Journey 2 the Shrekisland

The gameplay and plot

The game's supposedly about shrek.

It suffers from a lack of direction at the beggining. There is no indication of where you're supposed to go first although you don't have that many choices. You can either meet the odd church lady, or enter a series of fights in the battle arena which, spoiler alert, is needed to be traversed in order to advance the game. Not that you'd know, since before entering the building there was no indication that the path north lead nowhere (if you step at the top of the screen nothing happens until you beat everybody in the arena).

In a church-like home you find a woman who asks you if you can aid her with something. If you agree, she'll give you a hand axe and vaguely point you south, however, if you talk to her after this, she'll ask for your help again, and if you agree, she will give you ANOTHER axe, and this process can be repeated ad infinitum. I personally grinded her a bit so i could sell a lot of axes and be able to afford the stupid, stupid prices of the items at the village shop.



The shop has three items available for sale, potions at the cheap price of 50G a piece and two more healing items that are ridiculously overpriced compared to the potions which you have no possible means of obtaining, as the fights you encounter don't yield much cash. There's a guy that you can fight endless times in the village, but he drops a teensy amount of money, so grinding him for money is a time wasting chore. A better option is to just pester the church lady for axes.

Once you go south to a huge empty map with no encounters and waste some time finding the thing the lady asked you to get, you can go back and give it to her after which she... Disappears. She goes "Good job!" and disappears. I didn't pay much attention, but i think she gives you a small amount of EXP. The game doesn't tell you via message or anything though. Ah, and she gave me one more hand axe as a parting gift. How nice.



Assuming you fought everyone in the arena, you'll be able to finally head north where the game starts proper. There's a dungeon with enemies with encounter rates as unreasonably high as their HP and attack stats (hopefully you bought lots of potions if you were cautious. Like, 99. Also HOT TIP: If you encounter the succubus in the starting path at level 2 or less and you have less than 10 potions, restart the game. It's over. Although you should give up anyway because you'll need quite a lot more for what's coming).

The game gets really frustrating for a while from here on. No amount of potions seems to be enough. Enemies drop a pathetic amount of money despite having tons of hp, defense and attack. Your skills suck (except for Heal II which is a godsend in that awful area, since your Heal I stops being useful because enemies can easily swat the exact amount you healed in the same turn). There are unavoidable fights with tough enemies in areas where it's impossible to go back for more potions, netting you into a series of unwinnable situations. It's a nasty portion that made me wish to quit playing the game various times.

When you finally reach a store, you might think you can finally restock on all those potions you used right? Well, the pirate fellow who owns the store would like to disagree.



Fortunately, after this excruciating part comes an easier section with a familiar track from the shrek soundtrack reminding you that this game is supposed to be about shrek. Although it is slightly sped up.



You finally reach shrekisland, which is small on the outside, and you can finally fight some shrek characters here. Well, more specifically, A shrek character. It's Donkey, and you'll fight him over and over. And he has tons of health, can't damage you, and will never let you escape the fight. He doesn't talk, he doesn't give any funny quips, nothing.

Then you find a pseudo puzzle which is more like a quiz and you finally get to meet Shrek, at which point the game ends because he's fucking impossible to beat. He kills you in three hits and you'll have no means of sneaking enough attacks to kill him while you desperately try to heal, since he has an outrageous amount of health.

So, the ending of the game shall forever be a mistery to me. How terrible.

Content Analysis

The game uses RTP elements for the most part. There is no way of sugar-coating it, this game's mapping is shoddy as hell. Many places of the game got the "screw it" technique applied to them in that you can almost see the random clicks and drags of the mouse in order to make the map as quickly as possible.

The battles are a mashfest, since there is no strategy to enemies other than bash bash bash, they'll attack you but use no skills. You learn some healing spells, which are welcome, and a skill that is useless and will most likely never use.

The music for the most part is adequate RTP music, although some if not all of the custom tracks used sound oddly slowed down or sped up. It's like when youtubers want to circumvent copyright laws by doing that to the tracks.

Comedic Aspect

While I played I was wondering what the heck this game had to do with shrek, as you don't get to see anything from the franchise until well past 1-2 hours or so besides off handed comments from npc's. The only thing I found funny was the awful grammar and the combat nun in the arena that says something that's all but ecclesiastical.

Considering it is a first RPG maker game, there are many noobie mistakes that can be appreciated here, you could play it to see what kind of things to avoid doing, but ultimately you'll be wasting your time if you want a good experience.

All in all,



Give it a miss.

Score: 0.5