Miwashiba's LiEat

On the Steam platform, I do follow a few curators since I have a strong preference for Cute games. The reviews for this super cheap RPG were Overwhelmingly Positive, so I thought I'd try it out. LiEat runs in some uncommon, low resolution like 800x600, and it only runs in a window that can't be resized. Since this game uses pixel art, I figured this scaling issue was an artistic choice, to honor the game's aesthetic or something. But I was wrong.

When pixel art was the norm for modern games, developers would often do all they could to make the most of their set limitations. And with LiEat, all I see is laziness. Despite the top-down sprites and nicely colored, but lifeless map tiles, there's no conformity for scaling and pixel size. In menus, instead of drawing more detailed portraits for our heroes, the developer just stretched the faces of the tiny people walking around.

But they make up for that with dialogue portraits, like they're from a highly decorative manga. That being said, I'm not often sure what I'm looking at in them. Speaking of dialogue, I think they used far too many ellipses. Maybe that's normal talk for the hardcore weebs who are more likely to enjoy this game than people who want to play something fun.

LiEat is the story of a tiny girl who is actually a dragon who eats lies. Looking like a tiny human girl, she's carted around to different places by her abusing caretaker to solve mysteries. So the play is much more like a mystery visual novel, than it is an RPG. The RPG elements only exist to demonstrate that a fight is happens in the story. The battles aren't hard enough to count for anything, and there are only a couple enemy graphics. And they don't animate. They just flicker into a different 24-bit palette when you hit them with the same sound effect you hear when your man-friend slaps you.

So you spend most of the game going into every room and talking to every person until you trigger the next event in the story, which requires you to once again go into every room and talk to every person. There aren't a lot of good clues given, and there's no real reward to progression, because you just keep doing the same stuff.

The music in the game is all right. I guess it fits the vibe of the whole thing, with nicely voiced strings and piano. It doesn't annoy me, but I'm not going to pay an extra $4 to download it. I know I'm being kind of hard on this game, but I'm baffled by the otherwise positive reviews.

Style: 3/5 - Substance: 1/5 - Music: 2/5 - Fun: 1/5

Fenrir Lunaris's Vikings of Midgard

This is the pack-in game for the Official Hamster Republic RPG Construction Engine, originally developed for DOS, by James Paige. This is the engine I use for my little game design projects. Originally designed for people to easily make games similar to Final Fantasy IV, OHRRPGCE has been consistently development and can now be used (with a good deal of programming), to construct any kind of 2-D game.

Of course for amateur game designers, new engine options are popping up all the time. OHRRPGCE isn't even on the radar for noobs. But I know what I know, and there's still a lot I want to do with OHR. And the smallness of its community has its benefits.

But anyway! Vikings of Midgard showcases a near perfect execution all of the basic things you can do with OHRRPGCE, featuring developers as characters, among characters from the community's other games. Altogether, it's a wonderfully inspiring introduction to the engine and its community.

More about the game. Starting in Valhalla, Odin sends you on a quest to rescue the missing Freya. Meta intended, the game sends you on a quest for four stones to complete the Brising Necklace, which will open the gate to Helheim, where the *Dark One* has kept Freya kidnapped. This quest sends you to places of Norse mythology like Alfheim, Nifelheim, and Thule. Like most RPGs, you first go to the forest zone, then the fire zone, then the ice zone. But at least I wasn't forced to use the black mage. It's not that I hate black mages, I just think that for how many random battles you often have to fight in JRPGs, I'd rather not spend half those battles rifling through menus and picking the right elemental attack.

So the Gameplay here is pretty well-balanced. You can turn off random encounters to avoid constantly running into low-powered/low-reward enemies, but your invaluable thief character can usually steal something worthy. Aside from a thief, you get a variety of party members, like a black mage, white page, samurai, berzerker, valkyrie, fighter, bard, and ranger. This gives you options regarding how much you want to grind verses how much you want to strategize.

Some mini bosses will switch around your party, so the character they pertain to gets used, which can be a bit annoying if you really rely on your white mage. But these optional mini bosses are well worth fighting, because they usually reward you with a new skill. New mini bosses often appear in areas you've already explored as your story progresses, making it feel less like you're running errands just to progress the story.

I've always thought the graphical presentation for the OHR's built-in battle system was a bit wonky, which is why most advanced users of the engine make their own battle system. Fenrir-Lunaris compensates for this with laboriously crafted, beautiful enemy sprites. It's this kind of love-labor that makes this game stand out from titles made for profit or brand-building. Still, not all graphics were created with the same passion. Many of the human portrait graphics are downright ugly compared to the furry characters.

That being said, I got twelve hours into the game, and could not figure out what to do. So I talked to the developer on Discord, often asking what to do next. Fenrir is a furry, and talks like a college professor. A real nice guy. I made a quick video of myself using debug tools to get to the next area of the game, revealing that I'd been playing an old, probably incomplete version. So Fenrir insisted I start over, after I'd already invested twelve hours.

So I did, and it was worth it. Vikings of Midgard was a fun game with a great, very complete story, and it was an experience I'll never forget.

Style: 3/5 - Substance: 5/5 - Music: 3/5 - Fun: 3/5

Ubisoft's Child of Light

Since I've been spending a lot of time on game design, I figured I should be using some of that time to play and analyze some games, mainly RPGs, from my backlog. This one is from Ubisoft, a company which came into fruition with its hit game Rayman, which never did much for me despite being the most prominent title for the 3DO.

Child of Light is a side-scrolling, turn-based RPG in which you control a little red-haired princess named Aurora. The side-scrolling aspect is especially fun, because you can fly. It's the perfect game for those who like to explore beautiful worlds. And beautiful it is, this world called Lemuria, hand-painted with watercolors with papery texture to boot.

So there's a lot of style in this title, but not as a means to compensate for low quality gameplay. That's not to say the gameplay is especially profound. While the exploring is fun, and the world is filled with little puzzles and a ton of loot, most of the loot has little impact on your method of play. Healing items are good for boss fights, but most of them go unused. You have a firefly friend who can illuminate different areas of the map, allowing you to find more treasures.

There's no shopping in this game, and your only equipment comes in the form of gems called Oculi, which can be crafted and combined from their different varieties. After each level-up, your characters get to choose different upgrades, which is cool, but your characters are all going to have their general strengths and weaknesses, even with permanent stat-boosters. Characters also pool experience, so the fun exploration often gets halted so you can stop and choose upgrades for these characters you never use, but might need... maybe.

The characters themselves aren't very interesting, but I didn't look too deeply into it. Why not? Well, there's something about this game I really can't stand. The developers decided to make every single line of dialogue rhyme. And the rhyming is bad. Almost every sentence reads like it was spoken by Yoda, causing most of the text to come out in a jumble of terrible sentence structure. I figure on every block, there's a kid rapper who could have done a better job.

The battle system for this game is pretty good. It's much like Grandia, in the way that all fighters share a time bar. Each action takes a certain amount of time to execute, which gives you and your enemies space to interrupt each other. This is all swell, but a lot of enemies counter attack when you interrupt them, others counter when you use physical, magical, or elemental attacks. Each enemy has its own mode, which you need to keep in mind. This is fun, but there are no quick battles. They all require a certain level of focus, causing you to, after upgrading your characters, forget where you're going.

Looping back to the subject of elemental magic, I'm not really a fan of it, especially when you don't have all the elements at your disposal. Most RPG games have the tree levels, where everything's weak to fire, then the fire world, then the water world, and so forth, in an order you're never aware of. And this works fine (albeit uninventive), so long as you're not forced to use elemental magic, and don't have to gamble on which magic to learn.

The music in this game is all right, fitting, but there are only about four songs in it. But even that's fine, since it only took me twelve hours to finish this game. Despite it's flaws, I think Child of Light is a good game. It doesn't make you do boring things, like talk to every single person in town before getting to it. The gameplay is immersive, with the perfect amount of complexity. Some of the battles are also pretty hard, which scratches an itch. It would have been better if they'd included some impossible fights that, in spite of your perfect strategy, require you to come back later.

Child of Light's pretty good, but not really my kind of RPG. It's magical and whimsical, and more for the 90s born fairy tale fans instead of us who grew up worshipping Japanese games. I've watched Brandon Sanderson's lectures on Fantasy writing, and many of his concepts apply to all forms of media. Every story opens with a promise about what kind of experience the consumer is going to have. And if that promise isn't fulfilled, the readers (or players) will be unsatisfied. Despite its challenges, I think Child of Light is too short. It puts a lot of systems in play that are never used to their remote capacity. There are some touching moments to its story, but its resolution is flacid and crowded with one-note party members.

Style: 4/5 - Substance: 2/5 - Music: 3/5 - Fun: 4/5