Zero Gear Fighters

Before many of us became seasoned developers, we made projects with RPG Maker that often followed no coherent plan or adhered to any sort of consistency. We were young and full of dreams, but without a whole lot of knowledge about the inner workings of game design, nor did we critically examine just what makes things fun in a game, we just did what we thought was cool.

This was the impression I got from playing Zero Gear Fighters, a relatively basic RPG even with its numerous bells and whistles here and there. By all means, it’s a terrible game that lacks polish in many areas, yet unlike other awful games I’ve played, both on the site and beyond, Zero Gear Fighters has a sort of genuinely innocent, raw sense of quality that can be easily identified by a “first game.” Thus, I can never bring myself to truly hate the… thing I just played.

STORY:


The story of Zero Gear Fighters whistles a familiar tune. You are some chosen hero who is out to fight some great evil to save his sister and uncover his destiny, complete with a “suspenseful” back-story of how their father, originally presumed dead, is now alive. The story is so by-the-book that it’s difficult to really care for it. What I do care for, however, is how well it’s executed, and this is where Zero Gear Fighters stumbles.

The plot is as spastic and unfocused as a trip to Wonderland. Your primary objective is to save your sister, who gets kidnapped by a demon who has about a thousand screws loose, but along the way you also have a completely random bit where you need to deliver milk for someone, with no explanation as to how the milk got in your inventory and no reminder from your “mother figure” in the game that the task needed to be completed beforehand. Before that, you get into your first battle against a person being attacked by a slime in his house, but you only know of this after walking outside of the first town and an unassuming NPC lets you know. Prior to that, interacting with the house you need to enter or the NPC will elicit completely generic responses, as if nothing is going on.

It gets worse from there, after exploring the first overworld for only a few minutes, a cutscene triggers and you are immediately sent to the second town’s inn, regardless of whether you visited the town prior or not. You need to be at this new town because your kidnapped sister is here, allegedly, but upon going through meme drivel and completing a dungeon, you are instead facing off against the leader of some cult, and your sister is nowhere to be found.

There is nothing that telegraphs when each plot segment is supposed to move towards the next, making the game’s overall narrative feel highly disjointed. This is made worse by numerous errors in spelling and grammar, overuse of exclamation marks, and out-of-place game and TV show references that are blurted out by random people regardless of context. Sorry, but an NPC that blurts out the lyrics to Dora the Explorer does not a funny joke make. You need context, irony, a set-up at the very minimum in order to make humor work.

GAMEPLAY:


I find that adding “NO random encounters!” as a major game feature is one of the most laughable trends many RPG maker users employ. Honestly, an encounter system that keeps you on your toes and doesn’t allow you to predict when you’re going to fight is actually way better than what’s featured here.

Zero Gear Fighters features touch-based encounters implemented in one of the laziest ways possible. Enemies outside of battle move in a completely random pattern, typically away from the player, and pose no interesting threat. You’re expected to just walk up to them and initiate a battle, by and large, but you’d almost feel bad for trying to attack a slime that’s stuck to some corner and not bothering you.

Engaging in battle reveals larger problems, however. The battles have little to no strategy involved other than mashing a skill or a basic attack repeatedly to win. Enemies, even up to the phase of the second town, just use the default “attack” command and nothing else. Better yet, your main character is over-powered, as their skills cost next to nothing out of their total MP, and dish out about twice the damage you would with a regular attack, so the key to winning is to just spam your “Wind” skill often. B-b-b-boring!

Outside of battles, the game is littered with poor design choices. Why bother including an inn in a town where the player can fully restore their health at their house? Why have diagonal movement when it adds nothing to your game?

The worst design crime committed is probably the way the “poison” state is handled. It slips damage outside of battle, as you’d expect, but the flashing effect you get on the field is completely removed. Sure, the flashes can be an obnoxious eye-strain, but it’s better than nothing at all! Why is this a big deal? The first time I got poisoned, I ran around for a bit before taking on my next monster, only to be utterly surprised the status was still there and my health “suddenly” dropped to less than half my total HP. I fortunately never died, but because there was no indicator that the poison status was draining my health, let alone even existing outside of a check in the menu, it completely left my mind and set me up for a potentially unwinnable situation.

The things you put in games should have a specific reason for being there, whether it’s guiding a player to the next map screen to giving the player a non-verbal “tutorial” through clever level design. Ultimately, the biggest flaw with Zero Gear Fighters is that its design is almost strictly superfluous, not truly being there to serve the game, but stuff thrown together for no other reason than that the creator could.

Lastly, please, playtest your game fully before showing it to the world. The game soft-locks around the time you first meet some crazy dude with black hair, just after beating the first real boss. It’s horribly unprofessional, and makes this “completed” game technically unplayable.

GRAPHICS/AUDIO:


The graphics are an RTP vanilla-fest, which isn’t too bad on its own, but Zero Gear Fighters manages to use some tiles in ridiculous ways. There are doorways directly attached to star cases, repeated clusters of tiles that are arranged without any rhyme or reason. Tile edges where they don’t belong, etc. To its credit, it does a better job at using the RTP than most, in that the walls aren’t made of floor and the maps aren’t empty, paint-bucked squares with no direction. It’s still lacking in inspiration and ugly, however.

Worse than that is the mismatch of screen resolutions for graphics. The game uses a custom resolution of 640 x 416, but has background images designed for the default 544 x 416 resolution RMVX employs. This result in plenty of weird-looking black borders on battle backgrounds, and even the title screen graphic doesn’t fit this resolution.

The game’s soundtrack mix and matches between default RTP, Megaman music remixes, and Midis. Need I say more? Some of the tracks sound cool, but the clash of styles is very noticeable. Pick music that works with your game and can work well with your other tracks, as oppose to solely picking stuff that sounds cool.

OVERALL:


From its hilariously bad writing, poor design decisions, bad art decision, lack of polish and lack of cohesion overall, Zero Gear Fighters is a truly bad game by objective means. However, in the same way a cheesy B-movie manages to make me chuckle, Zero gear Fighters manages to elicit a smirk out of me regardless of its countless flaws. It’s the kind of game that reminds me of what I used to make when I was just starting out with the engine, and in that sense I can’t really blame it for being in such an awful state.

My advice to the developer is to keep on making games, but be receptive of feedback and take some time to learn a little bit about game design. There are topics and articles on the forums that are readily at your disposal. Still, a bad game is a bad game, and the score I’m leaving this off is based on what, in my opinion, the game deserves.

SCORE:
1/5
I HAVE CHEESE!!!