Shrine of Kammuki

Some games tend to really focus on storyline. Others would rather have you
ignore all that and draw you in with their own unique mechanics and features.
Still others just give you characters you'll love regardless of whether the game is really playable or not. Then there's Shrine of Kammuki, a game that is none of the above.

Its' writing wasn't terribly complex nor terribly interesting, the mechanics while
intriguing and potential-filled fail to work within the game well, and the less I say about some of the characters, the better. (I mean.. "SWIMELIA"? for a swimming instructor? For crying out LOUD.)

The title screen pretty much gives you an idea of things to come; there's a watch
hanging from a tree. My first guess was he was going to turn this into some time-travel themed game, which obviously won't instill a lot of hope in me given the potential for bad storytelling here... but sadly, the REAL explanation is "There is a time-of-day system in this game, and you'll have a WATCH to keep time with!". More on that doozie later.

Upon beginning, you're "Treated" to an intro featuring Klarth from Tales of Phantasia...whoops, I mean Ruteo, some guy who died who is supposedly your father. And based on the Star Wars midi, i'll guess you're gonna hear a lame "I AM YOUR FATHER" joke.

ok...

Yep! you get a lame "I am your father" joke. Now about the ripping off... every aspect of this game from the art to the pixels to the music to even the mechanics themselves are just blatant ripoffs of other, better and more fun commercially available games. It's like he took bits and pieces from anything he could get his hands on and mushed it together with other stuff like bad leftovers. Here's just a quick list of characters in the first town alone (and what appears to be the ONLY town in the game if the mechanics have anything to say about it)

http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v115/Tellah/kammuki5.jpg

Yanik was ripped from YuGiOh
Kammuki was ripped from Suikoden 2
Sheena's pic is from RTP 2000, but the name is from Tales of Symphonia AND Suikoden 1
Lilian was ripped from Chrono Cross
Lead was ripped from Breath of Fire 2
Kipo is Chrono Cross again...

The list could go on forever, but may I add that the "system sounds" are ripped from
Final Fantasy 7? (the beeps and boops for clicking and such).

The time of day thing was ripped right outta Harvest Moon, The store midi is a remix from Ocarina of Time's store theme, the cooking idea was ripped from Suikoden 2 again, some sprites are ripped from Pokemon (In particular, the hyperactive girl who apparently got high eating cookies infused with steroids) the relationship aspect was a combination of Thousand Arms and Harvest Moon... the list could go on forever. Terribly original this is not.


http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v115/Tellah/kammuki4.jpg

Let's move on to the annoying and distracting Japanese voices. First of all, what they're saying in Japanese NEVER matches what they're saying in English, so pointless there. They tend to drown out the music you've strangely heard somewhere else before, so double pointless... and they make the characters look childish and oftentimes retarded everytime they repeat the same Japanese phrase they just said two seconds ago which makes it triple pointless. And no, "Ohisashiburi da na" doea not mean "But I am so listen up". (you'll have to play it to see exactly what I mean) worse STILL, sometimes you'll have more than one voice representing the same CHARACTER. It gets annoying quite fast. Needless to say, this aspect of the game will have you pulling your hair and possibly threatening your computer with a chainsaw.


http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v115/Tellah/kammuki1.jpg

Mapping. Ok, the town doesn't look half bad, actually. It's standard town fare, and the cave I got to see wasn't bad either. No complaints there. The observations I DO have are mostly regarding what you can walk on and what you can't.


http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v115/Tellah/kammuki3.jpg

The house where you begin your adventure; I can WALK through the Shelf with the potions in it. I also can get trapped inside the fireplace and I can walk on parts of the WALL for some dumb reason. There's a house with an open door I can't go through right next to Shay. I can't walk anywhere near the sign labeled "Private Property" without triggering a message asking me why I DIDN'T read the sign. Ok, Can I PLEASE walk through the brick road part WITHOUT having to read the message again so I don't have to go AROUND the sign? I got the message now, I don't need to read it 7 times! There's some wierd hyper girl who I can manage to talk to 1/300 times regardless of whether I have a cookie for her or not, as her neighbor suggested... and boy is this town infested with Butterflies. I mean one or two here and there would've sufficed, but not to be outdone by Earthbound, he put an average of 5 butterflies to be seen regardless of where you're standing in town! I mean, do they EAT the bloody things in this town? Do they breed them for this purpose?

Now add to all this bizarre wall-climbing tiling the following problem:

The time system. A nice idea, it is implemented sloppily in this game. If you want to advance time, you can either stay put and WAIT for the time to reach your desired time, or you can do what I like to call "Twilight Zone-ing it". Why Twilight Zone? because once you see what time it was, sleep, and wake up, it wont make ANY sense. I sleep at 1pm and ask the prompt to put me to sleep for 4 hours. When I wake up, the prompt proudly tells me it's now 5 AM. But if I check the clock, it will say 5 pm. But if I go OUTSIDE, it looks like 5 AM. WHATS HAPPENING TO MY WORLD?!? For this reason and this reason alone, I had to quit playing altogether, because getting the time to mesh perfectly is a CHORE in this game, and it should have been properly play-tested to straighten out the time bugs. In a game where timeliness is PARAMOUNT, you can't let the timer go wacky like that. Oh yeah, when the day reaches a certain time, the screen will annoyingly fade out and in on you too, which is VERY annoying as well. It is not fun to have the screen interrupt you while you're walking inadvertently to display its' new "nighttime" colors. Uh uh. This needs major working with.

Finally, the Barney complex; make friends and you'll level up! When you achieve 40
relationship points with any given townsperson, that person can now be called your
friend. And don't think too hard, all you have to do is exploit the options. Mr.
VerifydRasta needs to add switches or something, so that people don't just EXPLOIT the system and talk over and over and over again until they reach their desired level. I talked to one chick over and over about fire, music and tv until she had 260 relationship points with me. (meaning it goes beyond your standard 255, folks) it's too bloody exploitable, and why does making another friend make me more muscular all of a sudden? Nevermind that the options and their given responses are for the most part bland, pointless to the plot, random and badly written, (along with some annoying pop references like talking about Christina Aguilera for no reason whatsoever) but having to repeat yourself again and again while your precious time is wasted isn't my idea of fun. This could be transformed into a brilliant fetch-quest for friendship points type of game otherwise.


http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v115/Tellah/kammuki2.jpg

The whole relationship thing needs to be worked on just as much as the time idea does. I think the author should have stuck with one working system rather than several faulty ones. Too much stuff packed into this for absolutely no payoff? Frustrating. You learn to cook automatically just by helping your mom cook breakfast one morning? Oh and you start at 8am and you finally finish cooking it by NOON??? That's gotta be one hell of a BREAKFAST! There's a lot of sloppy things that desperately need re-working. The text on the people's names are all different... To cut things short, this entire game feels like it was a jumble of a whole bunch of ideas, art and music from other games sloppily squashed together, for no reason other than that the creator liked these things. The story itself isn't much to read, either. I sincerely hope the author intends to take the plot somewhere interesting, but the intro failed to capture my attention. Less so with the distracting "Pieces of other games" lying strewn all over this game.

Bottom line? The remake that the author is talking about making in his Kammuki thread should address all these issues and possibly be reworked into something more fun to play. It would also behoove the author to make a concrete decision to either make it a joke game with pop references, or a serious one with some sort of awesome quest involved. Either way, he needs to make it fun. And he needs to make it his own this time, and let his own flavor shine through.

1.5 out of 5 is my score because he obviously spent time on it, and because he tried hard to put some interesting code into his game, the battling has potential as well as the timer idea. The friendship levelling could work depending on the overall plot. Ultimately, it could be turned into a good game if he polishes it and reworks it. Otherwise, it will be forgotten like the many Cracky-the-dog types you find all over the RM Universe.