Quest Questers by unity is a pretty classic RPG created with RPG Maker VX Ace that gives the player exactly what it promises in the title: Quests, quests, and some more quests. The game was created for RMN's Winterruption event, in which developers were encouraged to make a game entirely focused on an aspect of RPGs that usually takes a back seat behind the main story: sidequests.

Quest Questers starts the main character, whose appearance you can select from multiple available choices, on their first day on duty at the Absolute Peak Guild, an organisation dedicated to, well, questing. After some introductions and an opportunity to look around at the guild's headquarters, you jump right into your first job, and soon get to know your only other permanent party member Vallie. She is a young and only somewhat experienced adventurer with a big heart and enough patience to stick around for all of the future antics to come. In addition, she serves as the party's voice, since true to their nature as a player insert, the main character prefers to communicate almost exclusively via triple dots. Once this alliance has been forged, it is nothing but quests from here on out.







Presentation-wise, Quest Questers uses custom hand-drawn maps, backgrounds and monsters made in the creator's signature "doodle" style. Simple as these graphics may be, they give the game a very distinct aesthetic, which is only marred by the fact that some other assets, such as facesets and character sprites, clearly do not match the style. Still, just as with the rest of the game, it's very apparent that a lot of work and passion went into the creation of these resources, which is especially impressive considering the size of the game and the time limits of the event it was made for. The music is mostly taken from obscure older Japanese video games, but was chosen to fit the mood of all given situations and settings very well.

When it comes to gameplay, at first glance it seems that with the addition of its quest selection system, Quest Questers mostly follows the formula you'd come to expect of old-school RPGs. It features a number of often lengthy sidequests - which are actually the meat of the game - as well as a so-called main quest, which ironically is both the shortest and one of the hardest of them all. There is also a special bonus quest, which you can unlock by beating all other quests, and it's especially massive.

The turn-based combat system, which on the surface doesn't deviate much from well-known RPG Maker battle styles, is what the largest part of the gameplay revolves around. It starts off a little slow, but very quickly evolves into the most dominant and detailed aspect of the game. As you'd expect, on each quest, you are confronted with random encounters and boss battles, which you must overcome by using your team's skills and the items you find on your way to the best of your ability.

However, this is where Quest Questers uses a clever twist to keep combat interesting and fresh even over the course of many dungeons: Every quest you accept comes with one or multiple temporary guest characters, usually your questgivers or someone else who has a strong interest in seeing the task completed. These extra characters join you for the duration of their quest, bringing new skills and abilities to the table, but they will leave the party again after the job is done. This way, with every quest you get the chance to discover different powerful combos, come up with new battle strategies, and have the opportunity to learn more about these characters as they accompany you.

Some of the guest party members even turn out to be recurring characters who will call upon your aid more than once. These characters have longer and more complex backstories you discover along the way, and they have levelled up on their own and bring new abilities into the party every time they return. This whole setup makes every quest feel both unique gameplay-wise, and engaging on the level of story, as each character is lovingly crafted and presented to the player in a very genuine manner.







In addition, Quest Questers takes great care to be player-friendly in many ways. There are 4 different difficulty settings, and you can switch between them from the menu any time. Each quest can be abandoned if you feel overwhelmed, although this will cause you to lose a small sum of money you paid in advance. Random encounters become less and less frequent the more of them you have already fought in an area, so that the player is not punished for wanting to explore or admire a particular dungeon more thoroughly. And of course, guest party members will return any accessories they were equipped with upon leaving the group, so you'll never feel cheated out of your best equipment.

Still, even all of this cannnot change Quest Questers's one fundamental weakness: At its core, the gameplay provides little more than the bare essence of the archetypal RPG structure. You enter a dungeon, walk around while you pick up items and fight random encounters again and again, until you find the path to the end, then you battle the boss. Upgrade your equipment, get your next quest, repeat.
This doesn't mean that Quest Questers is boring - on the contrary, it is a very fun and enjoyable game, and especially impressive considering the constraints it was created under. However, the practically identical nature of each and every quest's gameplay and distinct lack of variety in things to do (combined with an initially rather high encounter rate) can make the the experience feel somewhat repetitive after a while.







All in all, though, if you enjoy the base setup of classic RPGs combined with well-balanced combat, an atmospherically beautiful and engaging setting, and a very pleasant and humorous but still immersive tone, I can only thoroughly recommend Quest Questers. It is definitely one of the most impressive and well-made projects to have come out of the Winterruption event, and will likely leave you wanting to come back for more. Quests, that is.