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Demo review: Typical 90’s JRPG turned halfway OFF

  • NTC3
  • 07/25/2015 04:44 PM
  • 2120 views
On its game page, BLANK claims to be inspired by RPGs like OFF, Pokémon and Earthbound. The latter two are a known quantity to most, so established that even non-players tend to have a good idea of what they’re like. OFF, a fellow RPGMaker construct, is the interesting one here, having successfully masqueraded as a typically shallow and empowering retro throwback, only to reveal a deeply subversive core, filled with heavy symbolism that allows for a range of interpretations while never fully accommodating any of them. Unfortunately, the similarities between OFF and BLANK are only skin-deep so far, while the conventional core of the game is also riddled with many beginner’s errors that must be excised soon if it is to last in the face of time.

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)

First of all, I must say that the soundtrack of BLANK is really pretty cool. Even though it sounds quite retro, many electronics sound you would hear at the time, the actual compositions, like the first boss theme, or the haunting main theme, are more complex than anything 8-bit or 16-bit. This style reminds me of Sanctuary RPG, available at any price, which was retro enough to be done in ASCII, yet Rafael Langoni’s OST had elements like digitised chanting during the boss fights. The sound design is alright: I’m not sure which battle sounds are custom and which aren’t, but it fits well enough. The one exception is the “wind flapping” sound played whenever the last boss of the demo uses her wind attack: she does it so often, that the sound also becomes really grating. On the bright side, there’s a cool typewriter sound used whenever messages get displayed on screen, and unlike most examples, it isn't paired with slow text.

All of the art used is custom, and is monochrome, much like OFF. There are still significant differences, since OFF was more about the broad strokes, large sections of maps just filled in with that area’s defining colour, which was simplistic, yet effectively accentuated the black-and-white character sprites and the differences between areas. Blank has more detail, when it comes to both the map elements, and character sprites/enemy battlers. Like in other games I’ve played, I would appreciate a bigger range of faces, but other than that, the artstyle largely fits the game’s aesthetic. The only notable weak point is the battle background, same for all encounters, when even OFF changed them between areas and for the bosses. It doesn’t help that it looks like this:



The overall map design is very uneven. The game starts off here quite well with its Finima village, which is thankfully larger than the 3-5 house “settlements” you might’ve seen in lesser games, and the houses and paths are not thrown together randomly, with the overall layout being quite believable (unlike, say, Divided Infinity, or Onyx). The immersion is only marred by the lack of public utility buildings besides the shop, town hall and the guard compound. Given that a lot of the lore focuses on the two religions of Transech, and their importance to the land, something like a small chapel/mosque/etc. would be very fitting. It would also be good to have more than one exit from outside the wall, with them leading to the farms, the mines/fisheries, etc. the way A Blurred Line did in Paradise, instantly expanding our understanding of the place even if the player never ventured there. Still, this town mapping is one of the relative strengths, especially in comparison to OFF, which reduced everything to corridors and intersecting corridors.

It looks well enough that you can at first ignore the cut-and-paste design of all house interiors; hardly anything seems to change inside besides a bookcase going two tiles up or a sofa three tiles right, etc. And pretty much the only things present are the bookcases, the sofas, windows and beds on higher floors. Things like desks, kitchen tables with utensils, cooking aggregates etc. are not present. It’s just inexcusably small and bare; if Sore Losers could create reasonably distinct houses with nothing but various stock assets, why can’t a game using custom art do so?
After leaving Finima, however, mapping swiftly goes downhill. The “Finima Wilds” are just a large, flat rectangle of land for you to traverse, all while getting plenty of random encounters. The way it’s boxed in by straight lines of utterly identical plants that don’t even look that high is just an extra insult. Here, see for yourselves:



I’ll let the experienced mappers (Liberty and Luchino come to mind) explain what could be in its place. Let’s just say that it’s practically impossible for a flatland to border perfectly dense growth, with no “transition area” in between the two, and move on. After wandering the place for long enough, you find a path into the forest that’s basically a flat corridor, violating 3-tile rule quite heavily, and after the boss battle there, you must move back to village to fight, whereas the map is suddenly full of stone-like Corruption things that only serve to block off paths to “unnecessary” houses and frustrate the player, making the map look much worse in process.

Storyline

There are two ways of accessing story content of unfinished builds. You can look at the general writing that is present, with its strengths and weaknesses, wary that things are liable to change as it progresses. Alternatively, you can look at how well it builds up interest for the finished game. The two might appear mutually inclusive, and often, they are. BLANK, though, has a demo with largely adequate writing, which nevertheless fails to arouse much interest once it is done.

One factor is the familiarity of what’s on offer. People becoming twisted versions of themselves as the result of an external influence from a magical carrier, in rough correlation to their sins/mental state might not be up there with awakened crystals and evil empires, but it’s still unlikely to be a new concept to many players. In a way, it’s a foundation of every demon story out there, and can overlap with the zombie ones as well. In fact, the plot so far bears surprising resemblance to the latter, as consists of our young warrior protagonist, Veta, leaving her village to investigate strange attacks on other villagers, discover and kill the infected creature, then come back to find most villagers already turned and needing to personally put them, including her former friend, down. The framework is tried and true: unfortunately, my previous sentence is a lot more dramatic than the story you’ll actually play through.

For one, the characters at hand are just too blandly one-dimensional for us to truly care. Most everyone is just inoffensively nice, wishing Veta and expressing some mild affection or concern for their loved ones. You could say that most people wouldn’t reveal a lot of themselves to strangers, and you would be right… except that Veta is the daughter of the chieftain, and hence knew these people all her life. There needs to be more energy, more life in the dialogues to convey this, to portray actual banter between friends, encouragement given to a responsible girl, or a gentle scolding of an over-confident child, depending on what the other person is like, and hence what they think of Veta. Showing this range of personalities around the town is very important if the player is to be invested, and thus care when the actual tragedy strikes. It might even help to push the game’s beginning a little further back just to establish these characters in the village more. It would certainly help us to know Carelia more: right now, she’s just a hyperactive, emotional child, who reacts badly to Veta refusing to play with her, shouts a lot, locks herself in her room, and then, once we come back to Finima, she’s turned into a boss because of her rage giving and particularly great opening to Corruption, etc. It’s just not compelling at all at the moment.

Another thing that hinders the storyline so far are the logical gaps and tonal dissonance. For instance, I’m not sure we ever find out how did the Corruption (its actual, unoriginal, name) spread from one person at the outskirts of the village bit by Infected Jackalites to the majority of the village, a moment that’s obviously too important to gloss over. Then, there’s a really daft moment when the aforementioned first infected person rises from his sick bed, fully corrupted and murderous, and then slowly heads for his wife in Veta’s presence. That his wife would hesitate to consider him a monster is understandable; for Veta, our hero, to stand still and do nothing when something is obviously very wrong strikes a false note. And then, of course, we have tonal dissonance. At one hand, Veta is obviously affected by what’s happened and asks the first two-three infected people she’s put down for forgiveness: then, though, she just stops saying anything. Meanwhile, too many villagers that are still alive remain cheerful, which obviously clashes with everything going one. The merchant seems to be intended as someone unhinged, though in a “quirky” way rather than a disturbing one. This, though, really shouldn’t be there.



Can we please trade you for that Infected Guard at the entrance?

Then, the game does have some limited lore, but it could’ve been both more intensive, and better written. The bookshelves in Finima village use a strange system, whereas you can read them in any order, yet still get the ordered history of Transech and its two creators from 1 to 9. Unfortunately, they can also only be read once, as trying to do so again triggers a message “You’ve already read from this bookshelf.” I would really appreciate a Note Log to combat this, similar to what OMNIS: The Erias Line did. Anyway, it’s interesting enough, but lacks depth, or relevance. In particular, democracy and order being on one creator’s side while anarchy and chaos is on the other’s feels naïve at best, especially from a non-western perspective: one just has to recall the recent US government shutdown to see that the two are anything but opposites. The later feud between the two creators’ followers spoken also feels contrived, a bit like all of the Paolini’s writing about mountain-worshipping cult in The Inheritance Cycle. Essentially, people don’t arbitrarily begin prominent wars of annihilation against their former neighbours just to establish the primacy of one creator over other: while things might appear that way to a disinterested observer, all the prominent religious divides in the real world have always had, and still have, quite prominent socio-economic reasons underpinning them. Perhaps, Blank will surprise me, and in fact establish these very reasons into the finished game. Right now, though, the dry text of a history book doesn’t give the best impression of this one story aspect.

Gameplay

The game page states BLANK’s desire to have “Approachable, straightforward menus and battle systems.” It has succeeded at this task all too well, as the battles are nothing but spacebar-mashing cakewalk throughout the entire demo. Veta only has her normal attack at the start: Desolun, her spirit companion, also has a Paralysis skill, which is, in a true Final Fantasy tradition, pointless to use on any of the normal enemies, yet never works on any of the bosses. Our duo gets an extra skill each at level 2, and then nothing for the next two-three levels, which is when I finished the demo. Those change little as well: Desolun gives some health regeneration for several turns, so that it’s situationally useful in boss fights and nowhere else. Veta’s 2nd skill, though, “has a high chance of entirely blocking the next attack” while, well, not attacking. It’s a glorified Defend (while the command itself doesn't exist in the game), reliable damage reduction swapped for randomness, and this dubious privilege will cost Veta 30 MP out of her 70. Worse, there’s no reason to ever use it: those games that bother to make Defend and associated skills useful in battle typically give enemies a charge-up turn, or a turn of a weak attack, or whatever, before they unleash a truly powerful move. This gives player a choice to either Defend to ride the attack out or hit the enemy with everything they got, at the risk of them still standing to deliver their ultimate punishment. BLANK has nothing of the sort, as enemies perform their (slightly) more powerful attacks randomly and with no warning. Of course, that’s when they even have attacks to choose from.

Yep: all of the game’s regular enemies so far do nothing but attack. Sure, they get different names and sounds, like “Sword Slash” for Corrupted Guards, and "Dark Lash" for Corrupted Demans, but the end result is the same: they all only ever do the same thing during battle. The first boss has two attacks, one slightly stronger than the other. The second (and last) boss has 3, and 2 have a chance to inflict either 2-turn Stun, or much longer Paralysis: obviously, there’s also no way to heal those two besides waiting it out if you do happen to get them. These attacks (as well as excessive health) do make the second boss more difficult than the rest: I lost the first time round after running out of potions, so I just reloaded to buy a dozen more and finished her off, and there was still no real strategy required. Simply put, this state of affairs is unacceptable: even OFF, which had generally been a cakewalk from level 5 upwards, still had challenging and interesting boss and Secretary fights, not to mention that there were more skills, even early on, and they actually did important things, while enemies’ skills at least provided some different animations to glance at. The combat here is as primitive as in Fragile Hearts, only this game is not even a parody.

As before, a good example is Sore Losers: for all its other faults, it did a lot of work on encounters that felt original and kept the player engaged in combat (at least, before the players’ stats climbed out of control in the second half, and made enemies struggle to inflict more than 2 points of damage in return). Its first enemy was a canine, too, in the form of Slum Hounds, except that unlike the pathetic Jackalites in here, they not only had respectable stats, but could buff all allies noticeably through Howls, and had an Agility-decreasing leg bite, all in addition to attacking regularly. Later on, both the Ferusian Soldiers and the rebels opposing them had 3 attacks each, and on the whole, even the enemies that were utterly generic on the surface could do interesting things. Of course, the party members began with 2 and 3 skills each, gained more throughout the game, and there were also other touches like weapon-specific skills and Overdrive mode skills whenever a character’s health got critically low. A little bit of this out-of-the-box thinking is urgently needed for BLANK if it wants to have anything resembling memorable encounters.

Speaking of which, the game has the on-touch encounters when fighting Corrupted Demans in the Finima Village, thus highlighting each person’s (former) uniqueness, but reverts to random encounters in the non-story areas. It’s not really a problem; the fact that I soon mashed Escape on all of them for aforementioned reasons is. Another issue is the lack of enemy/encounter variety: while not as significant as boring fights, it does make me question the use of RE in the first place. Normally, the greatest advantage of random encounters is that they allow for the player to fight many different enemy groupings in the same area, while on-touch is more limited by definition. Tristian: Lady of the Lion demo provides a good example of this truism, while A Blurred Line is a very good example of random encounter variety: you could explore the first section of its World Map for several hours before you would finally stop encountering completely new enemy groups. Here, though, your only choice is one Jackalite or 2; later, it’s 1 Infected Jackalite or 2. Either add more creatures, or make Jackalites live up to their lore by making them into on-touch encounters that normally try to stay away from Veta unless she got too close, or some other condition is fulfilled.

Lastly, there’s also the underdone shop system. Firstly, BLANK uses the traditional and lazy way of simply making every enemy drop small amounts of currency (G): it’s functional enough, but I always preferred games like Sore Losers or Withered Reason that limited the animal loot to hides and other craftable/sellable stuff the animal is actually likely to possess. More importantly, though is that there’s nothing much to buy so far, due to the cripplingly limited shop selection:



Out of everything the vendor sells, Health Potions are the only things Veta needs (Magic ones might become needed once the game gains skills that are actually useful). The equipment is the same or worse tier than what she has: however, all that leather armour is somehow equippable onto Desolun, a summonable spirit, which is another lazy abstraction that I hope gets resolved, and he gets the entire range of character-specific equipment. After all, if A Blurred Line and Iron Gaia did it with their robot companions, why can’t BLANK?

Some readers might want to know about the puzzles, minigames and the like, but there’s nothing to say, since the demo has none.

Conclusion

BLANK could certainly be very good in the future; right now, however, it’s a long way from actually being so. Much like with Divided Infinity, the most valuable part of the current demo is the excellent OST it offers.

* NOTE: The game has apparently been updated recently. As such, the faceset and battle background variety is no longer an issue, and the Finima Wilds map has also been scaled down. It's a welcome improvement, though changes like better, more varied combat are still essential.

Posts

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Yikes! You certainly tore this demo apart, I can tell you that.

Don't mistake that for being a negative thing, though. This review was probably one of the most informative and critical I've seen in a while, especially for my game and that's a good thing. BLANK (as I imagine you already figured out) is my first RPGMaker title. But unlike other first-time projects, I really wanted to put my heart and soul into the game.

But many of the points you addressed are excellent ones and the critique can certainly be implemented into the final product. Some things such as character faces are relatively easy to adjust, while others such as entire map layouts may take a little time to complete (specifically Finima Wilds, but I had a feeling there was too much empty space there).

As for the narrative however, I typically want to save some of the more important details until the end of the game where everything is revealed. I'll still do my best however to add on the established lore and character interactions (and yes, that Deman at the front of the corrupted village has now disappeared. You will be missed, fine sir).

So to end things, thank you very much for being completely honest in your review. It hurts me more if people withhold their criticisms rather than tell me directly, as it just stunts my growth as a designer and person.

Thank you!
No problem! Sorry for replying a little late, was too busy to check RMN recently. Anyway, it's always great to see a dev willing to improve when faced with constructive criticism, so kudos for that.

Also, I have just started playing a game on here called Guardian Saga, and I think it might really help you to see it. It was also someone's first game, and it's flawed in many respects (combat is better, but far from the best, mapping has too much empty space at the start, music and sound effects are often bugged and end up not appearing, etc.) but I really like the way it handled flavour text, and especially the dialogue with minor characters.

Those dialogues really have plenty of energy, and the people feel quite distinct, often with their own backstories, even though there are quite a lot of them, since the first settlement, and the location before it, are both surprisingly large and populated. If BLANK's dialogues could be more like those (though, obviously, with fewer jokes and such, since the tone of the two games is quite different), I feel it would be a welcome improvement.
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