The first RPGMaker game I played was Kelarly’s Castle Oblivion. Fast forward several years later, I am happy to see the series become better and better; the series should be proud to have luiishu as its current Lord of the Castle.

My overall impression of the game is that this is a huge leap forward from the prior games of the series, particularly in terms of battling and mapping, with story & characters getting honorable mention. In the end, it took me a bit more than 50 hours to complete the game.

I’ll rate the game 0-5 for the following sections
Gameplay
Battling
Music
Writing

This review is spoiler-free with a little discussion on battle strategy. If you’re thinking about playing this game (you should), please feel free to read!


Gameplay
CO3 plays much like a standard RPG. You travel on the map, loot treasures, solve some puzzles, and get into battles. Progression through a floor/level goes like 1) Cross a couple random encounter (RE) maps 2) Come into town and prepare for the floor’s “story”, basically cleaning up the town’s local problems 3) Cross a couple more RE maps 4) Go through a RE dungeon 5) Fight the boss. Story for the overall game takes place between floors and on occasion, on the floor itself.

I hope you like treasure hunting! There are gold coins and useful items scattered everywhere. You can even find get access to secret skills and rooms with good eyes! The main hero Evan likes exploring, and if you can survive the REs and indulge his interest, you can find a lot of items. Most goodies tend to be completely obscured by rocks and pillars, aka Grand List of RPG Cliché--Dungeon Design 201: “Most dungeons will include ‘hidden’ (stuff) which are nearly impossible to see from a bird's-eye view, yet would be blaringly obvious from the party's perspective.” You must literally visit every blind spot you can see on the map if you want all the money and good items, although you can purchase some (treasure) maps to help you out.

Luckily, the (game) maps are nice and detailed, so your eyes won’t shut from boredom while you’re trying to find everything. If you’re not a big fan for this sort of thing and want to clear that map before the monsters eat you, you’ll be happy to know that the encounter rate is reasonable. However, your dungeons are hiding as many keys, buttons, and switches possible to stop you from advancing. If you get stuck, it’s probably because you have failed to find everything you were supposed to pull/press/pick up. In fact, for better or worse, luiishu is so good at hiding things that you may even miss stuff in plain sight (I did, and more than once). So while treasure hunts are fun, they have potential to become frustrating when you need to progress and what I fear this will lead to is the player quitting the game out of frustration.

I should also mention saving. Unfortunately, the game only permits saving at specific checkpoints (I like to save anywhere I can, personally), so make sure you can set aside a half hour or so if you’re planning to make progress for the session.

Gameplay Score: 3.5/5
This section probably would’ve been 2.5 for being run-of-the-mill if it wasn’t for the sheer dedication luiishu put into hiding everything and giving me a reason to wander his maps.


Battling
I’m sure all of you have played an RPG before? So I don’t need to go into detail about classes such as wizard, fighter, and so on. With a couple exceptions, battling mechanics are mostly the same as your run-of-the-mill RPGMaker game.

BUT! As advertised, what CO3 does instead is test your ingenuity to cross the floor while staying alive. Each different group of monsters will require you to come up with a different optimal strategy because they all pack a punch and come with their own quirks (one group is likely to deal status effects, another hits hard, etc.). Everything (mid-game forwards) can knock you down in 2-3 hits. Guarding, on its own merits, is more useful in CO3 than most games, especially as you go deeper into the castle. I don’t find that your level matters as much as the strategy you use to get through the RE maps. You’ll probably struggle the most during the start of the new floor as you figure out what tactics to use against new enemies. Oh, and if you’re not keeping yourself at full strength for each RE, you’re risking a Game Over.

Starting mid-to-late game floors, however, recovering your HP mid-battle will probably form the core of your RE strategy; as mentioned, everything can flatten you out 2-3 hits and you don’t know which ally is going to eat those hits. If your healer (Evan) dies, your RE will probably deteriorate into a Game Over if you don’t proceed with caution. You should also note that escaping fails more often than not if you’re on the newest batch of enemies, so all battles are effectively "forced" and escape is only a last resort (but escapes DO happen, just discouraged). A failed escape is costly because the enemies get a critical free round of attacking.

There are also Red Crystals scattered partway through the RE maps that help facilitate grinding with free heals, if you feel the need. As mentioned before, however, it is my opinion that your success is mostly based on finding the right tactic for each fight. If you plan on exploring the RE maps though, they are excellent for making camp, and your objective on longer stretches of RE map may well be to find one. When you’re done with them, you can even break them for stat-increasing items!

Plenty of effort also went into the boss battles. To keep you on your toes, the bosses usually pull out a strong attack, summon monsters, and other gimmicks at the battle’s start and again at each third of the HP you hack off. Don’t be surprised if you’re dying to the later bosses.

The only serious problem I noticed is that sometimes your party will be surprised and the enemies get a free turn. I keep mentioning that everything can stamp you out in 2-3 hits late-game; even if you come into the battle at full health, that free round the enemies get has the potential to hand you swift defeat. Combined with the facts that saving is in checkpoints for this game and escaping is unlikely, you could suddenly find yourself having spent the last half hour for nothing due to something that wasn’t even your fault.

Side note: I ended up playing the game without using most of the “rare” items (not available in stores or battle drops), such as stat-increasers. There are plenty of stat-increasers in the game though, which are basically free level-ups if you can find them. The game may be (slightly) easier than I have painted here because of that.

Battling Score: 4/5
Lots of effort went into making the player think. If you need to die, spam the attack command!


Music
They set the mood. I don’t think this is the game’s selling point though and it’s not trying to break ground. CO3 culls from a variety of (big, well-known) video games. Our roll call includes Grandia, Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy, Rayman, Devil May Cry, and Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

Music Score: 3/5
There’s not much I plan to take home with me.


Writing
Split into characters and plot. We’re still spoiler-free, but you’ll learn what to expect. For the RPG genre, the writing here rates average if you ignore the spelling/grammar errors, maybe some of the excessive shouting/CAPS. Yet compared to prior games in the series, your plot-to-floor ratio gets the best mileage by far, although cutting a couple floors and condensing the plot would have made for stronger execution. You also don’t need to have played the other games in the series to enjoy CO3.

Characters. With a very good exception, maybe two, what you see in your heroes is what you get, and they stay consistent with their personality: flat static. I can define most of them in a few traits. I suppose this makes a certain kind of sense; their situation is akin to miners trapped in a cave or soldiers newly assigned to the platoon. They don’t know each other, and you only need to say and do so much to finish what needs to get done. Given their backgrounds and personalities, they interact as you’d expect, and they learn a thing or two about each other and the world they live in. Their bonds stay tight as they try to survive. But we’re telling stories, and in a world that is literally shaped by imagination, they could have been subject to a wider variety of experiences.

The NPCs feel much like the citizens of an oppressive empire. They certainly don’t enjoy being trapped in a castle, but there’s a “what can you do” attitude and they’re just making the most out of their situation. Of course, you’ll encounter some who have thrown in their lot with the antagonist.

Our villain Gaunt is an interesting person, but writing why would be spoiling. However, I think he should have been more proactive in dealing with the heroes, which leads into the next part.

Plot. The tagline is “Hero escaping villain’s reality plaything”. Along the way, Evan makes progress on that and finds some friends. Gaunt in the meantime appears content to just observe, amused like the cat watching the mouse scurrying around. I’m sure you can probably guess the idea of that dynamic turning into something else, for whatever reason I’ll leave to your imagination, but for all the power this person has, I felt like he’s just putting in the minimal effort. If I was Gaunt and had lots of power and influence, there are plenty of things I could think of doing so that I can try to "win" when the time came. Maybe Gaunt should’ve asked Zexion for pointers.

I mentioned earlier in the review about each floor having its own story/problem for the heroes to work on. It’s a mixed bag. For some, the individual chapter likes to creep close to simplistic RPG stuff like “there’s this problem, we need you heroes to solve it” and whatnot. For others, they’re complex enough or have a twist that the rest of the floors should have been held to that standard. Perhaps they could even have been more strongly unified or detailed; well, there are some baddies working on multiple floors, but CO3 should have pushed harder for this concept.

Perhaps what this game could benefit from is additional conflict for the overarching story. More chaos, if you would. At the least, it would’ve been a chance to help the characters escape my label of flat-static.

Writing Score: 3.5/5
Taken as a whole, I feel like the storytelling here was just itching to become something great and I do like how the characters are chattier than previous games. But first, the grammar needs to go up some notches, and maybe tone down the CAPS a wee bit during the finales. They didn’t detract from my enjoyment, so I didn’t deduct points, but don’t make reasons for someone to not play your game.


3.5/5 Gameplay
4.0/5 Battling
3.0/5 Music
3.5/5 Writing
___________
14/20 Total, 3.5 stars

Final Thoughts
If you’re a Castle Oblivion fan, you should’ve downloaded this yesterday.

If you’re a newcomer deciding whether or not to download, then I recommend a download if you like fighting through tough REs to explore interesting maps and find treasure. You could say that the game carries at its heart the classic RPGMaker spirit of creating a fantasy world, and the battling is a worthy challenge for any and all RPG players.