Unpolished, Unbalanced, and Nonsensical

  • Muninn
  • 07/08/2012 02:50 PM
  • 1746 views
The Out Casts is an RPGMaker VX game created by redwall10. This appears to be redwall's first (and, as of this post, his only) game on this site; as such it could be expected that the game would not be a masterpiece. Unfortunately, The Out Casts has many more issues than would be considered acceptable even for a first game, featuring unbalanced gameplay, a barely-sensical plot, and spelling errors galore.

Summary:
At this time, the game page for summarizes The Out Casts as such: "The Outcast follows the journey of Chris and Ashley, two siblings who have become outcasts for practicing magic, as they fight against the forces of Zio and attempt to reclaim their place in society. Throughout their journey, Chris and Ashley will be aided by Sakura, a woman from Japan, and a powerful fighter known as Alex 'The Guard'. "

In actuality, The Out Casts follows Chris and Ashley, two siblings who became outcasts after Zio attacked their village out of a sense of racism. After defeating Zio, they then go on to fight his master, the Earth King, who kidnapped their mother.

Story: It's an excuse plot, how could something so simple be made incomprehensible?
Sometimes in a game, we don't need betrayals and revelations left and right, and just want to beat up the dragon. That's fine. Excuse plots are perfectly acceptable in games that just want to attract you on the gameplay alone.
Temporarily putting aside the issue of whether or not The Out Casts has gameplay engaging enough to make such as design decision a successful one, The Out Casts somehow manages to take an excuse plot and make it nonsensical: After defeating Zio, the two siblings learn that Zio's master is holding their mother captive as revenge for them defeating his servant... except their mother went missing before they rebelled against Zio.

Presentation: Eye half know ID uh watt want rung, her.
Put simply, The Out Casts's performance in this area is simply atrocious. Graphics are decent enough on their own (due to them being RTP), but maps are overly spacious and haphazardly arranged (with the exception of one interior map depicting a mine, which wasn't that bad). Music is unremarkable. Any time the player is presented with a dialogue box, they can expect to find more words that are spelled wrong than ones that are correct. Even when you puzzle out what the characters are meant to be saying, it feels unnatural.

Gameplay: Not particularly interesting
The Out Casts is not the most unbalanced game I've played, but it still has a significant way to go. Pretty much every random enemy encountered in the early game will be way too easy for your party to ever be a threat during the two rounds that the enemy will be alive. The late game changes things up by including enemies that have enough health to last several more rounds, but are still incapable of becoming a threat to the party, mostly because somewhere in the 3-5 level range Ashley gains a full-party, full-health healing spell that she can cast for 8MP (out of ~90MP that she has). Due to the fast paced leveling in the beginning of the game, level 3 will be reached after the second random battle.
Bosses are not much better: As long as your party members have enough health to survive one attack from the boss, Ashley can simply spam her healing spell every round, while your other party members chip away at the boss's hp. When you don't need to heal, Ashley can instead use her costs-6MP-but-deals-600-damage Wind spell, which allows for enemies as late as the final boss to be brought down in 3-5 rounds of battle.

Final Verdict: No
The Out Casts could probably be made presentable with a nontrivial amount of work, but the low amount of salvageable content means it would be better to start over from scratch. The game is playable, but players would be advised to look to other games for entertainment.

Posts

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Marrend
Guardian of the Description Thread
21781
Actually, redwall10 had gamepage for Phantasy Star Gem on RMN, but it was deleted... only to be brought back later... only to be deleted again. I think he might have had another game, but my memory is quite foggy on this point. Though, from what I understand, the download that he managed to have for Phantasy Star Gem was just the audio directory. So, it would probably be more correct to say that this is the first game made by the author that was playable in some way, shape, or form.
im having trouble playing this game wherein after any battle the game crashes is there something ioing wrongm d
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