7 Days: An NPC Story

Intro

"7 Days: An NPC Story" is a short slice of life game following the "exciting" adventures of someone whose normally not meant to be a playable character. As you can imagine exciting is in air quotes since this game boils down to a bunch of fetch quests and interacting with characters that only have one or two lines of dialogue on any given day. In fact, the biggest problem with recommending this game to people is that it's super boring to the point I'm not sure who you'd even recommend this game to that would enjoy it. Though, I suppose I should still give my usual breakdown.

Story
Summary

You play as Tifa, a young female villager still living with her mom, that helps around the house by doing various fetch quests for her mom since she isn't allowed to leave the house. So prepare yourself for such exciting jobs as going to the store to pick up some meat, flowers, or seven herbs and spices.



Outside of doing some really basic chores you can also interact with the townspeople as well as a group of incompetent adventures. At least I assume the adventures are meant to be incompetent considering they get almost entirely wiped out by a group of Orcs on their way up the local mountain to fight a dragon. We also get a few of the usual tropes about the heroes making everyone in town upset for various reasons such as going through a woman's house and smashing all her pots and stealing all her money to buy a new magic sword.



At any rate after getting through the week the game simply ends with nothing of value having been accomplished. Though, I suppose that's the point since it's not like were a powerful adventurer or a chosen hero were simply a forgettable villager in a small village in the middle of nowhere.

Greatest Strength/Weakness

I suppose the game does accomplish it's goal of giving the player insight into what it's like to be a NPC in a video game, but that insight is stuff most people could predict. To make matters worse a lot of the jokes that exist in this game are based on old tropes. So it's not even like the game is bringing the player new insights into the plight of such characters. In fact, the few jokes in this game being so played out just adds to why this game is a boring experience from beginning to an end.

Gameplay

There really isn't that much to do in this game. You simply run around and interact with people in a small village and that's it. In fact, the game feels a bit lazy in some regards since completing tasks is simply tied to interacting with certain characters instead of the player receiving items from a given NPC. So while our mom will recognize that we picked up cured meat from the store. Such meat never appears in our inventory at any point in time. This can also lead to weird issues where other character's can appear to cancel out the previous interaction where we got the requested item. Though this doesn't stop us from going to bed for the day if we grabbed the item in question. At any rate after completing a bunch of fetch quests over the course of an in-game week the game simply ends.

Graphics and Sound

On the graphical and sound side of things the game relies entirely on the RTP for RPG Maker VX Ace for both of these aspects. As such I really don't have a lot to say about them that hasn't been said before. After all, the default assets have been used a lot over the years and while they are serviceable it does make any game that uses them feel rather generic. Which means snakins's definitely accomplished his stated goal for the look and feel of this game.

snakins
I wanted a very generic look for this game as it's a more of a short commentary on RPG tropes rather than a super serious game.

At the same time this generic look and feel while desired by the developer just adds to why this game is such a boring experience. An experience that isn't helped by the game's maps since most of them come across as rather lazy with multiple copies of the same tile surrounding each other.



While I get the white radish field being the way it is. The multiple stacks of the same box next to a villager's house and multiple piles of logs next to the town's inn are very visually boring. And that's before we even getting into the large patches of grass that are devoid of flowers or shrubs.

Conclusion

"7 Days: An NPC Story" is a boring game developed by snakins using RPG Maker VX Ace that is meant to serve as commentary on common tropes found within RPGs. Sadly the commentary offered isn't anything particularly new and the method of that commentary is boring to experience. As such I really can't recommend playing this game to anyone since you'll just be bored by it. In fact, the biggest bright side this game probably has going for it is that you can experience just about everything this game has to offer in under fifteen minutes. And that's including the glitches you can find in the game such as how going into the inn on Sunday will magically send you back to Saturday. A glitch that just adds one more boring day to an already boring game.