As this one hasn't been posted with an official download, I'll throw my review into Media format just so it's tidied away. I would also like to point out that I didn't finish this game.

So where do I begin.. This game is a big mix of something that tries to seem serious and funny all rolled into one. It starts out with jokes, but as the game progresses, it's like it tries to inch in a couple more serious topics and.. kinda falls flat, I feel. A lot of the dialogue seems to really need some work if the creator intends to make it more serious, or I would recommend just sticking to something silly.



The storyline itself is incredibly hard to keep track of, it jumps around with a lot of confusing characters with varied intentions which are far too difficult to keep in mind. I eventually decided it best to consider all the evil-looking ones bad guys, and the RTP heroes to be good.. I think it worked, maybe. The story could have been really good, but it was just delivered in wall after wall of text to the point I just started skipping through it because it was wasting the time limit away.

But onto the jumping around bit, there's a part where there's a long conversation and it's made really clear where you're meant to go, but then there's a messagebox that says “GO NORTHEAST” which was already heavily implied by the conversation. It doesn't do this for the bar at the beginning, it only tells you where to go after this point and it seems like the game suddenly puts it in. But then later, a party member gives you a big infodump and I assume you're told where to go in the subtext, but there's no message to tell you where to go. I spent a good 10 minutes flying around looking for somewhere I could progress the story.



So yeah let's move onto some gameplay. There's exploration which, as you can see, did not end well. A lot of the game is A to B exploration, being told to go somewhere (or in some cases, not at all) and engaging in a cutscene or battles there, before being whisked away someplace else again. The battles themselves are very unbalanced. I was frequently told they'd be tough, but boss battles would go down in one or two turns. And at the start, when I'm given the full party, everyone has every single skill and it's a difficult choice picking which skill to use because they're just far too many, but then when I have Eric and co., they have no skills at all. Every battle really is a button-mash until you level up and get more skills.

The encounter system is also really inconsistent. For the most part you will have random encounters, yet in the southwest cave there are a rat events wandering around who trigger fights when you touch them. Combined with the random encounters already in place, it makes for very jittery gameplay going from battle, to two steps on the field, to battle, two steps, battle..


There are some graphical issues as well, such as the way the event sprites are treated. For example, there are these creepy people at the bar in the beginning, it's like they're whispering schizophrenic-esque messages at you when you speak to them. They turn and the message box says “he's ignoring you..” and, because he turns to face you, it's kinda like he's talking to you but with some scary-ass voice in your head describing your every surrounding? Maybe I'm the only one creeped out by this.. but either way, you should probably put on a directional fix so they don't turn to face when you speak if they really are ignoring you.

The content of the graphics, much like the sounds, maps, everything, are all RTP. I don't think there's any original content in the game, and even the maps are all from samples. The database also doesn't appear to have been changed, which is a possibility for why the game ended up being quite unbalanced.

It really is just a regular RTP game with not much changed other than a story and dialogue. Based on those things, I'd say it has potential if it wasn't all dumped on the player at once, and the storytelling could definitely use some work, but the gameplay is where this mostly falls flat. As I mentioned, I did not complete this game because it came to a point where some of the scripted encounters were too difficult or irritating to fight compared to what I had been used to throughout the rest of the game.

In all, it's a game that shows a lot of promise but needs work in several areas.