Halloween Bash

Hello!!!
What's going on? I recently reviewed Halloween Flop and now Halloween Bash? Well, yes, since it's that time of the year and Halloween is approaching, why not playing these RPG Maker VX Ace game by Racheal & MakioKuta? They're both pretty short games (well, they were made in a couple of weeks!), even if the first took me one hour, and this Halloween Bash one hour and thirty minutes... more or less!
But the real question is... do you need to play the first game?
Well, technically no, because this is a prequel, still there is the return of some familiar characters, so I suggest to play both games of course, the order is not important. Halloween Bash is an All Hallows' Event 2013 entry for the themes Ghost Stories and Halloween Comedy. Yeah, even if it starts with someone dying!

Roberta is a cheerful girl thatìs really excited for her first ever Halloween party at school! And she she's happily going home to help her mother make a ghost costume. Unfortunately she's run over by a car while crossing the street and she becomes a real ghost. Oh no, how sad! Luckily she soon finds a couple of friends: Dee (Delilah) the vampire and her fiancee Eduardo (Eddy), the ice mage. They go back to Dee's manor, but the butler informs them that the place is overrun by a powerful witch and her minions! So their Halloween party will have to wait...


Delila the Vampire(ss) is back again with her array of vampirous skills!

Unsurprisingly, this game is another short jrpg adventure but instead of a dungeon we'll have to wipe out the bad guys inside Delilah's manor! This is not really different from the first game, since we'll have to fight other groups of three enemies using the skills of the three protagonists, anyway there are some differences!
For example, while both games do not include experience points or levels, this time we'll be able to find training manuals to unlock extra skills for our characters. Like in the first game some attacks and abilities are more effective against some enemies (the return of the Magic, Undead, or Astral elments from the first game), so there is technically a better progression and sequence of battles. Moreover yu can boost is the "mana" source for each character (the BPs, good old Blood Points for Delilah, MPs for Eddy, HPs for Bobby).

Visually the game recalls the first game, but you know what? It's better! I don't mind the change from a scale of brown to a scale of purple palette, the interface and menus are also much better structured compared to the first game and all the assets, sprites and maps are also more detailed and less "bare bones". Ok, it's true that we're not inside a tunnel but in a manor, still it's a more interesting setting for sure!

What did not change is the humor and the reference to various books/movies/tv series! In the first game we had the "Charlie's Angels", here there are a dumb scarecrow, a lion and an animated armor called Tinman. Is that familiar? Well during their battle you can listen to a MIDI version of "Follow the Yellow Brick Road"! There are also some opponents that recall some of the battles of the first game, like the one with the mummy, a big (zombie?) guy and a severed head, three differently named but similar opponents to the ones of the first adventure.


Do not forget to check points of interest here and there!

Final Verdict
In few words, Halloween Bash does all did Halloween Flop but better! Better graphics, battles, gameplay... well all! The story is well paced and clear, it has a good meassage, and the characters are fun! Like in the first game there are really a lot of dialogues, and excess is maybe something that can be seen as one of the issues of the first game that wasn't corrected. Anyway that's the only problem, for the rest this game is good! And goog means 4/50!!!