Introduction

"Rubi" is a short action RPG created by Ocean over the course of three days in RPG Maker 2003.

Story

You play as young girl whose been called upon by the spirits to save them in their time of need. After all, when your biggest problem is being frozen solid than the best solution is to call upon a girl whose powers allow her to throw around great balls of fire.

Gameplay

"Rubi" features a rather simple active-battle system where you perform your basic attack with z key and pull up your list of spells with x key. You can then choose which spell to cast with the arrow keys. You can also activate a few items by using the number pad. Though, I'll admit that I'm not entirely fond of that idea. After all, this is a game where you need to be almost constantly on the move in order to stay ahead of your enemies. So needing to move either of your hands away from either your attack or movement options comes across as a bad idea in my book. If anything, I think a better decision would have been to tie the items into the A, S, & D keys.

Graphics

"Rubi" is a fusion of custom assets as well as rips from a few entries in the Mana series. Unfortunately, I'm not particularly familiar with that franchise so I can't tell you how much of the graphical assets are rips and how much of them are custom. On the other hand, I can tell you that this fusion results in a world that is just bursting to the brim with pastel colors. And that this choice in color palette works really well with the lighthearted nature of this game. So much so that it feels like a match made in heaven.

Sound

On the sound side of things it appears that Ocean decided to utilize some original songs found on Bob's Mighty Midi Site, but I don't recommend visiting that site to be honest. This is because the site causes your computer to automatically download a sample midi, but who knows what else it might be making you download in secret. And, I've been jumped to other sites pages when trying to bypass the site's main page as well.

Bugs

As you can imagine a game thrown together in a matter of days is prone to having a few bugs, but only one of them is extremely relevant when it comes to my overall thoughts on the game. Especially since minor mapping errors can be rather amusing in small doses.



Especially if they don't allow the player to skip over major chunks of the game. Unfortunately the other bug can lead to some issues with combat. This is because Rubi sometimes doesn't change which directions she's facing when you move her to the right or left. And while you can compensate for this with a certain offensive spell. This bug can royally screw you when your trying to do a quick turn around in order to strike the enemy before once more putting distance between yourself and their offensive abilities.



Conclusion

"Rubi" is a simple action RPG that is just stuffed with charm. And while the game definitely suffers from a lack of polish in a few areas. It's hard to deny that this short game is a fun ride. So, if you have 15 minutes to spare I'd suggest giving this game a chance to shine like the ruby it's named after.