Forsaken Isle

Let's be clear: Forsaken Isle, by AtiyaTheSeeker, is essentially little more than a practice run at making fantasy RPG for its creator. It does show some promise, but not enough to seriously consider it over many other such games on RMN unless you really need some time to kill.

Storyline

The premise is wholly basic: Warlock named Nicholas has opened the dimensional rift on the titular isle and summoned a small army of generic rmk creatures from there, so your trio of heroes, Tawny, Zeke and Carol, need to put a stop to this before he manages to rework reality itself to his liking, etc., etc. Nicholas does get a nicely world-weary monologue before the final battle, but don’t expect any more nuance or complexity from the game.



What it does do pretty well, though, is descriptive narration, both for the items you wear and use, where it’s nearly always several lines long, and for the key events. Every boss battle will be preceded by a paragraph or more describing their appearance, while once they’re defeated, you’ll be treated to another paragraph detailing their dying moments and/or the looting of whatever key accessory you got from that fight. It substitutes for the characters’ dialogue pretty well here, although such approach would be obviously unsustainable in a larger game.

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)

The graphics and the sounds are all pure RTP, give or take the villain sprite and an edit of the demon dog battler to produce Cerberus. Hence, the game can only be judged on the way they are used, which is pretty mediocre overall. Most maps look decent and are devoid of basic errors, and there are even nice-looking rooms like this,



However, you also get truly boring and ugly stone corridors like the screenshot with the ring above. The combat screens are the worst, though, as they always use nothing but a spiral background tinged with the area-appropriate colour, which at its worst looks like this.



The RTP tracks are applied well enough, and also get changed just about every time you enter the new area, to keep you from growing tired of them. A pity that more of the same approach wasn’t applied to the enemies!

Gameplay

The main problem with the combat in Forsaken Isle is that it’s just pretty boring, both in approach and especially in its presentation. It’s entirely possible to create interesting enemy combinations with RTP-only battlers, but this wasn’t done at all here. Each area will only give you 2-3 basic troops to fight: 2 Ghouls, 2 Oozes, demon dog, 3 Ghouls (also the first “boss” of the game), 2 Dolls, a Black Mamba, 2 Black Mambas, 2 Wraiths, 2 Imps, 2 Gazers, and finally, 2 Imps and a Gazer, the only mixed enemy troop in the entire game! Moreover, the game uses both the on-map enemies and random encounters, but the only meaningful difference between the two is that the former can be dodged on map, but can’t be escaped from. Otherwise, you’ll get a random enemy group no different from the random encounter ones. It’s strange how something this basic was given so little thought while making the game.

As for the combat mechanics themselves, they are passable at best. Tawny, Zeke and Carol all have a single ability at the start (heal + status-clear, stunning attack, and lightning strike, respectively) and gain two more each before they cap at level 5. The enemies all possess a single ability at best, usually inflicting a status (Poison, Confusion, Drain Life), though there’s occasionally a fire-breathing area attack for demon dogs and (non-poisonous) Black Mambas. The resulting combat is functional, but quite shallow, since there isn’t a skill synergy for either friends or foes to speak of. The enemies’ stats in combination with low MP pools and lack of level-up heals are high enough to provide some challenge, and pure spacebar-mash won’t work too well at first. Thus, you generally need to figure out the appropriate level of ability usage for each fight, so as not to run the risk of running dry later. The game is also save-anywhere, and thus there are no save points with the associated heals: only a single restoration pool near the start. Because of it, I’ve had to use the consumables quite often, which does distinguish the Forsaken Isle from most games.

Said consumables are bought from the merchant, who hangs out in the opening area of the game. There’s a fair mix of them, including the cheaper HP/MP-restoring items that only work on-map. Attack items are notable by their absence, however, and weirdly, the armor/weapon upgrades only cost 15 coins, slightly more then the normal consumables, in spite of providing far greater benefit (+15 ATT/DEF increases). When I bought them on my first return trip to the merchant on the Isle’s Coast, I was at about level 3 from regular combat and exploration. Having done that, I found that the early enemies completely lost the ability to harm my characters, though the level-cap prevents the later ones from being similarly outclassed. Still, you’ll want to grind on those hapless Ghouls and Oozes a little more, so that the second-to-last boss, the mocking succubus on her throne, can finally choke on her blood (quote from victory narration).



And once she's defeated, for some reason her corpse temporarily changes to the Gremlin Santa one whenever you interact with it.

This is a difficulty spike of sorts, as all the earlier bosses are pretty underwhelming, and I defeated them by simply having Zeke stun them as often as possible while the rest unloaded with basic attacks, wisely topping up his MP bar beforehand. Succubus is immune to status effects, though, so only the damage spam works, requiring Tawney’s only offensive ability at level 5. Same goes for the final boss, with the caveat that you need to keep his 2 Wraiths under the Carol’s group paralyse ability (which also makes any regular battle trivial once it’s applied, and renders the later all-enemy fire attack irrelevant), and have one person healing back the damage every turn. Few other options are available when his group attack will simply kill everyone if used twice in a row, while the single-person Lightning removes about 90% of their health. Luckily, he can stupidly use his weaker regular attack as well, and a successful battle in no small part requires him to behave stupidly, which rather diminishes the satisfaction from the fight.

Conclusion

In all, Forsaken Isle certainly shows some effort and promise of a better, longer game from the developer in the future, but simply has little to offer on its own merits right now. Even if you narrow your criteria down to other games using exclusively VX Ace RTP, it’s still outclassed by Okiku, Star Apprentice, not to mention the longer, harder, story-driven games like Soul Sunder and Illusions of Loyalty.