Name: A Demon Crystal Story

Developer: Zero3D

Story: Made for the Winterruption event, failed to finish before entry. Follows Ash, a human who is one with the crystal and as such, able to live among fairies. He's a teacher, teaching fairies how to make wishes. At some point, he got into a horrible fight with his brother and is now terribly scarred.



Ash has a dream that his brother has failed to destroy some dark crystal thing that was hatching. And so now Ash has to destroy it. Fala, a fairy that still hasn't learned to grant wishes, begs to come along. Like a tool, Ash let's her. Because, yeah, teachers letting their underage students come on potential suicide missions is totally a thing.



Writing: Okay, the cringey grammar and syntax isn't too bad. Story and pacing isn't too bad, either. It's easy to find things wrong with the writing. I wouldn't call it poor writing so much as inexperienced writing, but looking underneath the novice nature of the game, there is a wildly imaginative story here. It's going to be hard for some people to look past some of the poor design and writing choices this game made, but one point that really says a lot to me was the fact that I didn't want to stop playing.

Gameplay: These are standard battles, using a sideview script by Vlue. Random encounters are high enough to be ridiculously obnoxious. I mean, one encounter every five steps on average (not even that, I think. More like one every three steps) is incredibly ridiculous. Seriously, be reasonable! The sidequests are very straight-forward and it gives a quest--I don't want to say log--a quest HUD, which if you rack up quests, disrupts a large portion of the screen. I'd love to have a way to hide that thing. It's like I've got a book covering half the window. Nice to have, but it'd be nicer if it was in its own separate window that you have to call up. I had a hard time reading some of it as some of the text was tiny (and that's saying something! I usually don't have a problem reading something when half the people in the room are squinting and asking "What does it say?" So if I'm having trouble reading, you've definitely got a problem that you need to fix), and it's made obscure by how it looks against the tiles. Map layout is well done with pacing between combat areas and safe areas done very nicely.

Graphics: The game is RTP for the most part with many characters being made in the character generator, including Ash. There are some non-RTP Mack characters; like Fala is definitely not from the RTP. The mapping is very good, though the main quest town is really hard to navigate due to layout. I do have one, tiny little complaint. The CSCA lighting script that the developer uses for the fairy town makes me want to rip my eyes out.



Music: Mostly RTP. Two rips. The music used for the fairy town is from Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. A very nice little piece of music.

Conclusion: The game is average overall, but it's got some really interesting elements, and...yeah. I think I'd recommend that you give it a try. It's not overly memorable, but it's interesting, and there's some really neat ideas, story-wise.