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Absinthe Makes The Heart Grow Fonder

Or: Jammin' With Ella
Or: Fun, Funny, and up to a certain point, Friendly

So first let me say that the first thing I did when I saw that RMN had a Playlist feature a few months ago was to add a bunch of Liberty's games to my Playlist because reasons. So imagine my surprise when The Shore: Foreign Tides, a three year old game that had been sitting on my playlist for months, turned out not to have been made entirely by Liberty, but is actually her completion of a first half created by Gredge109 for RMN's first Swap In The Middle With You event in 2015. That is one hell of a coincidence considering that I just signed up for the second go round of the Swap In The Middle With You event.

Let's dive in.

Story
Ella is a veteran bounty hunter who in spite of her veteran status is and apparently will always be Level 1 (but see Action below). She's a silent protagonist, or rather, you get to choose everything she says, and considering that opportunities for real two-way conversations are limited, let's call her a woman of few words. She has risen to become the top bounty hunter in frankly a very weak field of competition; she's a big fish in a VERY small kiddie pool: see, she lives on an idyllic island that is home to Enbury Village, a region where the monsters don't really do anything we associate with the word "monster", like savagely murdering innocent people. Instead they're mischievous little creatures that like to play tricks. In fact, it seems that she's made a career of hunting monsters without ever actually killing one.


The world's most polite boss monster, ladies and gentlemen. A remarkably cordial response to my just having thrashed his ass.


This is because the monsters are bumbling buffoons, tricksters, or some combination of the two (man, except those two cockatrices, those two cockatrices knew what was up).


Pictured above, dumb boss, pictured here, smart minions. Seriously, these guys should have been put in charge of all the monsters on the island. Their plan is flawless and is only thwarted by a nonsensical elemental weakness so illogical that even they lampshade it by bitching about it.


(I also like the twist of a cockatrice that turns itself to stone.)

Of course, the day eventually comes when Ella's presence is requested at a much bigger (and more serious) Hunter's Lodge on the mainland. Without too many sentimental attachments (actually, that may depend on your play style, see below) she leaves, bound for a new life, in a new world, where monsters actually kill people, and the stakes are for real. Then new fledgling hunters are put under her wing, and she has to adjust to a leadership role in a setting with much higher stakes.

The crossing is, it seems very evident, the point at which the game was swapped from Gredge109 to Liberty and also the moment when the game's proverbial balls dropped, adding the slightly harder edge and higher stakes that I'd been craving throughout the first half.

That's more like it.


In the end (I don't actually think this is much of a spoiler?), I got the ending where I was more brave than cautious or smart, and charged in without reporting back to command for orders. I was able to beat the final boss on my own without additional support from the higher ups, although just barely, by the skin of my teeth. I actually kind of felt like I deserved the chewing out I got for endangering Ilsa and Tenne's lives.

Action
I think the above section indicates that I preferred the tone and setting of the second half of the game to the first. The gameplay of the first half, on the other hand, was much better.

The entire Enbury Village segment of the game is a well-paced tutorial into some unique battle mechanics, followed by a series of puzzles (some of them hilariously easy due to the incompetence of the monsters setting them up, all of them funny in some way) and fights which are also puzzles. The puzzle fights reminded me of that one game without any maps by ChaosProductions/LouisCyphre/whatever-he's-calling-himself-now-if-he's-even-still-around, but better. None of these puzzles are particularly difficult, but as a rule what makes them easy is always funny, like moronic villains finding various creative ways to moronically blurt out their weakness.

There's several unique and notable things about the battle mechanics: you gain money and can buy or otherwise attain better equipment but never experience points or levels, all of the numbers are extremely small (and possibly WYISWYG like if your Attack is 8 and you attack, the enemy takes 8 Damage, not sure), there's a quick attack designed specifically for enemies that like to block and counter, there's the usual trio of RPG elements (Fire, Ice, Lightning), but all of them inflict status effects in addition to doing damage, and all three of them are pivotal in specific puzzle boss fights (I won't spoil which is which).

On both sides of the game, gameplay was made more convenient by a teleportation ring that let you 'port back to a nearby shrine. Also I don't know, there's just something cool about teleporting, as long as it's established in universe as magical teleportation. The 'there's no explanation for it you can just do it' Fast Travel that's virtually mandatory in all AAA sandbox games I care for a lot less, but I digress...

Outside of battles, there are various characters to interact with on the island, and I wasn't certain if some of them were opportunities for developing friendships or romances. The one I decided to pay attention to was the grizzled blonde warrior guy who had a scar on his face only when he smiled (doubt that was intentional). I checked back at the shore three or four times after he said to meet him there later on in our first conversation, so when the game announced it was evening I checked back, then later on when it was night time, and so on, but he stood me up every time (WHAT A JERK!). He did show up at the last minute as I was about to ship off for the much less G-Rated Liberty-Land and we had our tearful goodbye, but I still felt like I was missing something. There was a younger red-headed dude and I think a girl that also offered to socialize with me but I flat out ignored them.

Story Again, 'scuse
Anyway, the moment when Ella sails away from the shore invoked all kinds of different feelings in me. She was floating off into the unknown. The symbolism of the ominous boatman made me wonder for a moment if this entire place had been some kind of benign purgatory, all of the characters that I had met and fought essentially imaginary, and that she was now crossing the River Styx into the afterlife, and this was the end of the game. But no, the feeling I was getting was just that of Gredge109, sending his game off into the unknown.

'kay, back to Action
Anyway, so the first half does a really perfect job of establishing these cool systems, puzzle battles, and so on. And the transition into a more 'traditional' RPG at the second half of the game is not as smooth as it could be. In the first half of the game, every encounter was telegraphed by an on-map event, and had an amusing cutscene before and after it (the latter invariably involving the defeated minions bounding humorously away). In the second half of the game we get default random encounters in a crowded forest maze with a OUTRAGEOUSLY HIGH encounter rate (once I literally took two steps from one fight into another fight). This is not a step in the right direction.

The battles themselves were good for the most part. The framework of skills and systems established in the first half was mostly applicable to the second half, although a few things were awkward. Sandwich (restores HP) and Soda-pop (the MP restoring item in this game is Soda and skills are rather powerful so I couldn't help thinking of the PCs as soda-powered killing machines) only target the user, a decision which made perfect sense in the beginning when it was a one-character game but much less so towards the end when I could not have Ella feed the ridiculously fragile Isla a sandwich when she was at 1 HP.

One thing the second half did that I liked was give me a character that was essentially a blank slate that I could mold into a role of my choosing based on the selection of her weapon. I went with the crossbow for Ilsa and was pretty happy with my choice, although the battle system seemed very confused. Some turns, she got an extra action, some terms she got two extra actions, some turns she just got the one action. It all seemed very arbitrary and I couldn't find out the logic behind it. And her "Fast Hands" ability's tooltip promised that it granted "Three Whole Extra Actions". Well it didn't. That would have let her take four actions in a row, which would have been awesome. It gives only two extra actions, for a total of three whole actions. I don't know. This might be a nitpick but it bothered me.

And naturally for a game made in two weeks (I assume?), there were the occasional minor bugs, like passability issues. These are to be expected in a game made in such a short time.

wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!


Sights
RPG Maker MV RTP. The maps in the first half of the game were attractive. The maps in the second half of the game were better than attractive, aesthetically, although the crowded forest combined with the high encounter rate made for annoying gameplay (see above).

I think that everything else was default RTP, full stop, so not much to say there. In the battles there was a script/plugin in place that caused the static frontview RTP enemy graphics to kind of...undulate, which I think was supposed to make them feel animated, but didn't really achieve that effect. I will say this, though. If these facesets were made in the MV Generator, holy shit! I understand why people have said to me that Generator was so good. There are some very attractive facesets in the game. Also the visuals on
minor spoiler
Ella losing her hair at the end

were neato.

Sounds
The sound design in this game is excellent! The original music composed by Gredge109 is superb, ranging from peaceful and soothing to high energy and exciting to super-uptempo dub-step (yes, dub-step). It didn't end there, though. Little audio cues like the sound of an owl signifying night were also appreciated.

Final Thoughts: I've followed a lot of game jams and maybe even participated in one or two. Since then I've taken my first faltering steps towards being a musician. This felt more to me like 'jamming' than any game jam. The moment when Ella launches from the shore to arrive in Libertyland felt like the moment in a jam session where one great musician (nevermind for a second that Gredge literally is) ends their solo with a lick or a phrase and another talented musician picks up the song without missing a beat and goes on to rock their own thing. I recommend taking the two hours it takes to play this fun and interesting RM game. It has its faults, but it also has moments where it sparkles.

Posts

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Wow, thanks for the review, Storm! Looking back there's a few things I would have changed on my end of the game (like the random encounter rate) but seeing as we had only one week each to make our halves in (double that this time around) I think we did a pretty good job for both sides.

I'm glad that you picked up on the change-over between the friendly, open atmosphere of the island and how impersonal and more dangerous the second half was in comparison.

Good luck on your trials through the current event!
seeing as we had only one week each to make our halves in (double that this time around) I think we did a pretty good job for both sides.


AB-SO-LUTELY
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