You can tell Ocean worked on a game when the first thing you see is food.

Remie and Alana is an RPG Maker VX Ace game made for a game making jam that focused on relationships between women. Presently it exists as a 45 minutes demo that I feel is well worth checking out. The game could be described as having a sweet tooth as you can see from the title screen above; sweet foods are worked into a huge chunk of the game, all the items are named appropriately e.g. Elixir Cake, the characters undergo a magic transformation by chanting about chocolate and cake, even the post-transformation costumes resemble food!

Warning this game may contain magical girls.

Setting
The game blends a modern setting (complete with phones and apps) with magical girl tropes. The main chunk of the demo takes part in an abandoned mall although it also goes under a transformation for the second half of the demo.

Story
A Xalimi died but left 48 evil artifacts lying around. You need to stop them all from causing mayhem and chaos. The main characters are Remie and Alana who are likable enough and do their best to support each other.

Graphics
I didn't recognise any of the graphics so I think they are all custom for this game. With the possible exception of the portraits and summons everything in game is really consistent art wise. Also it looks great, a lot of time and attention to details clearly went into this game.

Gameplay
Skills are learnt by levelling up and use MP, TP or both. Enemies generally have one weakness you can exploit once you find it. There are couple of systems to note, there is a weapon upgrade system (which is just pay for the next upgrade) which perhaps could be developed further, currently it doesn't offer more than a weapon shop would. One final system is that each character can equip one summonable pet. In battle the pet provides two skills which summon it, one support, one damage - both can only be used once per battle. The dungeons are largely exploration based with a couple of instances of having to kill certain enemies for doors to open. Encounters are map based and not random.


I really liked the design of the Whale - also a bonus that the design accurately reflects one of the elements of the fight.

To conclude I usually like to think about a games strengths and weaknesses and the thing that was apparent to me is that this game is simply consistently good. Nothing came across which I could call a weakness. So really the only thing that pulls it down is that it is unfinished and hopefully that can be rectified.