Chance Encounter

Chance Encounter by Marrend is a very short RPG created with RPG Maker VX Ace for the Game Chill 2013 contest. On the day of an important ceremony, the protagonist Hiroji, prince of Askigaga, decides he's had enough of the constraints that come with his position and runs away. As he wanders across the snowy landscape of his country, fleeing from the royal guards, Hiroji encounters some other people on his way. And while some seem to be hostile, not all of them are...



Kids these days...


The Good (Positive qualities that justify an increase of score):
- The basic story idea behind Chance Encounter is not a bad one. There are events in the story that seem to make little sense at first. However, during its final part the game becomes better and, while being somewhat cheesy, the last story section is well-written and provides explanations for some of the oddities in earlier parts.
- Although it's not highly original and its outcome has no influence on the further course of the plot, the game contains a neat little battle minigame that is a nice diversion from standard battles and is surprisingly fun to figure out.
- An interesting aspect to note is that all of the music used in this game has been taken from the RMN Music Pack, and the choice of tracks mostly fits the situations and settings.



Walking in a winterwonderland. At least the enemies are easily discernible.


The Bad (Minor issues and nuisances that usually only decrease the score if they come in large numbers):
- The mapping and graphics in Chance Encounter are generally of middling quality. There are some enemies with non-RTP battler graphics, while the player characters on the other hand have no battler graphics at all. The mapping utilizes the RTP in a relatively poor way, resulting in monotonous maps with little to nothing interesting to see.
- The dialogue in the game is haunted by numerous typos. It is still entirely possible to understand the written sections, but the errors are slightly annoying nonetheless.



The obligatory spell that hits the entire enemy party - and in this case, instantly kills them all.


The Ugly (Major problems or very frustrating aspects that lead to a decrease of score):
- Unfortunately, the theoretically clever basic plot idea is marred by a very weak execution of most of the story bits. The characters are mostly bland and boring, their dialogue sounds incredibly unnatural and forced and the development of their personalities is rarely comprehensible (except for the final part). While a few issues are resolved during the ending scenes, some parts of the plot are just borderline illogical. In combination with the stale cuscenes, Chance Encounter makes it difficult for the player to find a connection to the characters and the story.
- The gameplay in Chance Encounter suffers from a severe lack of variety and originality. The whole gameplay consists of walking through a story-relevant map, entering an area with some fightable monsters, then continuing to the next story section and so on. There is nothing in between at all, making the game's sense of "progress" feel just arbitrary.
- This wouldn't be so much of a problem if the battles (of which I had to fight two in total to be able to defeat the "boss") were actually fun. Sadly, they are just standard round-based fights without any special mechanics, strategic challenges or interesting variety of enemies or skills, and they are not well-balanced either. Especially considering how short the game is, there is no incentive to fight more battles than absolutely necessary - a lost opportunity to make the central aspect of the gameplay more engaging.


Conclusion:
Personally, I find the pseudo-Japanese fantasy setting, which seems to be the creator's style of choice, somewhat ridiculous. But as that is a matter of taste and no objective criterion, I did not let it influence my rating. However, what did affect the rating was the fact that, bluntly spoken, there is simply nothing interesting about this game. Everything story-related lacks depth, while the gameplay is stuck somewhere between very generic RPG and straight nonexistence. The redeeming qualities of the final part save the game from being bad, but cannot do enough to make this a game worth spending much time on - except if you're a huge fan of the creator's work and really want to see his characters in action some more.
Of course, the time constraints of the contest explain some of the design choices. Still, seeing how prolific the creator usually is, I was a bit disappointed to find Chance Encounter had so little to offer. The concept of this game has more potential than what is currently there.