The Only One Left was one of Caz's first games (as well as her first VX/RMN Game, made for the Nugget Crash Course on a short time table). On the whole, it features some rather interesting design elements that buried by fairly typical and sometimes bland gameplay. Caz has definitely come a long way from this, and she has even admitted that it's not her best work, but it's not exactly terrible either.

Presentation
The presentation of the game is a mixed bag. The music is a mixture of RTP and non RTP, but I did enjoy some of the custom selections. The changes to some of the sound effects were also nice. Graphically, most of the non-dungeon maps were great. The dungeons themselves, however, needed extensive work: they were basically semi-empty rooms created with the random dungeon generator.

Story
The premise is fairly interesting. After a few events in the intro, your party is thrust forward in time by 100 years. You'll have to collect some precious minerals to make your way back in time and resolve the paradox! But there will be plenty of demons to fight along the way - as well as plenty of characters to recruit, as long as you have the right gifts.

I did like the somewhat twisty ending (as well as the initial twist that was basically out of left field). The pacing of the story was somewhat inconsistent, as I felt there was a huge plot valley in the middle where not much was going on. More character development during the intermediate areas would've been great.

As for the characters themselves, they're fairly decent. The one-eyed dude and Gwynn have an interesting, if inconsistent, dynamic with the occasionally good banter. The other characters aren't nearly as interesting, but that's the downside of having a bunch of recruit-able characters. The dialogue is fairly well written, though I didn't find myself really getting attached to the characters due to the lack of development and emphasis on dungeon crawling. No big deal to me, though. I don't need to get attached to characters to enjoy a game - and sometimes games can suck really, really bad if they try to get me to get attached. This game knew its limits, which was cool.

Gameplay
Ah yes, the meat and potatoes. Again, the gameplay is a mixed bag. You travel through five randomly generated dungeons (though I believe the fifth was hand-crafted because it's quite unique and well done), fighting monsters and inching your way closer to the boss.

But when you defeat the boss, you get teleported outside before you can grab the shiny loot surrounding it. You're warned of a dark presence, and when you go back up to the boss lair again, you'll have to face a harder version of the boss. After that, you get teleported again and have to go through the same dungeon yet again to obtain the loot (this time with no boss guarding it). This grew tedious by the second dungeon, but thankfully the dungeons aren't too long.

It would've been nice if the dungeon changed after beating the first boss, or if there was a warp portal that would take you back to the second boss. Something like that! The high encounter rate puts an additional damper on trekking through dungeons for a second and third time. I eventually stopped fighting these optional bosses.

In addition to the dungeons, my other big gripe with the gameplay was the balancing. Most of the game is extraordinarily easy, except for the fire optional boss and the final boss (which is a one-on-one battle against an enemy who takes more than half of your HP away per hit and paralyzes you on occasion...). Plus, some items cost too much early on, but later they almost become too easy to obtain while still having not lost much of their potency. The skills are also either too effective or too useless, as is equipment.

There was some good in the gameplay department. Items are very useful - and, frankly, that was the only incentive I had to fight extra random encounters beyond the ones that leveled me up to the point where I got my uber skills. Blacksmiths have powerful weaponry and can randomly turn broken items into works of art. Characters can be recruited once you provide them enough gifts. Some items have to be traded to progress the story. You get the idea: items play an important role in this game, as they should in most RPGs. Good work here.

I also enjoyed the world map and some of the optional content. There was a casino that I didn't really try out, but kudos for including that. Lastly, there's an optional boss rush that will really test your survival ability unless you overlevel. Nice work adding these interesting wrinkles into the dungeon crawl.

Conclusion
I think that basically covers everything. The game is inconsistent; for every interesting point, there's a frustrating counterpoint. I still had some fun with this game and Caz definitely showed some promise with this back when it came out. I'd check it out if you're a developer who wants ideas on how to implement items and party recruitment into your game.

Story: 3/5
Gameplay: 2.75/5
Presentation: 2.5/5
Fun Factor: 2.5/5
Overall: 2.69/5