Idle Isle

Introduction

"Idle Isle" is a Role-Playing Video game that was developed by Seiromem using RPG Maker MV. Oddly enough the game began its life as an entry in the Winterruption event, but was completed at a much later date. Regardless, the developer decided to largely stick to the rules of the challenge when it came to finishing this game

Story

Sadly, the story of "Idle Isle" leaves a lot to be desired in my opinion. After all, we really don't learn anything particularly meaningful about Cara, Elise, or Valera beyond them owing a ton of money to a powerful Demon King. And while I'll admit certain games like "7th Dragon" and the Etrian Odyssey series can get away with silent protagonists that are entirely devoid of a personality.

This is because the games in question focus heavily on crafting your characters into a well oiled machine that can deal with any challenges that get in their way. And while you are free to develop your character in this game in order to suit your needs. The game also doesn't place any sort of limit on how many skills and abilities you can give your characters. And part of the fun of games like "7th Dragon" is overcoming the challenge this limitation places on developing your party. After all, you need to consider the overall construction of your characters like cogs in a machine. In the case of "Idle Isle" you'll largely turn each of your characters into an engine that can do everything. As a result, you really don't feel like you've accomplished anything when you've beaten the game.

Gameplay

"Idle Isle" is a game that promises ultimate freedom when it comes to developing your characters. A promise it really fails to live up to. This is because while you are free to teach Cara, Elise, and Valera every spell in the game. The developer didn't set his weapons to also raise the player's magical attack stat. As a result, the only black magic worth learning in the long run are single target status spells. And these really only come into their own against the game's final bosses. As a result, you'll find yourself mostly relying on green (support) and white (healing) magic in the grand scheme of things. This isn't to say that fireballs don't have a use in the early game, but you'll find yourself needing to retire such spells to the dustbin of history in a hurry by the time you get to the mid-tier enemies in this grind fest of a game.

On the other hand, the end game bosses are pretty annoying in their own way. After all, the game basically makes the player focus on setting up Elise for the longest time. After all, Elise's best weapon comes with a technique known as Dragon Fury. This allows Elise to hit four random enemies three times apiece. And while these attacks can go to waste since you can hit the same target multiple times even if it's already dead. It's the best option for dealing with a lot of the upper mid and high tier enemies in this game.

This all changes when you get to the end game bosses. Or at least the two you can access in the current download. This is because those bosses are insanely good at countering physical attacks and delivering massive amounts of damage to Elise in the process. While you can counter this to an extent by setting up the buff protection. The dragon readily gets around this solution by taking all of your positive status effects with a simple road while also delivering massive amounts of damage to the party.

Instead the best method for dealing with the Dragon and Daemon is to make use of the spells Slow II, Toxify, Mute, Bleed, and Befuddle. As you can imagine this allows you to setup a pretty simple strategy where you constantly use Slow II to keep the Dragon/Daemon at the back of the combat queue while inflicting negative status conditions on them. After you've got them poisoned, bleeding, silenced, and confused you can allow them to potentially attack themselves with powerful abilities that only lead to them suffering from additional status effects or stat reductions while leaving the party to heal themselves if the enemy actually manages to hit them. All and all this makes the battles with the Dragon or Deamon rather boring, but I suppose its the only major way forward. I suppose you could also use Slow II and Dim I to inflict percent based damage while also denying the bosses a chance to do anything, but this strategy is a lot slower.



Conclusion

At the end of the day, I'd say "Idle Isle" is a rather forgettable game that should be resigned to the dustbin of history. And while, I'll admit the game came off like it had potential in the beginning. This potential was squandered by bad writing and not understanding why people play games like "7th Dragon" and whatnot in the first place.