Hey now. This game is already more sci-fi than at least two of the Star Ocean games.
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oh I am excited as fuck for this
Gonna assume this isn’t one of those RPG Maker games you can pay money for.
Also, clearly he is Delita Hyral, Tenth of His Line. We can expect great things.
How often do the facial art styles clash horribly?
e: And to be honest, even with all this, it probably does still compare favorably with a lot of RPG Maker games.
What in the world is this pile?
I’m excited to find out.
If we’re gonna be fair, this game looks like it was made by the hands of a teenager (or younger even), so they maybe didn’t understand that ripping things off in the way they were was a big creative NO. That said, we haven’t seen just how much they rip off yet…
Deren is the dude on the right. You can tell he’s the protagonist because he’s the more boring looking one.
Also I bet that Delita Hyral X’s name is either Derren or Darren (and leaning towards the former). I just get that impression for some reason.
his name is skeet? as in the clay pigeon thing??
Well… I sure doubt that this is a Doug reference, because c’mon. I bet it’s not even a sports thing, considering this is doing the Generic RPG But In Space schtick.
No problem. Eh?I still need to get paid though.
"Haha. I know.
I know animation can be difficult, but a closed > opened treasure chest is not anything resembling hard. At all.
How’s 200Gil. It’s all I have on me right now.
Hmmm…That’s really low! But since you’re a buddy of mine, I’ll do it.
I also know that after the writing masterclass that was the prologue, this clunky-ass exposition should not come as a surprise.
But somehow it does.
Thanks Deren! I’m in your debt. If you need anything in the future I’ll do my best to help!
That sounds great but you still need to tell me what exactly I have to do?
What’s a Wisdom Orb? It’s basically Magicite But Worse. You’ll see when we find one. That won’t be for a short little while, though.
Their was nothing I could do.
This particular round of clunky exposition ended up being, uh, not GOOD but better. A tiny, tiny bar I realise. Then it declined a bit at the end there and now? Oh now it gets worse.
Yeah. That’s another reason I asked you to do this for me. I knew you had a history dealing with him.
Endless Nova. Stars Bliss. Ally Luna.
Space. Do you get it? It’s space. A fantasy game in space! Do you… Do you maybe get it?
Also yes that is a “Q” and not cutoff. How does THAT ONE happen?!
I’ll get the weapon back for you. All I have to do now is get a ticket for the next space flight.
Motor. I wonder if they might just be a robot or something.
You once told me that Sho has a storage facility in the sewers. Do you think he would keep it there?
I do. Once I meet up with Motor we’ll head to the Space Station. See ya.
Good luck…
Kind of an overworld map, I guess? It’s really not at all useful, though. That one tiny rock is Stars Bliss? How considerate of you to tell me. I can barely see that thing because the arrow is mostly obscuring it.
Also holy shit the galaxy or whatever is called Hell’s Dome that is so generic edgy at least its not a space thing for once
its also not a dome so uh
Also, did you guess that Motor was going to be a blue haired, blue skinned(?) anime android? And also a woman? Because she is.
Because anime.
Hey Motor, you ready to bust into this joint?!
Sho usually relies on everything electronic like cameras and gates. So I highly doubt he would waste
Gates. Gates are electronic. Also generic nonspecific android “computer hacking advantage.” You could make something up here, you know. Technobabble exists for a reason.
Also this just proves 100% that we’re going to meet actual people in there. Derren just said as much by saying that there won’t be any. Welcome to cliche generic writing 101.
I will do my best.
Great. Lets go then.
Hey look, gameplay! It only took about 8 minutes, which is short for a Final Fantasy game nowadays but way too long for a 2d one. Doubly so one made with a shitty engine like RPG Maker 2000.
We can’t go left either, so we gotta enter the only other door we can. I’m surprised he had the foresight to set the event trigger HERE and not past it though. That would be awkward.
Can’t just open the door though. No, you gotta be told by a textbox that this gate that is a door has been opened. And it’s a Gate with a capital G so it’s important.
Except its a fucking door so it isn’t.
Your theory of no guards seems to be incorrect.
Well I guess we have to move to plan B.
What is plan B?
God, that is so bland. It’s not even funny bad, it’s just… bad.
You wont get pass me!
No music change here, so that one Final Fantasy VIII track plays for the entirety of this area. Enjoy…
Anyway, this ripped static image of a Military Police guy from Final Fantasy VII is our first fight. Just like in Final Fantasy VII for that matter… except that was animated but shush.
Our options are all fairly self-explanatory. Battle lets us input commands, Berseker autobattles for the round (and its not just basic attacks) and Escape flees. But we can’t do that which is fine with me.
Deren has no skills at all, because he’s a shit protagonist.
Motor is Deren with lower Strength but she has Scan. Which is ever so helpful.
FC Soldiers have one trick. They cast Blind. Because fuck you, that’s why. It obliterates your accuracy (reduces it to 20% of what it was!), but at least it doesn’t last after fights; very, VERY few ailments do that, thankfully. It also has a 20% chance to just end after 3 turns.
I’m sure not expecting this to mean much right now, and it shouldn’t. HP and MP are all that matters, really.
12 HP means 3 hits and we’re done; 12 MP means he can cast Blind exactly once and that’s it.
They have a decent chance of dropping Eye Drops, nicely enough. Cure Darkness of course; it’s not guaranteed though, which is kind of bullshit at this point but whatever.
Notably, we didn’t get any EXP from this. Hmm…
And now we have to deal with a scene. Kind of.
I’m finished. All security cameras, locks and alarms are disabled.
Great. Lets get moving!
Moving ever so swiftly on.
And now we fight two of these guys, sure okay.
I’m sure these will prove nice to have later on at some point. We can’t exactly heal without them and all.
Moving swiftly on, because this is just rote simplicity right now.
That must be where the weapon is! Well there are three levels to this storage facility. There has to be a way inside some how. Lets check the third level.
Well at least he didn’t also ripoff the part where you have to go through a tedious sidequest just to get a shit card.
Hungry Cookpot is pretty nice tho’. Devour is never a bad skill.
It must have gotten in by mistake.
Anyway, this thing ripped from Final Fantasy VIII (because space!) is our savepoint. It also gives us really generic lore!
There is a casino here. I am sure that won’t ever come up in any sidequest way in the future or anything. That would be silly.
Those inaccessible options do open up later on, at varying points and are of equally varying degrees of useful.
We could go back to where we just came from, back to this same one room or we could… not.
And wouldn’t you know it, there is A Man here.
He immediately attacks, and mercifully spares us any and all dialogue. I already like this guy better.
Shame about his awful palette, which is due to RPG Maker itself having an awful internal recolour slider thing. I don’t know why you’d ever use it for things that aren’t just placeholders and yet here we are.
Anyway, this guy is marginally LESS annoying than his weaker buddy paradoxically enough.
Like sure, he’ll fully heal if you give him a chance but that’s it. He doesn’t even do an ailment, and he is guaranteed to drop a Potion too. How nice!
So anyway he jobs out and… oh boy, this isn’t at all ominous.
Also vending machine! Let’s see what we can get from it!
…Oh, well fuck you too, Deren.
Another room, another fight. 2 more Soldiers, very ho hum. Moving ever-so-swiftly along!
Can you solve this puzzle? It is a very tricky one, I assure you.
And by “tricky” I mean “tricky if you’re not looking at the screen.”
Spot the difference, push the computer.
Fortunately, the obvious thing to move IS the obvious thing to move and we advance ever onwards. Yay?
And another dude. Sure, whatever.
Just lucky I guess!
Your luck ends here!!!
Somehow, I don’t think it does. But I do a bit of a heal here just to be safe. For reasons. Not because this guy’s dangerous but because I can.
Pictured: my thoughts slogging through this; it doesn’t LOOK so bad right now but its really, really slow. Everything is so tediou–
Oh no. Oh no, no, no. Motor gained Strength following that fight, which is not a good sign. We still haven’t gained any EXP because you don’t level up here. You gain stats based on your combat actions.
It’s Final Fantasy 2’s infamously terrible stat gains with no easy way to game the system! God fucking dammit.
Where do you think you’re going!
Do, like, ANY of these guys have any sense of self-preservation? Like, at all? Why would you do th–
Actually, we disabled literally everything already. HOW can you do that?
I don’t believe for one second that the android lady missed the “self-destruct” protocol during her mercifully offscreen hacking scene. But apparently she did. Remember how FF7 and 8 in particular had a timed sequence in their first dungeons? Yep. I’m fairly sure that’s the entire reason this exists.
Motor we gotta get that weapon and get the hell outta here!
Bio… Yoma? So it’s either a Mystical Demon or a Butterfly.
Or I guess a really bad sprite of… I don’t even know. Whatever this is meant to be.
But it’s kind of a boss fight I guess, but not really, so we’ll se-
It’s the Sealion from Final Fantasy IX. What.
WHAT.
At least it’s called a Demon, which is sort of accurate. I don’t think its name is actually based on Youma though for some reason!
Bio Yoma is not really all that threatening. Sure, he CAN cast Bio more times than you can cure it, but it at least can also wear off on its own. It’s only a 10% chance after 3 turns but hey. It also mercifully does not persist after the fight.
It also drops your HP by 10% of your max every round, though it doesn’t tell you the amount you lose ever-so-helpfully. That’s just an engine limitation rather than spite at least.
Oh and after he loses 22HP, so long as he has at least 4, the fight just ends. If you can kill him here, he has a 100% chance to drop a Phoenix… Tail…
It’s obviously impossible to get that Phoenix Down Tail when actually playing, though. Not even sure why it’s there, other than spite or something, or even renamed. Does Delita Hyral the Tenth, esquire, somehow not expect people to realise what a Phoenix Down is, or maybe even not know what down feathers are?
It’s really obvious where it’s going to be, but it was only really visible in one screenshot. Gonna set up an easy way out first though.
Or not. Because we can’t animate that, even more than usual.
We’re also not allowed to try and disable the self-destruct because shush. We’re just not.
So we’ll grab the non-specific Prototype. Only way out is to obviously jump down through that other new grate.
And then we fight one last FC Captain in an attempt to whittle away what little time we had left. It’s not at all a difficult fight, naturally.
…I genuinely don’t know why Motor’s Magic went up here, but it did. It is semi-random in general but still.
Oh right but we can’t have the thing on-screen when it “explodes” because we can’t animate that AND have it change easily on-screen simultaneously, I guess. That’s sort of fair, because RPG Maker is kind of not great at things.
Which is part why we unceremoniously cut to a scene in a different area altogether.
i It felt like an explosion.
Of course it was an explosion!!! What I want to know is where it came from!!!
(1) It felt like it came from underground.[/i]
How would you not notice that immediately. It’s not like an explosion is SUBTLE or anything.
You guys told me you would guard it from intruders!!! Remember this is your fault, not mine!!!
(2) Please calm down. It could not possibly be the storage faclity. If someone broke in, the guards would have quickly set the alarms.
“You have a point?” The guy who’s so shittily written he’s perpetually megashouting as per those myriad exclamation marks instantly calms down and becomes a completely different person?
look i know writing is hard but this is the easiest thing in the world to make one guy be consistent within the space of 30 seconds
Anyway, there is that guy peeking through the text box now.
What do you want! Do you have news on the explosion!
Yes. Two intruders entered the storage facility and disabled the security. Afer that they took out
How do you know any of this. If you fled THE INSTANT THE SELF-DESTRUCT was activated, that was before the thing you are saying happened happened.
Things that are difficult:
- Animating
- Writing
- Designing
- Characterisation
- The Chronology of Things That Just Happened
…Wait no that’s not right.
I don’t think it was them. I never heard of an android becoming a Su Karu Hunter.
The word android immediately conveys this one specific character, huh? I guess Motor is the only one in the entire universe then. No other sentient humanoid robots anywhere at all…
Yes. They seemed to know the area pretty well.
how do you know this
Remember how I said in the OP that this game got good reviews as recently as this year? One of the things it got praise for was successfully capturing the spirit and feel of actual Final Fantasy games.
Y’know, actual Final Fantasy games and their gendered sexist insults. Those sure are my favourite parts the whole zero times I can recall them happening. …If you can actually recall any, feel free to keep them to yourself 'kay, thanks.
Collect your men, find them and lock them up in my dungeon! I want the pleasure of turning them both to dust! And don’t you dare forget that weapon!!!
So that sure was a scene that happened. It was basically just to mask that this map is not the same one as we were on before. Because the storage area or whatever exploded.
All systems seem functional.
Great! We have to get back to the Residential Area as soon as possible, before guards storm these sewers like army ants. Lets go.
…FC is an actual thing that means something? And it apparently means Finel Quartet?
Finel. Is… did Delita Hyral X mispell “final”? Final Four? That… is a really bad name for anything.
Like ever. Fortunately, it may not actually be a mispelling. At least not entirely. It’s dumb. Surprise.
But we can worry about that when we’re back at Arleah.
Oh boy, now that we’ve finished the dumb prologue-y area, we unlocked the ability to recolour windows! But only at save points!
Fortunately, there’s one right here.
Yep, that’s the best option alright. So fucking gauche that you can’t read a thing. It fits perfectly.
Oh right, uh, the reason that the Final Fantasy VIII requisite sewer dungeon music is playing here at least makes sense.
It’s because we’re about to immediately dive into our first real dungeon.
And it’s a sewer level.
for fuck sake
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It reaaaaaally doesn’t. Even among fangames, this is not good so far. It’s “important” in the history of RPGMaker because it was one of the first fully completed games, but that is obviously very different from being good.
I wasn’t calling it good at all, mind.
Just, being finished was one of the things that makes it compare favorably to a lot of RPG maker stuff. Though in fairness, I haven’t kept track of that community, is 90% no longer both dogshit and unfinished?
Well, I mean, Sturgeon’s Law and all that, but quality has definitely greatly improved.
I quess that just happened. Sure.
It’s cruel enough that they’d use the FF2 stat growth thing, but to add insult to injury you can’t even have the characters punch themselves. I’d argue that would be the most crucial element to include in this game.
Everything so far about this game appeals to me for all the wrong reasons.
Can’t wait to see how deep this rabbit hole goes.
I’m definitely going to be following this one, I have a soft spot for terrible RPGMaker games! Even if the end result is really bad and unfun, I like to see where the effort went in! 
Okay, no, but for real I kinda like most of the alternative colours. That yellow is terrible and we will ignore it forever now.
Sorry to keep you, but you look new to the area. Do you have any questions?
This guy’s just here to tutorialise a few things. We’ll skip over most of this, but that Wisdom System is very important.
It’s one of two ways to get new spells. You take a Cryna Orb and use it in combat. It then attempts to extract a spell and let you learn it later.
It’s the bastard lovechild of Draw and Magicite. It’s like “okay Draw was always disliked for being terrible, but what if we made it worse?” Cryna Orbs are one-use items. If a thing does not have a spell, you lose the orb. If you fail to extract the magic (~50% chance!), you lose the orb. You get the spell, you get a different orb and can have one (1) person learn the spell.
So, what about stat gains? How bad are those?
Translation: lose at minimum 50% of your current HP to have a chance to gain a couple points of HP. And by “a chance” I mean it’s an 80% chance, which is surprisingly high.
See above but replace HP with MP. It’s ALSO an 80% chance to go up.
Oh and HP and MP are the only ones with increases that, uh, also increase. HP caps at +7 a proc and MP at +6. How… weird but nice?
Win a fight and get super lucky. This one has a 10% chance to increase! That’s really all there is to this one. Just fight and don’t run away. The most “grind, you fool” stat if there ever was one.
Added bonus: all the stats that aren’t HP/MP go up 1 at a time. Yay. :sigh:
Heal. A lot. It looks like you have to at least triple your current HP to have a 60% chance for it to increase. Naturally this gets easier the more HP you have.
It’s also lying because it can be done when out of combat as well.
This works like Vitality but for MP instead. Tutorial is still lying about it having to be in combat.
Reverse Strength. If you flee, that fight doesn’t count towards maybe getting +1 Str but instead can give +1 Spd. This is also a 10% chance so, uh, it’s also kind of a “grind!!” stat.
The elements thing isn’t worth worrying about right now so we’ll ignore it.
Last bit of tutorial is telling you how to gain non-magic skills. This is not as helpful as it thinks right now, but whatever.
Welp, let’s get to this sewer level then.
Can’t go through the door right now? Quess Guess we’re gonna be back later then, oh boy.
Southward bound we go, then. Could go west but meh, leave that 'til later.
Pretty quickly come to another branching pathway. Gonna head on south again because…
That lets us get Cryna Orbs. These 4 are all we’ve got until we’re done here.
…Fortunately, there are only 3 spells available in here and one of them is Scan so it doesn’t even count. 
Head ever further on left now; up just completes a loop and means we miss out on some more loot.
Battle
(might be pretty loud)
Oh boy, it’s a terrible MIDI mashup of several Final Fantasy battle themes. I’m sure this is a surprise to you.
But RPG Maker 2000 has very open files, so I removed this for something that I’m going to enjoy listening to for at least a little while. It’ll probably end up on rotation, really.
It’s a crab from Final Fantasy VII’s tiny sewer section, why am I not surprised?
Wait no I’m wrong, Clipper here is Clipper from Final Fantasy IX.
…It’s a water monster. 'Sgot 12 HP and 12 MP, drops Antidotes (15% chance) and likes to try and poison you sometimes. The magic you draw from this guy is Scan. Pass.
But we can get money now! We’re gonna get way, way more from crabs alone than we got paid for the entire previous update.
Only other enemy down here is a Flan, which is… the Flan from Final Fantasy IX. Sure, whatever. Sealion was around before and these things were in the same dungeon at least.
'Sgot 8HP (very quickly gonna die then), drops Potions (15% chance), and just does a basic attack and nothing else. Can draw Panacea which cures Poison. Also pretty meh.
Alright, so back to the dungeon we go. Just gonna grab these then head allllll the way back to where we started.
It’s not really a long trek, because the maps here (right now) are mercifully on the smaller end of things. At least as far as these kinds of things go.
It’s 60x80 squares but most of that is inside walls and stuff, so it’s not as bad as it sounds. It’s going to get much bigger much quicker though!
Like right now. Going south here is a waste of time though. We’ll head up north instead.
Hey these are genuinely, actually new. Like not really new, but new as far as this cares.
Guarantee escaping from fights where you can isn’t too sha–
…Weapon Phototype. That says Phototype. How did that… I don’t understand.
The path around here reconnects back with the southern path from before. South again is progress, so we’ll head left. Get more Potions but also…
A pair of Phoenix Downs Tails, and an Ether for good measure. Couldn’t have gotten the Tail before but this makes up for it I suppose?
And by “this” I mean the Ether.
After that, it’s just a giant long path that leads to a new screen which is… a PuPu and a bridge. Definitely not ominous. Nope.
Surprise, it’s a boss fight.
So, now we get to fight this guy for real oh boy!
Lets make sure it never reaches the surface!
Anyway, let’s see what we can get from this guy first off…
So we gotta thow the orb to see it shatter. Over and over and over again.
…On the eleventh try, we finally get Bio.
The fake-Draw system is not at all worth it outside of save scumming. Even then, it takes a while to get some things.
Anyway, the Bio Yoma itself is mostly similar to before. He does have a couple new tricks though. Venom Claw is a single target attack that can poison someone.
Every 5th turn, he casts Water. This hurts a lot, yes. It’s by far the most dangerous thing we’ve seen thus far.
But that’s it. Very ho hum. If you use Berseker it’s 100% possible to kill him in less than a minute and not even need to heal, though.
For beating a boss, we get a bonus fixed stat gain. This one sucks though, of course; it’s +6HP and +4MP.
Let’s just leave the sewers and pretend that we won’t ever be back.
Final Fantasy VII was popular and its first town was the slums.
Correlation equals causation so let’s make the first town here ALSO be the slums!
So lets hurry to the Space Station in the Shopping Area before it’s shut down.
I hardly think 200 Gil was enough for this job.
For reference, we currently have over 1000 because of the sheer number of crabs and flans. Being exterminators must pay super well on this rock.
I agree. But getting back at Sho was really worth it. I wish I could have seen his face.
I was referring to the FC Troopers. I’m still curious about their working with Sho. I sense something odd.
You also said something odd. That middle sentence is a goddamn mess, jeez.
You know what else is also a mess?
Anime RPG affection systems!
…Yes, really. The points are also wildly out of balance. Being a Nice Guy gets +5 romance Love Points (yes, really) whereas actually hitting on the robot gets -2.
Gonna try and max all the date points because fuck it why not.
I’m glad you’re here Motor.
You’re my partner right. Who else would I want to watch my back.
… We should hurry.
And hurry we shall. Eventually. There’s a craphole of a town to look around and explore.
NPCs to talk to.
Dialogue to begrudgingly deal with and mostly ignore because it’s not even the good kind of shite.
And this guy shares the tutorial man’s generic sprite, so he’s going to exposit at us.
Well, let’s get this over with then.
Six Star Resort
It was built four years ago by a wealthy merchant named Sho. With it’s popularity raising after each week so does the amount of garbage produced. This is the cause of the mid section of the asteriod being turned into a huge junkyard.
Atmosphere Generator
space rocks such as Asteroids. Once the asteroid is sealed with a glass like material the generator mantains a livable environment.
…Discounting how over the course of 3 sentences, the word “asteroid” has been written in just as many different ways… how on Earth did “environment” get spelled correctly? I am genuinely impressed by that one. Huh.
Asteroid Colonies
Over 350 years ago Finel Capital became the first asteroid colony and is now the largest. Soon after many other colonies were formed some remaining others not. The asteroid we are on now Stars Bliss, is younger that other major colonies being only 80 years old. All asteroid colonies are alligned on a huge asteroid belt called Vesta Belt.
Christ, that’s a lot of badly written exposition.
Also, I sure as fuck doubt the asteroid belt being named Vesta is Delita flexing his astronomy muscles here. It’s most likely just a coincidence that 4 Vesta is a well-known asteroid within the actual proper asteroid belt in our real universe. It’s also definitely not named after the Roman goddess Vesta, unlike the aforementioned asteroid. Mostly because Vesta hasn’t been in Final Fantasy at all. Not even in Mobius!
There’s a reason I’m going to ignore most NPCs. This is one of the more interesting ones. Yes, really.
Anyway, yeah, you probably missed it in the expositionman dialogue above but odds are good that FC stands for Finel Capital and not Finel Quartet.
BUT! With this game, I could believe either. And it’s not like the game does anything at first but imply very heavily that the C is Quartet is anyway.
This part of town is also where the Inn is. It’s cheap, but also costs more than 50% of the fights in the sewers give.
Anyway, this building here above the expositionman is important and not just because it lets us know that rapper B.o.B has been around here.
Not so much for the people in it, though this really makes me question the folding screen at the back of the room.
No, there is an item in here. Can you see it?
No you can’t, stop lying.
It’s here. It’s in a treasure chest even, so that implies that you’re expected to be able to see it somewhat. I’m fine with hidden items (I’ve played JRPGs before after all), so it’s not that it’s hidden that bugs me.
If the writing was better that Ether would be more worthwhile as a reward for exploring. As is, you get punished for looking around by railroading and bad text. There is no incentive to not just run to the next plot beat.
What doesn’t help is that there are 3 chests in the slums and that one is the only one that was hidden. If it wasn’t in a chest I guess I’d like it better.
Is that weird? Yes, yes it is. This is me just being persnickety about things for no reason. I’d at least put a hidden item in a container or something. There’s lots of them dotted around but examining them just has Darren lament that they’re empty in boring ways.
Anyway, items! JRPG tradition dictates that we can’t buy Ethers, so they’re out. Everything else in here is stuff we already have. At least we can buy the Orbs if we want to play along with the Draw mechanic more.
This guy isn’t important, but that building above him is. It’s a restaurant!
And it’s only noteworthy because everyone in here is an asshole who insults you.
…Hey so remember Wall Market and how there was someone in a bathroom there? And you needed to give them medicine so they’d help Cloud crossdress? That sure ain’t gonna be in the HD Remake but at least it’s partially preserved here!
Shows what I know for not following much of games media much, huh?
The one thing I’ve noticed, by the way, is that “their” is very consistent. It is always the possessive. Always. I could be wrong about that and the other versions get used later, but so far every single instance has been “eir”.
Anyway, weapons, armor and MS Paint Grafitti.
…I can’t really call that out for being bad. That’s probably about as good as I could do as well.
Weapons aren’t worth buying. Broadsword is the default sword Derren has; Hand Gun is Motor’s default, uh, gun and the Iron Sword is not any stronger. It just deals extra damage to Shell creatures (like the crabs). Meh.
Armor is a little more worthwhile though. Bronze and Cotton are the defaults but the other two are upgrades straight up. Armlets boost speed which is going to be important because I don’t see that getting many stat gains through normal play. I flee very, very rarely in Shin Megami Tensei games (because I make nothing but Good Ideas) so I sure ain’t doing it here unless/until I need to grind it out for any reason.
…What I’m saying is if this game gives me a Chicken Knife then everyone’s Speed is going to jump very high very fast.
Oh and the equipment store has an Arcade Machine in it. It’s currently broken. It will always be broken. No minigames for you, mister.
Alex from Golden Sun is just chilling out here telling us the name of a place we definitely won’t be going to later on. Nope.
And that’s basically it. So, how about this Travel Agency?
Wait, this was a Space Station one scene ago.
And now it is again! The two are very much not the same thing.
I mean I sure don’t expect the train station to be travel agency, so why should this?
This is also totally where it self-destructs, right?
…Right?
But, yeah, we should’ve seen this coming really. That one guy did somehow break chronology and causality to exposit to that Sho fella about us.
We can’t go to the sewers cause they would expect that. We can’t stay in town because in a few hours it will be crawling with guards. That only leaves…
Sensible reasons we can’t go hideout in the sewers:
- We just came from there so logically that’d be the first place they’d check
- Disease!
- We blew up a base IN said sewers
- It’s a fucking sewer
Given reasons we can’t go hideout in the sewers:
- Hiding in them is predictable
I get that’s basically point one on my list but… the way its written is more “going back there is the expected thing and what anyone would do!”
Oh but a junkyard? The big ol’ thing that just sits in the middle of the asteroid and the guys would have to go through to get to the slums? Nah, they’re never gonna look in there.
(Easy for you to say. Androids can always turn off their smelling sensors.)
Alright then. Lets head east of town. Butbefore we go we should stock up on goods.
From underground sewers to a junkyard which is basically aboveground (mechanical) sewers.
So real quick! Let’s just think for a second about why this is terrible. Why should you never, ever, ever make a sewer level the first dungeon? And then the second dungeon, kind of.
It’s just common sense, surely. You want to start off strong to get people interested. You want investment. You don’t want to start off with the most maligned level type, even if in this particular instance it was mostly inoffensive. Sewer levels are never good, and even a well done one is just bland at best. It might not have any of the hallmarks of a traditional sewer level (outside of things what do a poison) but just knowing that it’s going to be a sewer level and then it being kinda dull is just a surefire way to kill enthusiasm stone dead.
…Admittedly in this particular case that wasn’t a concern because the opening cutscene also kind of does that job pretty well on its own, but that’s not the point!
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Goodness. Those stat mechanics could definitely use some QoL tweaks. I get that they’re trying to do something different, but this is a different that’s already been tried in the series proper, and was really not what the doctor ordered.
Yeah, if the stat gains end up being too low due to bullshit RNG I can, and will, tweak them to compensate. Gonna try and not do that, as much as is possible, but it is an option I will take if it ends up being necessary.
I guess you’ll always be going last in fights because constantly running trying to gain speed is a really bad idea.
Like, I get -why- speed bonuses are tied to running. There’s really no other action they could be tied to that makes sense.
That being said, when you have to make that much of a stretch it should be a sign that your level-up system is a bit shit and needs a rework.
Oh man, I had forgotten what a treasure it is when people try to bend the RPG Maker 2000 battle system into doing things it wasn’t designed to do.
I like this game. I have poor taste; but I liked this game.
It’s very strange seeing an LP of this. I played this game quite a bit around… gosh, maybe 15 years ago. Considering it was free entertainment, I was more forgiving towards it flaws. Granted, I was also 14 at the time, but that also reflected the charm of it; the game looked like something that was reasonably within my own abilities to make, even down the questionable quality.
I remember it being impressive for being an actually completed RPG Maker game, of which there were only a few of. Many of the games I remember playing usually were only demos or ended halfway, even for the “good” games like The Blurred Line, which one LP of exists of in the LP Archive. The only way to make an RPG Maker game impressive is to program a lot of complex systems into it; but the more complex systems you add in, the higher the risk the game becomes impossible to actually complete development. This game actually shipped and wasn’t just a straight port of the base engine, which got a lot of interest for the time.
But notably absent from this process is the additional testing to make sure that said complex systems are actually good. Endless Nova is in the middle of the road on this front. A lot of what it does is usually not at all balanced, but at least it keeps it interesting. Another game I know of in RPG Maker was Dragon’s Destiny by a guy named Rast. It was a game with a lot of advanced programming and plenty of integrated systems that made it something of a technical marvel; however, it was also very poorly balanced, had unforgiving difficulty issues, and was just downright boring to actually play. “Wow! This dungeon puzzle that is a fully 3D Rubik’s cube is a really impressive thing to have done in RPG Maker,” I once astutely observed. “It’s almost too bad that I am not fucking playing that.”
A lot of the things we like to rag RPG Maker games for are products of RPG Maker itself. Hilarious typos and bad text formatting are one example. RPG Maker itself has no spellcheck, nor any decent way to do copyediting that isn’t part of just doing regular coding in the map editor. Sometimes the matter of finding the lines which need editing is also difficult, since they can be hidden in all sorts of nooks and crannies. A friend of mine who kept up with RPG Maker much better than I did only found a command-line tool which dumps all the map data textboxes into one place for easy proofreading just a few years ago. In the heyday of RM2000 and 2003, these tools weren’t as freely available.
The younger me’s only real complaint about the game was how it used a slightly-nonstandard version of the RTP, so a lot of the builds of the game shipped with chipsets and animations missing. However, the missing items were only used in the game around the time after you got the game’s airship equivalent about 15 or 20 hours in, at which point the game would crash. It was fixed eventually, but it still was something of a letdown to play all that time and only encounter a fatal error then.
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