Sunsong

Sunsong was one of the entries for the IGMC (Indie Game Making Contest) for 2014. As one of the judges for the RPG portion of the competition it is my pleasure to share my thoughts on the game. This review will basically just be the notes I took cleaned up. It will be based on the competition version of the game, so certain aspects of the game may have been changed.

Presentation
Graphics are edited RTP resources and look quite good, though there are parts where they can be a bit too much on the eyes - mainly battles where it can be hard to keep track of what, exactly, is going on. This is compounded by the speed of the battles. Mapping is decent, fairly standard. It emulates a gameboy aesthetic and pulls it off quite well.

Music is custom, and used to great effect. There's a main theme that has various renditions which is used quite well. Sound effects are used well enough, but don't really stand-out.

The story is very light and characters don't get much screen time - even NPCs are given a wooden treatment. That said, what is written is quite well polished and charming in an old-school way.

Gameplay
Battles are fast. Very fast. Very, very fast and you can lose control of them if you're not paying close attention. That said, they are also quite well-balanced and any class choices are great for taking them on.

The last boss, however, is very hard. You cannot make a single misstep or it's game over. I found focussing on taking out his support monsters to be the best way to deal with him, but there being three monsters at once, all hitting hard, made it very difficult to keep up with when it came to damage. Which was great, because you were given items to help with that and help they did. You were practically forced to use everything you had at your disposal to win and it makes for a pretty epic battle.

You are given the choice of using a bunch of classes, changing between them at any time. This is a great way to encourage people to try something new.

While there were no sidequests, there were some small optional parts to the game - namely the fairies and the island shop. Equipment was useful and did many different things. Same with skills - each had its uses and came into play during battles quite often. There were also a lot of items to find - both armour, weapons and healing items.

Random encounters were used, and in some areas they were far too high - one case was in the last area where you had invisible on-map encounters as well as random ones, meaning that you got into a lot of battles. Earlier areas were pretty good encounter-wise though.

Fun factor
I had quite a bit of fun playing the game. Battles were engaging and required you to pay attention to win. Skills actually were useful and necessary to beat the battles, which they should be. Enemies were a real threat, especially the last boss who kicked ass quite a bit.
The addition of higher-tier equipment squirreled away on another island was neat. While the story was very minimalist, what was there was well-written. And I loved the use of a main theme song, even if it was a bit repetitive in some areas. Oh, and classes were fun to play with, too.

I was a bit surprised as to how hard the last boss was. Considering I had the highest tier of equipment (which can be missed), it was a big challenge. I wouldn't like to consider trying it if I'd missed the shop - it'd take quite a bit of grinding to get through that boss. (Though I only got to level 10 so I was probably a bit under-levelled come to think of it.)

The only real issues were a lack of well-written characters to enjoy and interact with and high rates of random encounters in some areas. Otherwise it was a pretty decent game and I enjoyed myself quite a bit while playing.

In the competition I gave this game a solid 52/60. On RMN I'm giving it 4 stars.