World Outside

How has this game not gotten more attention? World Outside utilizes a battle system highly underutilized in the RM community. Unlike more traditional RPG Maker projects, World Outside makes use of top-down, real-time battles akin to Legend of Zelda or Secret of Mana. Get ready to blast your way through hordes of enemies in this highly entertaining project.

Adelain is a sheltered young boy with a mysterious power who has never experienced life outside his mansion, leaving him timid and naïve about the nature of the world. However, when the unscrupulous young sorceress Nera visits his manor and makes some strange demands of his family, Adelain’s parents decide to go to some very dramatic lengths to be rid of her and protect their family’s secrets. Fortunately, Adelain, being an RPG protagonist, is more than willing to throw away everything he has ever known and fight to the death to protect some girl he met five minutes ago.

Balance 3.5/5
The game makes use of entirely custom battle mechanics. You have two playable characters with slightly different ways of fighting. Nera, who you will play as first, uses elemental magic spells, which have a bet of a delay when casting which can make combat feel slow-paced. It picks up considerably once you take control of Adelain, who is a melee fighter who can attack much more quickly. Also he can punch a wolf in the face.

The emphasis of combat in World Outside is on combos. You can set up your own button input combinations to execute certain moves, allowing you to perform many techniques in rapid succession. You must be leery of making a combo too long, however, as your character will be locked into moving all of the moves in the combo once they are input, even if they are facing the wrong way. Being able to change directions mid-combo, or cancel a combo in progress would have been a nice touch.

Basically, the goal is to experiment until you find a particular set of moves that appeals to you. Your ally will also fight using the combinations you set for them, and they generally fight intelligently enough and their pathfinding AI is surprisingly good. As long as you’re careful, your partner shouldn’t require much babysitting.

The game has no conventional leveling systems. You can purchase new equipment but this is the only way to influence statistics. Characters can learn new abilities by acquiring experience from defeated enemies, which they spend on the new skills ala Final Fantasy Tactics. Many boss battles unlock new techniques to be learned so you’ll have quite a list to work with by the end of the game. Early on in the game it can be hard to accumulate enough experience to learn new moves while you experiment to find ones you like, but later in the game you are likely to accumulate large piles of it and have no trouble having enough to spend on things.

As for battles themselves, they tend to be of pleasing difficulty, although basic enemies tend to have perhaps a few too many Hit Points at times. Fortunately the game comes with a built in difficulty setting that you can adjust at any time, so you should have no trouble completing the game. It can be as hard or easy as you desire.

Most importantly, though, the combat is just plain fun, and it can be very enjoyable to try out new moves or execute powerful combos on enemies. Definitely a novel approach to combat that is worth checking out. One drawback, however, is the game uses particle effects. Lots and lots of particle effects. It is sometimes very easy to lose track of your character as the screen quickly becomes overwhelmed with animations. It is important to pay close attention. You’ll also find yourself mashing buttons a lot, but in a good way, akin to the side scrolling beat ‘em ups of the nineties.

I'm not sure if I was playing the game wrong but I pretty much never came close to running out of MP. More advanced spells could probably stand having a higher MP, otherwise this mechanic may as well have not existed for as much as it affected me.

Level Design 3/5:
The towns are stunningly well-designed, and every area is very well mapped, looking vibrant and visually appealing. A few dungeons feature some interesting puzzles, and even a most bosses make use of environmental factors to influence the battle.

The main problem with the design is the clunky interface. Off hand, I can think of two attack buttons, a menu button, a jump button, a target button, a switch character button, and many of these buttons have different functions depending on if you are pressing it or holding it down. It can be very difficult to remember which button does what in a pinch. The game does come with a handy reference for how each button is mapped, but does not tell you what each button does by default, which would have been very useful.

The user interface, such as the heroes' hp bars, also obscurs your character on some maps; in general this does not happen very often but it is fairly annoying when it does.

Characters 2.5/5:

The game is lamentably full of wasted opportunities for character development, which is a shame since a very large portion of the narrative is focused on the protagonist. Adelain’s unconventional heritage comes to the fore in many scenarios, but almost none of these result in any meaningful growth on his part, at least not visibly. He had great potential to be an interesting character, such as if his lack of understanding of the outside world was played up more. Nera is, fortunately, a very amusing character to watch. She is devilishly clever and harbors potentially shady intent, making her all the more interesting. As for minor characters, most are hardly worth mentioning, they tend to serve their roles and offer little else to the narrative. The one exception is Sam the Butler. He’s awesome. He should have his own game.

Storyline 3/5:

The game is very short, only a few hours, the full story arc covering what would be a side quest or the first act of a longer game. The game does not pretend to have an epic storyline, instead playing out more like “A day in the life of a Ranger.” It is somewhat refreshing to see a more modest approach to storytelling at work here, while at the same time lots of interesting facts about the world’s history or strewn about to help flesh out the setting, which is really the game’s main focus. The world is filled with many fascinating places for you to see, and it is definitely worth the trip to go through and see them all.

Music and Sound 3/5:

Almost all the music are tracks from Ragnarok Online, which are pleasant to listen to and fit most of the scenes. It also gives the game a fine sense of audio coherency and consistency. Ragnarok is a very well known game, however, so quite a few players are likely to recognize the music used in this project.

Overall 3.5/5:
An innovative game that pushes the limits of what XP is capable of. Its custom combat is enjoyable and stimulating, and even if the novelty of it starts to wear thin near the end. Although it has some clunky interface issues, if you like crazy and intense battles, you could do much worse than spend the few hours on this game.