SkyE

Foreword

Thankfully tracking down a copy of this game wasn't as difficult as I feared it might have been. This is because it's possible to get a copy of this game through the use of the Wayback Machine which is more than I can say for some other old games on this site unfortunately. Though I'm still hoping the developers will upload the game onto RMN's servers in the near future since it would make it easier for people to get a hold of this game.

Intro

"SkyE" is a RPG/bullet-hell game developed by Anaryu and Krisanna using RPG Maker VX for the RPGM Miniature Project Contest. A contest I know little about an am too pressed on time tonight to try and look into it. So I'll just try to keep in mind that this is a contest game during this review. Though even if I keep that in mind there are some serious issues holding this game back from greatness in my opinion.

Major Bugs

The game contains a few bugs whose triggers aren't exactly clear to me. The first one you'll probably encounter is that bosses will sometimes fail to spawn in. The reason for this isn't clear to me, but if you retry a stage enough times the issues usually resolves itself, but needing to reload your save file and play through a stage multiple times so it'll load correctly is rather annoying.



An example of this issue is shown above where you can see me flying around some spawn points, but enemies aren't spawning in nor are these spawn points going away so the boss can arrive.

Another issue that will sometimes crop up is about a scripting error.



Though I'm not enough of a programmer to know what this error means. I've been told it means the game is trying to retrieve information that is no longer there. So I'm guessing it's try to access an image file for the boss I just defeated before this message popped up. Thankfully this error doesn't always happen, but it's still annoying to need to reload and beat a boss multiple times in order to access the next section of the game.

Sound

And since were covering some of the worst aspects of this game first I figured I'd talk about the game's background music and sound effects. While I really don't have any issues with the game's sound effects. The game's music on the other hand is awful in my opinion since so much of the music really doesn't seem to fit the game itself. This is especially true of the music that plays during the game's many battles and the end credits.

Story

You play as Celeste, a sky night, whose been tasked by her boss to investigate a school and get to the bottom of recent monster activity. Unfortunately the game really doesn't make a lot of aspects of the narrative beyond this basic premise particularly clear. Like why do the monsters attack our dimension, why are people studying at school run by a group that likes to perform cruel human experiments, and why is all of the important information about this world seemingly locked away.

Gameplay

Gameplay wise the game is a bit of a mixed bag in my opinion. On the plus side the game much like "Sigma Star Saga" on the Game Boy Advance allows the player to gain access to new weapons over the course of the game which is really useful for changing things up now and again as you fly around blasting monsters. On the other hand it does take a bit longer than I'd like to get used to the controls. For example in order to charge your super attack you need to be holding the shield button before you press the attack button. You simply can't go from spamming your attack to charging your super by holding the attack button down before you press the button for your shield. Another thing to keep in mind is that your only locked on which direction your facing if your holding down the shield or attack buttons. And this is something that got me killed once as I tried to put some distance between myself and a group of enemies in order to make it easier to avoid incoming bullets.

On a more positive note you can switch between four difficulty settings and experience a new game+ where you can explore areas you'd previously missed in order to get a fuller picture of what's going on at the school. And during your initial run through the game you'll get enough gear that changes your basic attack and supers enough to be satisfied though the beam super is a massive step up in terms of power to the game's starting super. And the ability to apply points into various auras you can switch between allows you to swing between offensive and defensive styles of play at the press of a button. On the other hand you'll probably not be using the others one that much since the attack aura is clearly the best if you want to get through enemies quickly since this game really likes to throw a lot of bullets at you.

Graphics

Graphically the game is a bit of hodge-podge in terms of styling with the human characters and monsters looking like they come from different games. Though I'd be hard pressed to explain that with my words alone so I'll use this visual to help out.



Though I suppose this is rather fitting considering the enemies come from a different dimension so them looking strange in comparison to the human characters makes a lot of sense.

Conclusion

If this game wasn't so prone to suffering from major bugs that force the player to reload this game I'd consider this game good, but those bugs are just unacceptable in my opinion. After all, who wants to reload and retry a battle a bunch of times in order to see if the game will finally cooperate or not? Though if your willing to look past those issues you'll probably have a decent time blasting your various enemies into healing orbs.