Mystic Dawn

Mystic Dawn is an RPG made in RPG Maker Tsukuru 2000 by Corfaisus. He floated it as a game for me to try during the Review IX event and I nabbed it up and gave it a go. How did it work out? Well...


Presentation
Graphics are all RTP, bar a few small edits here and there, and they are used very competently. Corfaisus does a wonderful job eking out the meagre amount of graphics to create varied areas. From a giant kobold tree to a fort with many ladders to climb, each map is full of detail and you can tell that a lot of time and effort went into creating them. There were also a lot of neat little details when it came to things like dwarf doors being too low to walk through (you had to duck each time you went through them) and crystals being floated around the oracle. Little touches that made the world feel a little less hollow than it was.



The story was interesting - you are a skydweller who sees his homeland torn away from him suddenly. You travel the world below in order to find the one responsible and bring them to justice.

The writing was very well done and showed a lot of character for the world in which you find yourself. You are on a grand quest and yet... and yet there were some minor problems. There was one case of the plot skipping a part entirely, leaving me puzzled about what I was supposed to do - when I first met the cat people they acted as though I'd been sent to talk to them about some war... of which I had no idea. Either a flag had been skipped or a piece forgotten, but I'd talked to everyone in the large city and not even seen mention of a war or a cat race. Colour me surprised when I was suddenly thrust into being their messenger!

I have to admit that I didn't like just how fast the pacing was. I felt like I was being bounced around from place to place with nothing to really connect me to any of them. I'd turn up in a town and suddenly be sent out to another place with no real exploration. While there were NPCs, the world felt a bit hollow as there was nothing to make me engaged in it. I much prefer to take my time with story-driven games, with some dips and valleys to ease out the high-action parts, but in Mystic Dawn you were always on the go, never relaxing or seeing much of where you were. Areas were blocked off to you, explanations about various parts of the plot were shoved aside and ignored and it just felt incredibly rushed.



I understand that that was part of the intention - to create a quick, little game - but it felt just a bit too quick. At the end I felt as though I hadn't really done much at all, even though I'd been through a lot of adventures by then. It left me feeling a bit 'Oh.'


Music was well-used, though quite familiar. It was nice to hear some of the older classic tunes from games like FF7 and FF9 again and when they were present they fit well with the areas. The start was quite devoid of music, I found, but overall the sound direction was good.

Descriptions were straight forward and easy to understand. Items told you what they would do and they did it and I loved the use of the various custom glyphs to impart information. They looked clean and did their job well.

Gameplay
There really wasn't much in the way of gameplay, bar wandering around, fighting a few battles and nabbing some chests.

The battles were balanced well - which can be hard to do with a one-person party. The last boss wasn't too difficult (I had a bit more trouble with his kids, honestly, just because there were two of them and my MP was limited) and the other battles in the game were fast and furious. There weren't actually many battles in the game, come to think of it. There was maybe one area which allowed for grinding, but the rest of the battles were story-oriented and one-off.

Balance was well-done on the weapon and item side of things too. Costs were fair, heal amounts were decent and buffs were a boon. I never actually bothered with damaging spells, especially once I got a 2x hit weapon.

Exploration was a bit dull for the most part. There weren't many houses you could enter through the whole game, and once you got to a town there was no incentive to really explore except to see if there was an item/weapon/armour shop or inn in the area. Otherwise it was very straight-lined - get quest, do quest, get new quest, do quest. Rinse and repeat.



Dungeons did have a few neat little tricks though - mainly that you could jump over one-tile ledges (neatly taught to you in the start of the game) and there were some hidden paths through walls (not taught to you that well).

The world map was neat looking and very simplistic, but it worked for the fast-tracked type of game that Mystic Dawn is.



Summary
Overall, I did enjoy myself. I loved the mapping and the battles, and I did like the story. I do wish that it had been expanded and presented a bit more slowly, at a more leisurely pace, but despite that it's still a great little game.