Rita's Adventure

Intro

"Rita's Adventure" is a RPG that was being developed by TrainerAbu using RPG Maker 2003. Oddly enough this project was initially created as a gift for TrainerAbu's girlfriend, but apparently she never played it since TrainerAbu let one of his friends play the demo first. Though maybe that was for the best for two reasons. For starters this game is plagued with a lot of first game issues that make this game not particularly fun to play. And secondly the developer included a boss that threatens the character meant to be a representation of his girlfriend with turning her into a sex slave.



I'm not going to say you can't include such a character in a video game, but this does strike me as something that can go very sideways considering who this game was made for.

Story
Summary

We play as Rita, a female hamster, whose been summoned by an old man to save the animal world from Fuzzy Lumpkins. In order to do this we'll need to collect the four elemental orbs of Earth, Wind, Water, and Fire. So basically we have an early Final Fantasy game with hamsters and a villain from "The Powerpuff Girls".

Strengths

Honestly the only upside this game has going for it in my opinion is that the hamsters remind me of simpler times when I was still in school and my brother was a fan of "Hamtaro".



It also probably helps that I currently have two hamsters as pets. So I definitely have a soft spot for these little guys.

Weaknesses

Unfortunately this game has a lot of issues going against it in my opinion. For starters the game includes a lot of zany or off the wall humor. Sadly these jokes tend to be more annoying than amusing. To make matters worse the more traditional jokes the game does have suffer from poor timing. This is because the developer includes an excessive amount of build up time to the punch line. As a result the joke loses it's momentum and becomes irritating for excessively wasting the player's time. And finally the demo contains plot points that are never really explained. I suppose the developer may have intended to explain why Rita was chosen for this mission at a later date, but I can't imagine the developer coming up with a good explanation for this considering we know the old man that summoned her also has a team of heroes at his disposal that are all over level 80. And no amount of trying to wave this away with cuteness is going to work in my opinion.



Gameplay

On the combat side of things the game relies on the default combat system that comes with RPG Maker 2003 for the most part. As far as I can tell the developer only made three changes to the combat system. The first change was to set the game to passive mode by default so the active-time battle system effectively behaves more like the conditional turn-based system used in "Final Fantasy X" or "Phantom Brave". The next change was to swap out Rita's basic attack for a special skill that allows her to summon Simba to attack her enemies and this special skill is split into potential sub skills such as allowing Simba to perform a fire attack on enemies if you purchase an upgrade. And the demo appears to include the standard fix to speed up the combat in RPG Maker 2003 so your not spending longs amount of time waiting between attacks.

Unfortunately this combat system is plagued by a few issues that drag things down in my opinion. For starters you begin the game with just Rita in your party and she can be jumped by up to three enemies at the same time. As you can imagine dealing with a large group of enemies when you have only one character is pretty annoying since your going to take a lot of damage and you don't start off with easy access to a healing point or town in this game. You kick things off in a dungeon and are given a limited supply of healing items. To make matters worse enemies tend to be super stingy when it comes to drop and be worth very little in terms of experience. This is especially true of the slimes in the first area that are worth one exp. point a piece. This also leads to another issue in that leveling up in this game is pretty slow early on since most of the enemies in the starting dungeon are worth one point and you need thirty experience points in order to reach level two.

Though oddly enough the leveling up issue flips on its head shortly after you gain a second party member. This is because the high encounter rate in this game effectively ensures your going to gain levels even if the amount of battles needed to level up is pretty high. And as you level up in this game you'll quickly find yourself being able to both outpace enemies as well as one shot them. And since most enemy groups are comprised of only three enemies. Once you have Abu in your party you can wipe out two thirds of an enemy party before they can do anything. As a result battles in this game go from feeling dangerous to highly tedious and boring.

Graphics

On the plus side of the scale this game does contain some custom assets in the form of various hamsters. And these hamsters tend to have a lot of visual personality due to their outfits. On the negative side of the scale the custom assets don't blend in that well with the RTP assets at times. This is especially true of the battle sprites for the hamsters which conflict in terms of style with the RTP enemies you'll be dealing with in random encounters.



To make matters worse the mapping in this game is pretty bad as well. A lot of the dungeon maps are overly large and maps both in and out of town tend to utilize large groups of the same tile. This results in a map that feels extremely blocky and visually unappealing due to how boring the world is.



Sound

On a more positive note the game does utilize non-RTP tracks. On the downside these tracks are pulled from various sources such as professionally made video games to songs by bands that were varying levels of popular back in the 2000s. And to make matters worse the songs by bands aren't just instrumental versions of their music but full on songs with the lyrics still included. As you can imagine having a song playing on endless repeat in the background is pretty annoying when the lyrics are included. And on a partial side note it's pretty annoying the demo comes with a lot of unused midis since they just blow up the size of the demo file for no real value.

Conclusion

"Rita's Adventure" is a bad game. To be fair a lot of the issues with this game are pretty typical for first time projects which is what this appears to be. So I should give props to TrainerAbu for being willing to put something like this out there to be criticized. And while I understand why this project is a hot mess. It doesn't change the fact that it's a bad comedy game that looks awful and is plagued with more random encounters than you can shake a stick at. As such my advice is just to skip over this project, but I'm guessing it might see some new life due to my review. After all before I came along to review this game had disappeared into the long list of forgotten old games on this site.