Painted Heart

Once every so often, there comes a pretty little game from a first-time developer/team that experiences huge popularity due to its mass appeal and polished presentation. The very pink Dreaming Mary was this, the duo of accha/Trass' breakout game, a sidescroller kitted out with unique artistic visuals and an intriguing premise. Where that game consisted of a series of story-based puzzles in the context of a tense symbolically loaded parable, Painted Heart shifts direction with a series of traditional underwhelming RPG battles based in an ethereal painterly world (the player literally explores a painting). Time and time again, the game largely falls short of its ambition to include a sophisticated and strategic battle system. In the attempt to create a sense of logical decision-making in battle, the team's attempts fall short of spell-binding, reducing the importance of emergent gameplay to a complex rock-paper-scissors formula that demands the player to refer to it like a manual of instructions rather than a mere guide. What is aimed to be a newly original take on the flow of battle somehow makes options seem more cumbersome and limited than ever before.

Audiovisually, Painted Heart is a treat. Aside from some visual glitches in the contest-submitted version (which were fixed in later builds), the world is a lush one, surpassing Dreaming Mary in terms of quality of art and presentational polish. Trass' magnificent score lifts the game in important story moments, with the same lushness with which accha paints the world. Unfortunately, though the world is rich with colour and Miyazaki-like wonder, traversing the world feels railroad-y, with many scenes feeling like you were pasted on a 2d flat screen rather than inside a living, breathing world. This is where the sidescrolling format falls flat on its face, with a severe lack of player freedom that is so crucial to what makes JRPGs playable in the first place. The lack of freedom of movement worked in Dreaming Mary because the story was spellbinding to begin with, and the feeling of being trapped in a dream world is complementary to the game's atmosphere. But in Painted Heart, too many paths are blocked off, there is too little to explore, and as such exploration (which composes the bulk of the game) leaves much to be desired. Moments where paintings are brought to life from monochromatic sketches are highlights in a rather dull walking simulation.

Characters are both flat and uninteresting, providing not much to the very little story that is somehow there. The faceless protagonist Cor wanders his way through the world, restoring a painting to lift a curse, with an angel and a demon to guide him. Though Zophie the angel and Agiel the demon have some of the most lines in the game, neither of them happen to say much in the process. The only reason for their characters seems to be to provide what limited exposition that there can be, and to serve as badass battlers to make 3-hero gameplay more interesting.

It is a shame that Painted Heart has so many drawbacks, because its positives are actually quite strong. The art and music is highest tier in the RPG Maker scene, the dialogue is fairly competent, the presentation values are honed to a T, to the point of being very nearly commercial level. However, for all of the pizzazz and flowery ornaments that the game has going for it, never do they cohere into something that equals more than the sum of its parts. This isn't a death sentence for the development team - if anything, they're just getting started - but perhaps with a little more time, and a little more love, Painted Heart could have got the treatment it deserved.