matter much to me. You can only lose money in two ways; by accepting missions and hiring new adventurers. Firstly, new recruits are simply a one off purchase, once you have them they’re yours forever. In a lot of ways, this does work initially because it is an investment and a decision to make at the time, but it’s only something to consider once. For example; you can fire any of the recruits you want, and even leave yourself with none - but there’s absolutely no reason to do so. You don’t get any of money back that you originally spent on them, and now you can go on less missions, it’s a lose/lose situation. I personally thought it would have been better to hire new adventurers on a daily wage instead of a one off cost. That way, if you find yourself spending too much too quickly you can fire a few adventurers until you’ve built up a better income (they could even charge more of less depending on their skills and how much they like you). But then, how about when you fire someone they won’t ever want to work with you again? So using someone in that way could also be risky. It’s this kind of “every choice has a reward and a consequence” that could have made the game flourish. If you’ve ever played XCOM Enemy Unknown then you’ll know what I mean. In that game, things such as building your base in one area means you can’t build somewhere else, when you choose a mission you can’t help out two countries in crisis at the same time - but if you planned it better then maybe only one of those countries would have been in crisis in the first place. It’s every perfectionist’s nightmare because you can’t achieve 100% on everything every time, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t make you feel invested in every decision you make. Only you get yourself into the mess that you’re in. If only Adventure Ace could make you think twice every time you were about to advance the day, just to make sure you did the right thing.

Secondly, a mission is only really complete when it was a success. That might sound like a redundant thing to say, but let me explain: You’re going to get two outcomes, either the mission was a success, you reap the benefits and then it disappears forever. If however, you happen to fail the mission, all that happens is it just reappears in the list ready to be taken on again infinitely until someone finally clears it. The drawback being spending the mission fee and having a recruit sent away for as long as the mission lasts again. In that sense you can’t really miss anything, so it plays it a little safe there. I don’t inherently have a problem with that, but failing a mission is more of a minor nuisance than it could have been. For example, if you can’t afford to redo mission yet because of a lack of funds, you can just skip a couple of days until you have enough. As I said before, money only decreases in two ways, the passage of time itself does nothing to decrease your funds. Perhaps a mission could reappear after failing but the rewards were reduced for future attempts? That way it puts pressure on you to get it right the first time, or perhaps they are time sensitive? A rival guild of treasure hunters could steal your business if you’re not careful. In addition to that, there’s no mission log to speak of, so if you weren’t paying enough attention you could quite easily send the same person on the mission again, and of course, they would fail again. Also, because of the length of the game, and the way that income works, it’s almost impossible to tell how difficult the game actually is. On one hand I felt the game became easier as I played because now had a source of guaranteed income every single day, but then on the flip side of that you also have additional recruits to look after. I still wouldn’t say that was a difficulty curve though, days just took longer to complete - they weren’t harder. It was time consuming but I never really felt like I was micro managing of a team of adventurers or keeping track of my funds.

Once you’ve finally gotten into the meat of the game and amassed a team of slaves to send to every corner of the earth, the game does quite abruptly end. At the end of the year (the year ends in March so the developer might need to invest in a calendar) your score is tallied and you’re given your final result. No matter how well you perform, you can only achieve the title of “Adventure Bum” unfortunately, but it will show you your achievements throughout the two months of play. It does leave me wondering what would have been planned here had development continued. As I’ve said before, I imagine it was designed with multiple plays through in mind, and it certainly would have been a great feature to have some sort of high score option on the title screen. The actual final results screen is something you could easily screenshot yourself and show off on the game page so there could have been a nice competitive element between other players for the best score. With the game play in its current stage, it’s to the games advantage that it ended after two months as I could easily see this becoming quite repetitive beyond that. I already said to myself that I would only play for a maximum of six months had a full year been implemented, so it was somewhat a welcome surprise.



The majority of the music was taken from Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. It’s a criminally underrated soundtrack, and I’m certain this is the only game I’ve played on RMN to make use of it. It’s got a real folk sound, making use of panpipes and flutes among others - it’s fantastic, unique and I absolutely love it. What I don’t love is its use in this game. I think there’s a massive disconnect between the music, atmosphere and game play. When you break it down you’re simply navigating menus and reading a bit of text. That’s in no way a criticism, but you’re not taking part, or even viewing any of these exciting missions. You’re in a museum. It’s arguably more important to nail the music in this game as you’re getting a little less viewable stimulation and a little less to help build an atmosphere for you. You’re relying more heavily on music. Now, I’m not suggesting the music should be removed in favour of more traditional sounds of a museum (as then we’ll just be listening to people shuffling about and speaking pretentious symbolism) but If you’ve ever played Crystal Chronicles, then you’ll know this music gets used for sprawling landscapes and bustling towns - places so pretty you want to take holiday snaps! Not exactly a dusty museum where you’re planning decisions at a desk alone. The music that plays is somewhat randomly generated, and even though some songs fit slightly better, the entire pool of tracks as a whole misses the mark for me. Honestly, it makes me feel like I’m rushing, like I have a time limit on each day - yet I don’t. I can take as much time as I want in a single day, I wish the music reflected that better.

I have little experience with solely menu based games, but I have played many games that involve some sort of menu based side quest or optional content. Take Rogue Galaxy for example, although not menu based in the exact same sense, it has something called The Factory. You navigate menus, looking at blueprints, checking ingredients and recipes then use that to create items. It’s time consuming and is almost a game in itself. Like Adventure Ace is requires a bit of thinking. The background music you ask? It’s a simple melancholic piano. It brings your mood down to a state of thinking and relaxation, you can really spend a long time there and often you need to. Think of it like you’re in purgatory. Everything else you have going on is frozen in time, so you don’t mind. The world could be ending out there for all you care - but it’s okay because you’re in the factory making your 50th pair shoes you’re never going to wear and you’ll pick up where you left off later. Adventure Ace falls within those rules too; advancement of time revolves solely around you. You’re the boss. Even if the missions were time sensitive (they’re not I checked) and disappear after a certain number of days, it’s irrelevant because the day doesn’t even advance until you want it to. Your crew isn’t going anywhere either, they’re just chilling out waiting on you. It’s important to remember you’re not playing as the adventurers. You’re a guy in a suit making decisions from the comfort of a dusty old museum. I think that gets lost in translation when the music gets you so pumped and wants to whisk you away to a fantasy land. I get why the choice was made. Taken alone, it’s a great soundtrack, with influences all over the world (a theme the game really wants to convey) and a number of options meaning that you don’t have to listen to the same thing constantly. Perhaps you could argue the fact that I have prior knowledge on the soundtrack detracts from my overall experience as well, regardless, once I muted the background music I felt my opinion of the game improve. There are conversations on the game page of an original soundtrack being created, but if you download this game right now, you’re not going to get any of that and you probably never will.



Now, I know this game was made for a contest and had time constraints. I haven’t over looked that. I think what has been achieved here in a short space of time is technically impressive. Everyone involved should be pleased with what they created. However, I think what I found frustrating the most, was how the groundwork to achieve so much is all here. Surely the hard work is already done? It’s a perfect blueprint. The foundation by itself is fine, but has room to grow in so many ways. Just simply writing this review I was able to come up with a wish list of ideas for the future, which I know I’ll never see. Exactly what was considered before the hiatus is almost beside the point. Adventure Ace will now forever be on the cusp of one of RMN’s most unique and rewarding games. For now though, it’s a passable experiment squandering the talent of its many developers.