Notes

I realize it's extremely odd to review a game over five years after you played it, but I've also had a rough draft for this review sitting on my desk for the last five years as well. For whatever reason I kept telling myself I would get around to reviewing this game tomorrow or in the next couple of days. And as a certain song likes to remind us, "tomorrow is always a day away", but seeing as how I'm waiting for my headset to recharge at the moment before I dive into doing some episodes for my series Bargain Bin Saturdays, I finally figured it was time for tomorrow to arrive.

Intro

"Final Quest: The Disciple's Journey" is a short comedic role-playing video game about a master imparting her final lesson upon her most frustrating pupil. Ernst's sheer inability to follow her rules for this final lesson may drive her to have to punch bears, yet again! At least it feels that way. Though, I suppose that reference would work better if one of the developers for this game was actually involved with "Punch Bears" or if this review was posted in a more timely fashion before that game got buried within the list of completed games on this site, but I suppose you work with the rough draft you have in a situation like this.

Gameplay

Oddly enough "Final Quest: The Disciple's Journey" does stand out a bit amongst all of the standard turn-based RPGs created with RPG Maker by including a skill tree system. Unfortunately this system isn't as deep as I would like since the unlocking of skills is based on how many battles you've won while focused on a specific skill tree. As a result it's fairly easy to fully unlock two-thirds of Ulrika and Ernst's skills before the first boss battle. To make matters worse the player can readily abuse certain skills to create an unbreakable chain of attacks that turns combat into a mindless series of picking the same moves over and over and over again.

Though, I'll also admit my boredom was mostly self-inflicted since I actually took time to fully develop some of the trees before I started working my way through the narrative. Which is why I was able to access such a broken series of moves in the first place. And this isn't the only game to ever fall victim to my grinding habits either. I still remember surprising the developer for "War of Harmony IV" by finding a way to power level in an area that was largely meant to help the player gain a few levels at most before they would become too resource starved to keep at it. So much so that it should have been a death sentence fun my run to even attempt it, but I managed to find a way to turn it into an area to power level to end game levels near the start of the game.

As such, my boredom with the combat feels more like a nitpick considering most players probably wouldn't experience my issues with the combat system. And the main drive of this game is the interactions between Ernst and his master. So it's really not that surprising that the combat difficulty is fairly casual anyway.

The game also stands out because Ernst and Ulrika operate under different mechanics. While Ulrika's adrenaline system is indistinguishable from the standard setup used by games like "Spirit Blade". Ernst is a completely different kind of beast since his EN bar fills as he uses offensive magic, but his bar goes down as he uses support skills. To make things more interesting Ernst's EN gauge operates like a reverse MP gauge. In other words you can only make use of Ernst's best offensive spells when his EN gauge is low. As a result your forced to try and balance out his offensive and support skills in battle to maximize his effectiveness.

Music

I really don't have any notes from back then about the sound aspects of this game, but I usually don't bother with those aspects in a rough draft or even the kind of notes you'd jot down on a notecard unless I have something particularly positive or negative to say about them. As such, I'm going to assume the background music and sound effects for this game were average.

Visuals

The game largely appears to be comprised of stuff found in the RTP for RPG Maker VX Ace, but it does appear the developers took some time to slightly modify the sprites for Ulrika and Ernst. Which is a nice touch considering Ulrika is meant to serve as an old mentor for Ernst within the confines of the story.

Conclusion

"Final Quest: The Disciple's Journey" is a game worth experiencing at least once in my opinion, but the likelihood people will play this game only gets progressively worse as the years fly by. After all, this game like many other older games like "Devil Hunter: Seeker of Power" only get pushed ever further into the depths of obscurity as newer games are added to this site. And while the site does need new content to keep it afloat. I still wish older games like this one were acknowledged every now and again.