Sunsong

Hello, adventurers and heroes!
This time I played a game that... I believed I already played before! But no, I confused this game with another fantasy party-based rpgmaker adventure jrpg with dungeons, four heroes and VERY GREEN graphics! Sorry! Now I feel like those who says "I do not remember the title of that horror game, but the cover was RED!". Uh. Nevermind.

Sunsong is a RPG Maker VX Ace game by Gamesfreak13563 made for the 2014 Indie Game Development Contest, that like most other short rpgmaker games starts with a simple premise: the world is in danger, you and your friends are the only ones who can help! So do what your king orders and save the world. The game in fact oddly begins with... naming our party members. This is a classic party of four different classes: a warrior, a rogue, a wizard and a cleric. I named them Riggs, Vedge, Sid and Gessye. If you can understand the reference, well we can be friends! The game also lets you change their class at any time if you want to try something different, anyway I admit I never used this option, I was happy with the initial selection!
In any case the characters are just silent hero types, do not expect dialogues or anything else. Just do what they tell us!


Yes guys we need your boat to complete our mission. Can we used it? Pretty please!

Ok, so what they told us? There's an evil Vampire King that threatens the lands or something like that, he used his powers to make the sun disappear and now lives inside a secluded castle protected by a barrier that can only be destroyed by the... SunSong! Anyway the magical SunSong was divided into two parts, magically inserted in magic orbs that are on the top of two different towers (the Tower of Dawn and the Tower of Twilight). Choose in which order you will explore them, it does not matter since we'll need both orbs! Then to shatter the magical barrier it will be necessary to bring the orbs in a temple and reaching it will require recovering a ship. After that, the plan is to use an airship to reach the darklands and enter the lair of the Vampire King for the final battle. Easy, isn't it?

Sunsong is a classic rpgmaker adventure with a party of heroes: expect travelling from dungeon to dungeon solving the occasional puzzle and facing many random battles before defeating the level boss. Then restock your consumables at one of the villages and repeat until the end of the game. That's it, anyway the game is pretty well done: battles are balanced but VERY fast. Enemies die quickly (no damage sponges here!) but they also unleash powerful attacks that can destroy your party with a couple of attacks if you do not pay attention and take it easy.
Remember to heal and restore your mana points, anyway there are many items that can help a lot, from regeneration rings to elemental swords, anyway the last boss battle will be particularly challenging. But that's what I like!
Oh and you can save anytime when on the main map and at the save points (rapresented by giant crystals... there are always crystals in the se games!) when inside a location, be it a dungeon or a village.


A powerful attack by Vedge, and one that one-shotted this opponent!

Characters have the classic series of abilities: the wizard is specialized in elemental spells, the warrior has various physical attacks (to reduce the enemy's defense, hit more than once and so on), the cleric is a classic healer while the rogue can use two weapons and unleash powerful strikes. Level up a bit and you will learn a plethora of different abilities, but the game does not includes only battles.

Here there are in fact also some puzzles and tasks, every dungeon has some kind of gimmick like spike traps, slide sections, disappearing floors and levers that open and close the access to various parts of the dungeon. A bit of everything well condensed in a small game.

Visually, as you can see the game uses classic RTPs (for facesets, chipsets, charsets and enemy sprites) but edited in green to emulate the gameboy aesthetic. They're pretty good even if sometimes battles look a bit confusing, and the lack of colors somehow hinders the capacity to understand the elemental weaknesses (this is what I mean!). For the rest all ok, mapping is nothing special but still adequate (nice gimmicks used here), and I like the fact that the game includes some secrets (where you can get useful gear) and you can find random loot interacting with pots, anyway watch out for the monster chest! Music is original and good while sounds... nothing special, I think they're all Rtps.


Not just battles! This game has also some puzzles, like the classic sliding rooms... this time with spikes!

Final Verdict
SunSong is a solid little event game, don't expect something new or original nor a deep story, anyway this is a competently made short adventure with a well fine tuned gameplay. It's pretty simple but still it's a game where you've to choose a good strategy to prevail, and it also plays fast with short violent battles, simple puzzles, and little dungeons. It's pretty linear and there are just some optional parts, but that's ok, oh and do not forget that you can edit the classes at any time, and even change the names of the heroes at a particular location.
Pretty good, it was quite fun to play!