Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon is a first-person dungeon delver by Rampant Games with an unusual focus on comedy and characterization. It lacks polish in a few areas, but FK:TSoSD is such an enjoyable (and unique) game that it’s impossible not to recommend it.

More than anything, Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon reminds me of the old Might and Magic games. You spend your time wandering around, exploring, accepting (and completing) quests, fighting things in turn-based battles and gathering loot.

As in classics such as Might and Magic IV: Clouds of Xeen, you start the game with a pre-generated party of characters. And just like in those games, combat is a turn-based affair where you issue commands on a character-by-character basis. You don’t get the option to roll up new characters, unfortunately, but you can effectively convert your existing characters to different classes through careful point allocation upon leveling up.

There’s a reason you have to use the four starting characters the game gives you. It’s central to the thing that really makes Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon stand out relative to its forbears–the writing. Writing is generally an afterthought in games like this. Your party is typically populated by mutes who, but for their individual classes and stats, would be all but interchangeable. Not so in FK:TSoSD!

It isn’t that the writing is funny (although it frequently is); it’s that the characters are believable and likeable. There is some strong characterization at work here, with relationships consistently revealed (and complicated) through onscreen interaction. Much of the game’s amusement comes from a stable of deliberately silly quests, and your characters’ fourth-wall-breakingly genre savvy commentary on what happens during those quests. Your characters remark on genre tropes, on their own classes and abilities, and sometimes even on the actual player. If your characters all die, they comment on that, too. RPG veterans, in particular, will get a real kick out of the dialog here in a Dead Alewives sort of way.

Frayed Knights works as more than RPG satire, however. It’s a solid, enjoyable first-person dungeon delver in its own right, with loads of quests to undertake as your fledgling adventuring group tries, Rodney Dangerfield-like, to amass some respect.

Frayed Knights occupies a strange twilight dimension between real-time and turn-based. Enemy groups patrol wilderness areas and dungeons in real time. Your movement occurs in real time as well. However, combat is turn-based, as are most other in-game actions (like searching or lock-picking).

I'm not saying that Jay should have named this guy Sarcopho Gus. Actually, wait, yes I am.

Movement in Frayed Knights is untethered to a grid, which makes exploring town and other non-dungeon areas far more enjoyable than it is in older games of this type. 360 degrees of freedom helps the town feel like an actual town, rather than a dungeon sans monsters. Free movement also works well within dungeons. Paired with visible monster patrols, it adds a certain frenetic quality to the exploration that you won’t find in the earlier Wizardry or Might and Magic games. In dungeons, I often felt pressured to get to “safe areas” where monsters weren’t patrolling, which is something I haven’t felt outside of true real-time dungeon-delvers like Eye of the Beholder or Stonekeep.

Speaking of patrols, it’s also nice to be able to actually see parties of monsters patrolling the dungeons ahead of time, rather than always getting thrown into random encounters beyond your control. (That said, the game does still have plenty of random encounters, most often tied to turn-based actions like searching and resting, but sometimes triggered during exploration.)

There are downsides to this approach, however. The real-time free-form movement system means that there is no proper ranged combat to soften up enemies before they reach melee range. It’s a small thing, but given the obvious gameplay inspiration Jay Barnson took from Might and Magic and Wizardry, it’s a little disappointing to see it missing here. It also complicates actions like searching and sidestepping monsters–I’ll talk about that more below.

I can’t be too sad about the loss of ranged attacks, as the battles in Frayed Knights are pretty good as-is. Jay Barnson has gone out of his way to create a system that is both elegantly simple in its structure, yet complex in practice. Both you and your enemies are arranged into melee and ranged rows, with only characters in the melee rows accessible to either side’s melee attacks. Characters have a sizable selection of spells available to them, with a wide variety of buffs and status effects at your disposal pretty much from the get-go. Enemies get access to buffs and status effect spells too, and they aren’t shy about using them. (I managed to get half my party poisoned and put to sleep before I’d even left the first village.) Combined with the constant need to manage character Endurance (more on that below), combat is just complex and challenging enough to be entertaining. I only seldom felt like I could sail through encounters just spamming the “Attack” command.

I would actually compare the battles here to some of the fights which occur in Dragon Quest VIII, in that so many of them depend upon the intelligent use of buffs, de-buffs and status effects. That said, Frayed Knights is a game that sees itself very much in the lineage of Dungeons & Dragons, so you have much more randomization to deal with in terms of the effect of attacks and spells than you would in Dragon Quest. I’m not normally a fan of heavy randomization, but in this case it works in the game’s favor, since you’re given so many tools to manage your risk.

Speaking of tools to manage risk, I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about drama stars at least a little bit here. Drama stars are Frayed Knights’ flagship gameplay innovation. If Frayed Knights were a Square Enix game, there would be a bullet point on the box that reads “Featuring the brand new Drama Star system!”

“Okay, fine Craig: drama stars,” you say. “That’s fabulous. What the hell is a drama star?” Allow me to explain. Any time you do anything in the game–get a new quest, open a door, disarm a trap, fight a battle, and so on–the game awards you drama points, which start to fill up one of three little stars at the top of the screen. You can fill up the stars up to three times each, transitioning them from bronze to silver to gold. Whenever you want, you can click a drama star to unleash its power in the form of one of a few special abilities.

Now, here’s the catch: drama points do not survive a load. If you save the game, quit, and then later Continue your saved game, it’ll keep your drama; but if you are playing and something bad happens and you decide to Load a save, then you can kiss all of your drama points goodbye. So you’re encouraged to keep playing even when bad things happen, because hitting the Load button will–quite literally–suck all the drama out of the situation. It’s both a clever metaphor and a clever mechanic to discourage save scumming.

While I really do love the idea of drama stars, I don’t think they’re as effective as they could be in FK:TSoSD. Their powers are just too weak relative to the effort involved in acquiring them. In my experience, there are two major situations where RPG players reliably engage in save scumming: (1) where choices made in branching dialog lead to permanent negative consequences; and (2) where they get creamed in combat and don’t have the means to cheaply heal their characters back up. Pretty much nothing can dissuade a player from scumming in scenario 1, so we don’t need to worry about that.

Scenario 2 is another story, though. Fully recovering your party from even a single tough battle in FK:TSoSD can require a trip all the way back to town to rest in the inn, which is (let’s be honest) a pain in the butt. If things really go that badly in a battle, the easiest option is to load (i.e. save scum)–unless, of course, the drama stars provide a viable alternative. But they don’t. Unless you’ve got more drama saved up than NBC on the eve of a Jerry Springer marathon, you’ll be lucky if you have enough drama points to resurrect a single dead character.

This actually ties into another issue. It’s obvious that Jay Barnson put a lot of thought into the systems of this game (I mean, just read the Strategy Guide), and by and large I think he succeeded. But I do have one big beef with the game’s core design: maximum Endurance erosion.

What am I talking about? In Frayed Knights, character actions in combat (and sometimes, outside of it) all rely on a single renewable resource called Endurance. Attacking uses it up. Special abilities use it up. Spellcasting uses it up, too: every spell has an Endurance cost rather than a mana or magic point cost. Characters, in turn, regenerate Endurance by resting. This provides a nice resource management mechanic to every battle, and forces you to make choices outside of combat as well. Oftentimes, you’ll find that you need to rest in a dangerous area in order to recover Endurance, thereby risking further attack. This is all good stuff: resource management, risk/reward–two of the many techniques a good game designer uses to keep things engaging.

But here is where things start to go off the rails a little. As you go through an area, using up Endurance and resting to recover it, your characters’ maximum Endurance will start dropping. The more Endurance a character burns through, the more that character’s maximum Endurance dips, lowering the ceiling on how much Endurance you can recover. There are only a few ways to reverse the effects of maximum Endurance erosion: (1) use up a Liquid Nap potion, an item which the game gives you a handful of at the start of the game, but which are available thereafter only at great expense; (2) make the long, slow, painful trek all the way back to the inn and pay to sleep; or (3) use up a drama star, which probably won’t even restore your Endurance to its normal maximum.

As you can probably tell, I do not like the Endurance erosion mechanic. I understand why it’s in the game: Jay doesn’t want you to be able to immediately reverse the consequences of triggering traps by just taking a nap. What’s more, repeat visits to the inn enforce economic costs on players who make poor decisions, or engage in a lot of unnecessary combat, and then just rest constantly as a way of dodging the consequences. It also makes sense from a narrative stand-point: your characters need to sleep every now and then, and they’re not going to get very good rest pitching camp in the middle of a dungeon, where they are at constant risk of being ambushed and killed.

But we all know that just because something is realistic, that doesn’t mean it’s fun, right? Besides, Frayed Knights already has this covered; your characters face risks resting (or, for that matter, even just moving around) in a dungeon. They’re likely to get attacked. Triggering a trap or grinding through lots of battles therefore puts them in danger even if they could theoretically recover both full health and full Endurance through resting afterwards.

"You will experience a great adventure...in bed."

Meanwhile, maximum Endurance erosion basically forces me into making a lousy choice at the end of every dungeon (or oftentimes, right in the middle of one), when my characters are exhausted from slogging through battles. I must either (a) face the most difficult fight(s) of the dungeon with half the maximum Endurance my characters normally have, or (b) drag my party all the way back through the dungeon and back to town, spend 25 silver to sleep, then go back through the whole freakin’ dungeon again just to get back to where I was. The battles in this game are not trivial, and as such, it pays to go for the second option if you don’t want to get TPK’d. And it’s the only option that makes sense, given the maximum Endurance erosion rule. But dear God, it’s boring. I don’t want to play a Sleep Quality Simulator; I want to explore dungeons. And every minute I’m spending trudging across the countryside to get to to the inn is a minute I’m not exploring dungeons.

While writing this section of the review, I wondered to myself: “What if there was a way to incentivize conservation of Endurance without requiring players to constantly go back and forth to the inn?” And then I started playing back through Might and Magic IV. It turns out that they’d hit on a near-perfect solution way back in 1992: food. In Might and Magic IV, players can carry up to 10 days worth of food at a time, and can fully recover health and mana by sleeping. Sleeping causes 8 hours to pass; passing time means food used up. When players run out of food, they have to return to an inn to buy more rations or start suffering disastrous health effects. This system has all the virtues of hitting players with an economic cost for resting too much, but requires players to spend far less time trudging back and forth to inns. Frayed Knights would benefit a great deal from something like that. (Alternatively, I’d settle for just adding a “fast travel back to the inn” button.)

While I’m picking nits, I might as well talk about the other notable design issue Frayed Knights has: the interface. It works well enough for the most part, but there are a variety of small irritations that I wish had been cleaned up prior to the game’s release. Like bird poop on the windshield of a brand new sports car, they distract from what is otherwise a very good experience.

Some of you may have read my rant about how to improve turn-based RPG combat systems. In my view, FK:TSoSD needs a little work on virtue 2 as it relates to its combat interface. Visual indicators are stretched a little thin here. The game has a grand total of three icons that it uses to show the existence of status effects: a flexing arm, a ball-and-chain, and a human silhouette surrounded by blue arcs of electricity. It took me an unreasonably long time to work out that these stood for “a buff,” “a de-buff” and “something affecting a character’s ability to move or act.” (Don’t judge: if you got poisoned and a ball-and-chain suddenly appeared on you, you’d be confused too.)

These aren’t even used consistently: when your characters fall asleep in combat, their portraits change and the word “Asleep” appears over them. If you put an enemy to sleep, however, the enemy picks up the “electricity man” symbol. For all other paralytic abilities, though, both you and the enemies use the “electricity man” symbol. Also, blinded characters get the electricity symbol. Why? I haven’t a clue. I guess what I’m saying is, art assets are expensive, but it couldn’t have been that much for an image of a green bottle with a skull on it, some sunglasses and a picture of ZZZ’s.

Interface issues extend beyond combat. For instance, it’s never really clear exactly how far a monster patrol’s “sight” radius extends, which leads to exciting moments like hiding out near a monster’s patrol path, sure it’s going to pass you by, only to end up in a combat encounter you neither wanted nor expected. It’s like ignoring a call from your mother-in-law only to walk out the front door and find her standing on your stoop.

Expect to see this a LOT.

Searching suffers from similar problems. When you search, it isn’t really clear how far that search extends. You can no longer go space by space to search an area as you could in grid-based games, because there are no defined spaces. So you’re put in the unenviable position of having to guess how far to move before searching again, weighing the chances of blowing way past the bounds of your last search against the tedium (and risk) of performing unnecessary searches. A simple user-interface element showing the outer radius of a search would have fixed this problem easily.

Other interface issues: the Journal features buttons placed literally underneath other buttons, and casting spells can require up to four clicks just to select the right target for a friendly heal or buff. There are hotkeys for much of this stuff, which helps, but there aren’t any for selecting targets or navigating sub-menus. This means that even for spells that are in your characters’ Quick-Cast slots, you’ll have to use the mouse to cast.

None of this stuff is game-breaking, but it does slow things down and hurt the game’s flow. Some of you may remember the copious amounts of crap I gave to Dubloon for its horrendous control scheme; Frayed Knights is not even remotely on the same level, but I feel its interface issues are still worth mentioning. After all, the interface is the means by which the player interacts with a game; it is literally the one thing the player spends all of his or her time using. For that same reason, interface is one of those elements of a game that quickly becomes invisible to the developer, and issues can slip through the cracks. Hopefully, some of this stuff can be tightened up in a patch.

"Hi! I'm Evelyn, and this is my friend Nightmare Fuel."

Frayed Knights’ graphics remind me a little of games from the Unreal Tournament era in terms of poly count, lighting and complexity. There are frequent particle effects in combat (and sometimes in the environment itself, such as Ardin Village with its frighteningly huge pollen). Frayed Knights isn’t going to win any awards for visuals, but aside from a sometimes-noticeable variation in asset style and quality, there’s nothing really all that objectionable to get in the way of the game.

Musically, Frayed Knights is a mixed bag. Combat triggers one of two high quality songs that lend some drama without calling too much attention to themselves. The outdoor music, however, has a throwback MIDI sound to it that I found rather grating. Oddly, the music that plays in the Temple of Pokmor Xang appears to lift a motif from the Aladdin soundtrack. And so on. I mostly played the game with the sound off; your mileage may vary.

The Verdict: 4/5. Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon succeeds both as satire and as a proper dungeon-delver in its own right. With great characters, enjoyable writing and solid combat, I’m more than willing to overlook some interface issues, the odd mismatched asset, and the need for frequent trips to the inn. Frayed Knights is well-made, fun, and entirely unique. If you enjoyed the old Might and Magic or Wizardry games, I’d strongly recommend snatching this one up.

You will jump into the dreams of people you meet and can exit the way you came in or jump into the dream of another person you meet or person within your party. This allows a lot of back and forth into different landscapes, something you will need to do to advance farther in certain realms. You won’t be worrying about random monsters though, they appear on the screen for you to avoid or confront depending on you.

An interesting aspect that adds some difficulty to the game is the lack of a healing item inventory. Within the dreams you will find food of all sorts that will heal your party. Certain characters more than others depending on the food type. The true kicker is once you pick it up it is used immediately and removed from the map. So you need to use them sparingly and make sure it is the right item for the character needing healed most. There is a bit of a safety net as far as healing goes. You can use a fairy that appears near where you start, at a cost. If she heals your party the dreamworlds will react and make the game more difficult. So using her can be more headache than help.

Additionally, here’s an interview Adam Ames of TruePCGaming did with Indinera (the owner of Aldorlea Games). They don’t talk too much about the game itself there, though Indinera does mention that Dreamscape is more puzzle-focused than his usual fare.

This comes in the form of a top-down, old-school RPG, reminiscent of Nintendo classics, as you wander pixel lands, visit pixel towns, and conquer pixel caves, all in the search of heroic deeds. And while it’s undoubtedly a spoof, it also remembers to be a coherent, detailed RPG in its own right. The variety of monsters to fight alone is utterly extraordinary. However far through the game I may be, and I’ve been playing for many hours, I’ve encountered literally hundreds of unique enemies, each with particular fighting styles, their own mini-bios, animations, and a special look for when Cthulhu turns them insane.

CStW, in other words, is a traditional jRPG. Interestingly, it functions a bit like Deadly Sin 2 in that random battles eventually cut off. Rather than letting the player find and deactivate a monster node, however, each screen has a custom cap on the maximum number of random encounters you can get. Once that cap is reached, they stop entirely. Personally, I like DS2′s approach better, but it’s good that they thought to limit the random battle grind at all.

Zeboyd is offering the game bundled with their previous effort, Breath of Death VII, on Gamersgate for a trifling $3. More details on getting the game here. Meanwhile, here’s a trailer so you can see what this game looks like in action:

Guest Review by Tof Eklund

Monster’s Den and its sequel Monster’s Den: Book of Dread are pure hack-and-slash. As Book of Dread is half-sequel, half updated version (it includes the
original dungeon in Monster’s Den in it), this review effectively covers both games. The Monster’s Den games incorporate old-school front and back row turn-based combat as well as the sort of magic equipment, skills, and shopping we’ve come to expect since Diablo. Story in these games is intentionally nominal (you’re exploring a dungeon to rid it of evil, whaddayawant?) and exploration is simplified to a nicety, so it all comes down to inventory management and combat.

The Book of Dread is part of a RPG sub-genre intended to be picked up and put down easily, the “lunch break” CRPG. This genre’s most celebrated title is Desktop Dungeons and its archetype is probably Fastcrawl. Desktop Dungeons is very puzzle-like in its balance, with emphasis on careful exploration in a vaguely “Minesweepery” way, and while exploration is less important in Fastcrawl, that game still features locks, traps and puzzles. Monster’s Den falls at the other extreme, using its map mostly to allow the player to pick his or her battles and eschewing puzzles in favor of randomized combat and treasure.

The original Monster’s Den came out a year after Fastcrawl and may have helped kill that game by being more convenient (Flash) and less expensive (free). Perhaps the most important part of the game is selecting the characters that form your party at the beginning of the game. Figuring out how you want to combine the skills of different classes is half the fun of the game. Unlike some Flash RPGS (the Sonny games, for example), there is no Diablo II-style skill tree so you can get the skill you want most as soon as you hit level 2. Book of Dread increases the number of classes from 5 to 7 (on Kongregate – only 6 on other sites) and enables some new strategies.

Combat can be pretty intense, though focusing on one strategy tends to trump flexibility with the exception of a few skills and items that are much more effective against specific enemies (the Cleric’s Smite skill v.s. Undead, for example). Each level of the dungeon (in both dungeons) will have only monsters of one type, so knowing when to put Smite back in your Cleric’s skill set is a no-brainer.

The boss fights (1 per level) remain relatively interesting as a chance to buff up with pre-combat bonus potions and an increased chance of having to fight with a cog or two missing from your war machine.

This game’s weakness is a common one to RPGs – repetitiousness. Once one has maximized one’s equipment for a particular strategy, there’s little reason to vary it, and the lack of story means there’s no new plot to unlock. Worse, the items and monsters cycle: it doesn’t take long to see that you’re only getting the same kinds of equipment with higher bonuses, and fighting the same monsters with higher stats.

Taken to an extreme, this sort of gameplay becomes either slow and animation heavy, as with Adventure Quest and its free cousins, or automatic, as with the parodic Progress Quest or the bizarrely irony-free Infinite
Tower RPG. Book of Dread plays quickly and offers a nice range of options for customizing the difficulty and feel of the game – the “no energy regeneration in combat” option makes the game play in a very different way, but also renders a number of skills useless in a decidedly uneven way.

Daniel Stradwick deserves kudos for these games, which he created single-handed, and “Book of Dread” has remained one of the most popular games on Kongregate as it offers a satisfying hack and slash experience in a free game. I prefer my RPGs have strong, interesting stories, but here the lack of plot means that there’s little reason not to abandon a game when the grinding gets stale, and not having a story is better than having a hackneyed cliche of a story.

The game option I’m most likely to return to is the “hopeless siege” scenario as it gives you a party of 10th level characters and a single trip to the store with a decent war chest before sending endless waves of monsters at you with no chance to recover (eliminating the already marginalized exploration mechanic entirely).

Stradwick has collaborated on a Dragon Age tie-in Flash RPG and has two more Monster’s Den games in the works (the ambitious Godfall and an interim game using the Godfall engine called Chronicles). You can find info and links here. We’ll see if Godfall ups the ante in an interesting way, preferably with tiered addition of new game elements and a significant plot. Of course, if it does, it will almost certainly have to sacrifice some of the “pick up and play” appeal of the existing games.

Verdict: 3/5. Monster’s Den: Book of Dread comes out of the gate stong, setting reasonable goals, and hitting them with precision for the first half hour to an hour of play. After that, however, the lack of new elements (same monsters, same skills, same equipment) drags the game down. It’s a good “lunchbreak” hack and slash, but lacks staying power.

If this sounds like a relationship sim, well, it basically is, except that it’s apparently more about exploring and traversing a non-linear narrative with multiple endings than it is about time allocation and grinding for stat points.

Here’s a choice quote from the review:

Highly unconventional gameplay hiding behind a conventional facade, an occasional lack of polish to the system, and the game’s queer themes make it a labor of love. I can’t image what a pitch meeting with a publisher would be like for this title –- though I think there might be more of an audience for this sort of game than the conventional wisdom would dictate.

I’d post a screenshot, but you already know what RPG Maker assets look like. If you’re curious, you can nab the game free-of-charge right here.

Arvale: Treasure of Memories, Episode 1 is a jRPG by Jaybot7 (Jason Surguine) originally released back in 2009. Created in RPG Maker and using mostly default RPG Maker assets, Arvale is a short game with a silly atmosphere and some amusing dialog. However, the issues with this game’s mechanics are no joke.

Let me tell you a little bit about the world of Arvale. It’s made up of four elements: Fire, Water, Earth, and Everything Else. (No, really. Everything Else is an element.)

As you might have gathered, Arvale is an extremely silly game. If you are like me and enjoy silly things, this aspect of Arvale will probably appeal to you. Admittedly, Arvale’s characters are all one-note caricatures. However, the dialog is written cleverly enough that I found myself chuckling on more than one occasion as I played through the game.

The plot, meanwhile, is a new spin on an old trope. When the game starts, you learn that the protagonist has saved the world already. He is now just a gardener with a head injury (which, conveniently, prevents him from remembering any of his prior exploits).

I’ve played plenty of RPGs in my day, and this is the first time I can think of where a game has used this particular setup. The main character’s memory loss becomes the basis for a great many jokes. Unfortunately, however, the biggest joke is on the player. There is no Great Quest. It’s been finished already. All that’s left are mundane, workaday quests. In any other RPG, this could have served as a poignant commentary on modern life. But here, it’s mostly just used to set up jokes and fourth-wall-breaking interactions with the game’s faceless narrator.

Not that this is bad, of course. There’s plenty to like in a game that refuses to take itself seriously. But make no mistake: this is no Space Funeral. While Arvale teases the player with funny dialog and self-parody during the game’s exploration portions, the rest of the game isn’t in on the joke.

This isn’t because of anything deliberate the author did. Rather, it’s a crime of omission: the developer simply didn’t adjust the game’s mechanics to fit the feel of the game. You never get to–for example–cast an Everything Else spell. Combat in Arvale is in no way silly, funny, or parodic. To the contrary: it is both grueling and obnoxiously frequent. Arvale uses a cookie-cutter Final Fantasy-style turn-based battle system, and due to poor balancing, routine battles are far more frustrating than they ought to be.

Consider the rats. Rats are the very first enemies you fight in the game (along with slimes). Rats can chain together stun attacks, pummeling you at length while you sit helplessly. And you have no one else in your party at this point, so being stunned means you lose your next turn, at which point you can get stunned again, ad infinitum. So there you are, comatose, round after round, being chewed on like your dog’s favorite stuffed weasel. Rats also deal a surprisingly large amount of damage when you’re first starting out. Did I mention that they are the first enemies in the freaking game?

Specters belong to the second enemy mob you meet in the game, and they are even worse. When you first encounter them, they will kill you with three regular attacks. Three! Meanwhile, they take five or six of your attacks to defeat. You are, again, still a one-person party at this point.

Now, difficult battles are not a bad thing in and of themselves. I certainly wouldn’t be griping if Arvale were a game where you face difficult battles but have a wide variety of tactics at your disposal to eke out victory against long odds.

As you might have gathered, this is not the case. You begin the game with only a single character, no spells or special attacks, and two usable item types: Weak Potions and Antidotes. That is it. Accordingly, there is only one viable tactic to survive the early battles: spam potions. And I don’t mean potions made out of canned meats.

Battles become a tedious exercise in alternating between selecting “Attack” and “Item > Weak Potion.” Weak Potions, in turn, are fairly expensive for most of the game, which means that you’ll be spending a sizable portion of your earnings buying them between battles just so you can keep going.

The only reliable way to improve your battles-to-potions-you-have-to-drink ratio, in turn, is to grind. So you fight lots of battles and use up potions so you can afford more potions and eventually grow stronger so you won’t have to use as many potions. This is every bit as fun as it sounds.

The combat difficulty doesn’t make sense from a narrative perspective, either. I think it’s high time that game developers recognized that losing one’s memory is not a level reset button. A legendary hero should not be at risk for getting his butt kicked by slimes and rats, regardless of whether he has lost his conscious recall of past events. His prior exploits should have imbued him with physical conditioning and muscle memory that would make him very difficult for low-level monsters to kill, whether he remembers specific techniques or not.

But no. Instead, we get the RPG equivalent of Hulk Hogan coming out of retirement and getting pinned by a 5-year-old girl. Except it’s actually worse than that. Imagine that instead of just becoming buff and good at wrestling, Hulk Hogan collected weapons and armor with every match he won, which he could then use in subsequent matches. By the time he became a wrestling champion, he’d be walking around in titanium plate mail getup and wielding a Ludicrously Gigantic Claymore of Ass-Kicking +20.

In Arvale, you haven’t magically lost all of your Hero equipment along with your memory, but the equipment has somehow become worthless. Your Hero sword/spear/mace are only slightly more effective than a garden spade, and less effective than a rusty sword. That’s not hyperbole–you can actually buy a rusty sword, and your attack power will go up when you equip it. Duncan could probably deal more damage with a sharp reprimand than he could with his old “hero” gear. Considering how often the game lampshades itself, I’m a little surprised that the developer let such obvious implausibilities slip through the cracks.

But this is nit-picking. Ultimately, the narrative inconsistencies in Arvale aren’t the part that really hurts. Did you think I was done complaining about the game’s balancing issues? I hope not, because if you did, you are about to be disappointed. This game is about as well-balanced as W.C. Fields during Mardi Gras.

Consider the third boss fight. You will find a life potion right before this fight, and presumably it will be useful, because at this point you’ve got a second character in your party. Um, yeah. Not exactly. The third boss spends 70% of his time spamming “damage everyone” attacks at the beginning of each turn, and the life potion brings your characters back to life with 1 hit point. Which means that if you bring someone back to life in this fight, they are almost certainly going to be killed immediately afterward, and the other character is going to take an extra round’s worth of damage for their trouble.

There are innumerable other examples of this sort of sloppy execution in the game’s combat balancing: enemies who “double attack” yet deal the exact same damage as a single normal attack, enemies who inexplicably drain 2-3 times the health as the number that pops up onscreen, and so on.

Magic is another sore point. Most jRPGs rely on a selection of spells with varying effects on different monsters in order to provide a semblance of tactical variety. Arvale does not. With very few exceptions, spells in Arvale are useless. Even the most basic spells cost 20 magic points or more to cast–in exchange, they both heal less damage than potions and deal less damage than attacking.

There is only one type of enemy in the game that takes noticeably more damage from spells than it does from regular attacks, but your spells are so expensive that you are far more likely to run out of magic points than you are to actually succeed in killing the thing.

The only two spells in the game that are routinely useful are Quick Draw and Temptation Dance–the first primarily for boss battles, the second solely for regular encounters.

“But Craig,” you are probably thinking, “all jRPGs have kind of a crappy, poorly-balanced combat system that is more annoying to deal with than it is fun.” This is true, but there are degrees. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king; and the guy who just straight-up doesn’t have a head is the janitor. Arvale, unfortunately, is the janitor.

Still, I wouldn’t spend so much time ragging on Arvale’s mediocre combat system if it weren’t for the high random encounter rate. You are going to be fighting these dull battles constantly. Especially in the dungeons.

Arvale’s dungeons are generally fairly short and linear, without much in the way of puzzles. They also end, universally, with a HP/MP restoration pool situated right before a boss. Because of these two facts, you never have any reason to fight any enemies until you’re at the very end and can hang out at the recovery pool. Then, of course, you’ll need to spend time grinding to make up for the fact that you spent the entire trip through the dungeon walking a few steps, being attacked, running away, walking a few more steps, being attacked, running away, and so on. I never thought I would resent a game for regularly providing me with HP/MP recovery points, but Arvale somehow pulls it off.

Around this point in the review, most reviewers would point out that Arvale is quite short, and that it is not a free game. I don’t generally like this approach. Purchasing a game is not like choosing the brand of dish soap that will last you the longest. If you enjoy a game and its price tag is within your budget, then you should purchase it, even if some other RPG you played in the past had a larger ratio of hours-of-playtime to dollars spent.

That said, this first episode of Arvale is extremely short. I finished it in just over three hours, completing what I believe was every side quest the game had to offer. Five dollars is cheap for an RPG, but you don’t get a lot of RPG for your buck here. (Interestingly, there are actually two free Arvale prequels, advertised as containing “over 20 hours of gameplay” and “over 40 hours of gameplay,” respectively.)

The Verdict: 1/5. Arvale’s light-hearted tone and sense of humor are fun, but the core game is tedious–and you’re going to be spending far more of your time with the latter than the former.

Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is a Japanese indie RPG originally developed and released by EasyGameStation in 2007, now localized and re-released in English by Carpe Fulgur. The gist is that you play a young girl forced to pay off her late father’s mortgage on the house by converting it into one of those ubiquitous jRPG item shops. Recettear is creative, endlessly entertaining, and above all, truly and painfully addictive.

Recettear feels a lot like a Nippon Ichi game. In case you don’t know what that means, it’s a compliment. The cut scenes remind one strongly of Disgaea, and the setting has an unmistakable La Pucelle flavor to it. Recettear’s engine and game presentation have a Disgaea vibe too, with randomly generated dungeons, menu-based travel and animated 2D sprites interacting in a colorful, low-poly 3D environment.

Mostly, though, it’s the cut scenes. Recettear’s characters are well-crafted, consistent, and comical, with interactions that range from the merely amusing to the downright hilarious. Recettear is not afraid to mock its central cast, self-parody, or name-drop Adam Smith when the moment calls for it. And it all works very, very well. Carpe Fulgur really did a splendid job on localization.

In spite of some qualities it shares with Nippon Ichi titles, make no mistake: Recettear is no tactical RPG. Properly categorized, Recettear probably belongs somewhere in the realm of shop management sim. You do some delving into randomly generated dungeons using hired adventurers, but dungeon exploration is more of an action RPG mini-game than it is a fully fleshed-out game mechanic. The core gameplay here is in managing your shop.

In my view, however, this doesn’t disqualify it as an RPG. In a sense, Recettear is simply an action RPG that–moreso even than usual–is all about the loot. It’s like Diablo taken to its logical extreme, with weak, shallow dungeon-delving and deep, complex options for how to manage and sell the loot that you find there. Except that in Recettear, you don’t technically even need to set foot in a dungeon: you can make a profit buying low and selling high from the marketplace, from the guild, or even off your own customers.

This is important, because the dungeon-diving portion of the game is less than stellar. Though randomly generated, every level feels very similar, with differing assortments of enemies and occasional (admittedly, well-done) bosses providing the only real variety. Though enemies are predictable, it can sometimes be very difficult to avoid taking damage from them. Take rock-throwing gnolls, for example. Unlike the octoroks of the old 2D Zeldas, these creatures don’t throw anything until they see you, meaning that there is no noise warning you of their presence while they are offscreen. Worse, they can see you when they’re offscreen, and throw rocks at you. Which means that you will sometimes be walking down a hallway and randomly get smacked in the face with a rock, leaving you to infer that there are some gnolls hanging out in the next room.

This would all be fine, except that dungeons are uniformly barren of health potions or heart containers. You have no way of recovering hit points inside the dungeon unless you level up or drink a rare and expensive health potion brought in with you from outside. Once you reach zero hit points, you will lose every piece of loot you’ve accumulated to that point except for one. You can’t just cut your losses and exit the dungeon when you’re hurt, either. Your only two options are a) get to the next dungeon exit (they appear on every fifth floor) or b) die.

Even this would be okay, since you will eventually get so used to fighting these creatures that you can almost always avoid taking damage. But then, even on a successful run, the reward rarely justifies the time expenditure. The items you accumulate are seldom worth all that much money, meaning that your haul will consist of low-value items whose margin of sale will still be roughly equivalent to what you could have accomplished by simply buying higher value items yourself at the marketplace or the guild, and you will have spent two time blocks accumulating them instead of one.

Luckily, you can choose to just focus on managing your shop. This is the fun part (in my view, though others may disagree). Every day is split into four periods: morning, noon, evening, and night. In any given period, you can open the store to customers, go out into town to dig around for stock, or visit the adventurer’s guild.

You have a goal to reach every week paying off your father’s bad loan. To this end, you need to buy low and sell high, fill special orders, and improve your store’s selection of high-end goods. You can also earn a good (or bad) reputation based on how you treat your customers, though it isn’t immediately apparent what effect this has on the game.

Recettear’s buying and selling mechanics center around haggling. Your customers each have a hidden bottom line–that is, a percentage mark-up that they are willing to accept on all purchases they make and a percentage price cut they are willing to accept when selling the store their goods. It’s your job to figure out (mostly through trial and error) which characters are cheapskates and which ones you can make a killing on. There is also a small amount of leeway in each character’s bottom line based on how excited they are about a given item, which you can infer from their dialog.

The system works well, though certain aspects of the haggling system are a little wonky. Characters will sometimes walk into your store, sell you a good for 42% of its base value, then return later and repurchase that same good at 130% of its base value while wearing a giant, amnesiac grin on their faces.

Also strange is the fact that you get more haggling leeway with a character after you’ve built up trust with her–which is to say, you can haggle longer before she stomps off in frustration. It sounds intuitive, but it produces counterintuitive results. The player ends up having more room to experiment only after she’s long since figured out a character’s bottom line. It’s a bit like taking an exam and then being handed a cheat sheet on your way out of the building.

These are quibbles, though–none of these things detracts from the joy of squeezing your customers for every last drop of currency they possess. On the whole, Recettear’s design is elegant and well-balanced. Making each payment on your father’s loans feels challenging, yet it is always doable with smart play. If you fail, the game retcons it with an all just a dream, but lets you keep your progress and try again. The upshot is that you can never, ever get stuck in an unwinnable position playing Recettear, no matter how slow you are to catch on to its mechanics. Once the game ends, you’ll want to keep playing: and in what is perhaps the smartest design choice in the whole game, the creators let you.

The verdict: 4.5/5. Recettear is charming, addictive, and astoundingly well-designed. You will begin playing this compulsively. Do yourself a favor and download the demo immediately.

Eschalon Book II is the second game in the Eschalon series by Basilisk Games. Eschalon is an isometric, nonlinear wRPG reminiscent of Fallout and Baldur’s Gate. It does almost everything well, but there are a few areas where the game fails to live up to its promise.

Let’s talk about the things Eschalon does well. First of all, Eschalon is beautiful. The visuals all hang together perfectly, the scenery is vivid and lush, and all sorts of neat little environmental details really help the world come alive. Plus, everything you would expect to be animated is animated. (I’m looking at you, Avernum.)

Eschalon’s music is also very well-produced and atmospheric. It’s generally pretty unobtrusive, which is nice, since you’ll be hearing it a lot. On the other hand, it’s not very memorable.

The Eschalon game engine is simply superb. Everything is turn-based, but if you keep moving, it looks positively real-time. Hunger, thirst, gradually degrading equipment, changing weather and day/night cycles make you constantly aware of the passage of time. Eschalon feels like a survival game at times–it’s thrilling to play an RPG where your character faces a real risk of starvation if you don’t plan ahead. Darkness has noticeable effects on visibility and on your ability to successfully hit things in combat. You’ll need to stock up on torches to get much done underground or late at night.

The engine plays to Eschalon’s strengths: namely, exploration and loot collection. The world of Eschalon is huge, and once you get Cartography, if you’re anything like me, you’ll find yourself compulsively traversing the wilderness in an attempt to simply map it all. I found myself wanting to put extra points into Cartography even when I didn’t really need to, simply because of how satisfying it was to watch the mini-map fill up with color.

The world of Eschalon contains many unmarked secrets. Wandering around, I often found myself stumbling across hidden caves, obelisks, bandit camps, and nests of unfriendly wildlife, to say nothing of abandoned chests full of loot. Occasionally, I would be led back to one of these places with a side quest later in the game, which I actually found disappointing: it was much more satisfying to find something no one else knew about, even in the fiction of the game world.

I have only two complaints about the exploration and survival aspects of Eschalon. The first is small but not insignificant: you can only view your Cartography maps as an auto-scrolling mini-map for the current area. You cannot create your own world map, or even pan the auto-map for whatever area you are in. This rarely has any impact on the gameplay, but it does make it hard for the player to look back on his or her mapping handiwork, which in turn cuts down on the satisfaction of having explored vast swathes of wilderness.

My second complaint is the fact that the main character evidently suffers from some kind of food-related learning disability. He is unable to recognize a potato or a cabbage without outside help. You literally have to take him to a magic store and pay money in order for the store clerk to tell him that the potato he is holding is a potato. Even worse, you can’t just tell him to eat the damn potato without identifying it, and once it’s been identified and eaten, he won’t recognize any new potatoes if you happen to find another one.

The only way your character is going to recognize staple foods is if you create him with a high Intelligence score. But the only characters who actually use Intelligence for much of anything are wizards. Which leads me to conclude that it is an act of magic in the world of Eschalon to know what a cabbage is.

Intelligence snafus aside, character creation in Eschalon is robust. Characters are eminently customizable, with a half dozen races, religions, and classes. There is also a full array of skills to choose from ranging from weapon skills to foraging, schools of magic to lock picking, dodging to cartography. Each religion functions like a Fallout perk, in that it comes with one advantage and one disadvantage (though you can always opt for Agnostic, which confers no advantages or disadvantages). Players who like tinkering with character stats will delight in the large array of options at their disposal here.

There is only one thing conspicuously missing from the skill list: pick-pocketing. There are so many chests scattered around the world that this doesn’t matter much for purposes of making money, but there are certain instances where it matters quite a lot for purposes of good role-playing. A good thief character ought to be able to simply lift items off of NPCs rather than having to bargain with them (or kill them).

Eschalon is competently written, with pleasant if rather unremarkable prose. NPCs you meet in the game will converse with you via dialog trees. However, there is an unfortunate paucity of memorable characters and dialog alternatives to color your interactions with them.

You have no Charisma or Personality stat, so there are rarely more than one or two ways a conversation can go. Most conversation trees give you two branches at a time: one “I’m ending this conversation” branch, and one “I’m continuing this conversation” branch. That’s mostly it. Consequently, the hand that guides conversations forward never manages to stay out of sight. You will always know that you are talking with a “Give a Side Quest” or “Advance the Plot” marionette. For a game so plainly about exploration, the inability to meaningfully explore other characters is a major oversight.

This stinginess with dialog options extends to the quests. Just to be clear: the non-dialog-driven quests in Eschalon are nicely non-linear, with multiple ways of achieving the same objective. Entering Port Kuudad, for instance, can be accomplished in a wide variety of different ways, few of them immediately apparent when you first arrive at the outer gates.

But once you start talking to NPCs, all this non-linearity goes out the window. Eschalon reprises one of the problems that plagued the original Baldur’s Gate: encounters that always devolve into fights no matter what you say or do.

Worse, quest-related dialog in Eschalon only supports one objective at a time, leaving you no room to manipulate the characters you’re dealing with. The game, in fact, affirmatively forbids you the opportunity to say one thing and do another. If you say you’re going to do something in conversation with a character, the game will oftentimes actually rewrite the quest in your quest book so that you can only complete the quest in that fashion. You cannot tell a lie. It’s like you’re playing Lil’ George Washington.

While I found the linearity of in-game dialog disappointing, it wasn’t bad enough to sabotage my enjoyment of the game. That honor was reserved for something else entirely: the learning curve. I played the game on Normal with default game settings. I played four different games this way, each with a different character. My conclusion? Eschalon Book II is balls-hard for the uninitiated. I’m talking billiard balls dipped in titanium.

To begin with, it is surprisingly easy to create an utterly useless character. I started off trying for a Cleric, typically a versatile, well-balanced character in wRPG tradition. “Yeah!” I said to myself. “A good melee fighter with healing spells–I’ll be self-sufficient and powerful in no time!”

Um, yeah. I began the game, left my cottage, and was promptly attacked by a giant rat. He immediately bit me, transmitting some sort of loathsome disease. Troll Syphilis or something like that. It cut two of my primary combat stats down by 50%. “Okay,” I thought, “I’m a priest. This will be easy to deal with. Where is my Cure Disease spell?”

Um, yeah. I had none. I didn’t even have a healing spell. All I had was something called Flesh Boil, which just sounded like a particularly nasty symptom of Troll Syphilis. So with my combat skills down lower than Verne Troyer doing the limbo, I only barely managed to survive the very first encounter in the game. I made it to town, slept, and bought some healing magic. “Okay–now I can heal myself. I’m a legit cleric. Time to try combat again.” It wasn’t long before I started fighting some black molds and needed healing. “Great!” I thought.  “Time to invoke the divine powers of healing!”

Um, yeah. You don’t get divine powers. In Eschalon, “healers” are basically just crummy wizards. I was carrying a sword, and the somatic requirements of my healing spell meant that I needed to have my hands free. So in other words, my disease-ridden “healer” couldn’t even use a basic healing spell on himself without disarming in the middle of a crowd of monsters.  I decided at that point that he actually deserved to die, and I left him to the care of the black molds.

My fighter fared substantially better. At first. But by the time I reached the second town, the quests required me to take down monsters way beyond my poor fighter’s ability to kill. I took a job to kill a sentinel plant, which looks like a giant spiky corn stalk. I figured I would walk in with my sword and walk out with creamed corn, but no: instead, the corn creamed me. I just kept swinging and swinging and missing and missing. (How does a corn stalk dodge a sword?) And then I was dead.

There is a continuum in game battle systems between luck and skill, randomness and determinism. Chess is 100% deterministic, the outcome of a match 100% decided by player skill. Games like Fire Emblem add randomness into the equation, turning the proceedings into a game of risk management. There can be a lot of strategy in risk management. But there have to be enough mechanisms under player control to stack the odds in his/her favor.

Most games with randomized hit/miss/damage accomplish this feat by giving the player a party to control. Eschalon’s cousins Baldur’s Gate and Arcanum do this. Avernum does it too. You have different characters with different abilities, and smart positioning and use of their respective strengths will usually triumph over bad luck.

Eschalon does not have this going for it. You are one character. Tactics consist primarily of using different combat stances and deciding when to use potions or run away. But for the most part, whatever your character’s hit percentage is, that’s it. You’re stuck with that and whatever the dice give you. And unfortunately, the way the game is balanced, characters spend so much time missing, they should be on the back of a milk carton.

I just know people are going to show up here and comment that I suck at combat in Eschalon. I mean, okay, I did die over and over again. But there’s nothing to suck at. Oh, sure, maybe I could have given my character a bow to take ranged potshots with. But that would have been a minimum of three skill points I’d need to take away from my sword skill, and even with me pouring all of my offensive skill points into swords, I could barely hit anything for the first 10 hours of the game. It would have just been me accidentally hitting cows and passerby with arrows, then drawing my sword in time to start a fresh batch of missing everything I swung at.

Wizards don’t get off easy, either. Their spells always hit, which is a godsend, but the early spells don’t deal much damage unless you jack up their level (and associated mana cost). And once enemies close the distance with a wizard, it’s time for the bookie to pack up and go home, because that fight is over with. Absolutely ensuring that wizards die constantly is the fact that it is nearly impossible to use hit-and-run tactics in Eschalon. This isn’t Fallout, where your move distance is determined by your character’s speed. For every space you move, enemies move one space. You can jack your character’s speed up to 30, and this will still hold true. (I checked.) So enemies will always maintain distance with you when you run away, unless you manage to interpose some obstacles to mess with the game’s pathfinding AI.

I finally managed a playable character with my second fighter, a blunt weapon user named Bash-ette. I rolled as close to straight 14s as I could get, then poured every single point I could into two stats and two skills: Strength and Dexterity, Blunt Weapons and Light Armor. I found and completed every single side quest I could in the initial area, leveling up and pumping all of my new points into those four skills and stats. I was level 6 by the time I made it to Everdale. I was just barely able to survive the quests in that area.

I now believe that I could create a non-combat-centric character and survive–maybe even do well. But it took about 20 hours of play time for me to figure out how that could possibly work (hint: run away from everything, save up your money, and try to get into Port Kuudad so you can buy combat training and complete all those quests you skipped from earlier). This will appeal to some people: this is a game that rewards patience and repeated playthroughs. This will turn off others: it takes a long time to reach a level of familiarity with the game world that permits even a single successful playthrough.

The verdict: 4/5. Eschalon Book II is enthusiastically recommended for patient players who don’t mind dying all the time while they figure out how to survive in the game, and cautiously recommended for others who don’t mind playing on easy.

Deadly Sin 2: Shining Faith is a jRPG developed by Deadly Sin Studios in RPG Maker. The author was plainly influenced by Final Fantasy 6, evident in some of the character names, much of the overall plot structure of the game, and in a strangely familiar system for simulating pitched battles with multiple parties. But make no mistake: DS2 is its own game, featuring many inventive and clever design decisions that add up to a very well-crafted experience.

The dungeons in DS2 benefit from something called monster nodes. A monster node is essentially the jRPG equivalent of a monster generator from Gauntlet. Every explorable area with random enemy encounters has an associated monster node. Once you find the monster node and turn it off, enemies stop spawning. (You can turn the nodes back on again, but dear God, why would you?) The feeling of switching off a monster node is immensely satisfying. It’s like serving an eviction notice to every annoying neighbor on your block at once.

As an added bonus, switching off a monster node nets you a shiny Monster Node Shard, which you can distribute to one of your characters to help level up a skill. Every character in DS2 has three passive skills (things like “weapon mastery,” which boost that character’s strength and critical hit stats) and nine active skills (like spells and special attacks).

There are no skill trees—rather, each character can put points into any skill from the very beginning of the game. However, until you do put points into a skill, your character won’t have that skill in combat. You start out the game with no skills whatsoever, which can be confusing to newcomers. (Your mage, for instance, begins with no spells, in spite of what a cut scene prior to her acquisition might lead you to believe.)

Combat in DS2 is in the Phantasy Star style, but with character turns decided according to character speed. Fast characters gradually lap the slower characters, picking up extra turns in the process. Enemy encounters are well-balanced, and the assortment of useful skills at your disposal provides just enough flexibility to keep encounters tactically interesting.

The skills are distributed well among your party members—each character in your party (with the arguable exception of Ruby) is useful in a handful of different roles. Many individual skills are unusually versatile, with multiple beneficial effects that make them useful in different situations. Cure, for instance, can be leveled up to simultaneously restore a lot of hit points and cure most status ailments at once. Other skills are high-damage attacks that deliberately boost the attacker’s Threat rating.

“Wait,” you ask. “Threat rating?” Yeah—that’s another thing. You can actually determine who in your party the monsters are going to attack each turn. Characters’ Threat ratings go up when they damage a monster, up even more when they kill one, and way way way up if they kill or heavily damage multiple monsters at once. It’s basically a “how much have they pissed off the monsters” meter. Whoever has the highest Threat gets attacked by every monster. This means that you will have to plan your actions to avoid having your weaker characters accumulate too much Threat—or, alternatively, do your best to have your toughest characters up their Threat enough so they take the brunt of the enemy attacks (hence, those Threat-boosting skills I mentioned). I didn’t think that I would like this system at first, but it adds an extra tactical consideration to combat that I’ve grown to appreciate.

DS2 merits a special mention in its item design. Healing items recover a fixed percentage of your total health, not just “X hit points.” Better healing items recover a higher percentage, but it’s still a percentage. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Craig, who cares. Why are you wasting review space on this?” This is actually an impressively smart design move, and it’s indicative of the care that went into this game. Because healing items recover a percentage of health, they remain useful through the entire game. You won’t ever reach a point where all your “Potions” become useless filler, to be replaced by “Hi Potions,” to eventually themselves be replaced by “X Potions,” as happens in basically every other RPG ever made.

DS2 has an item augment system reminiscent of Diablo 2′s: you collect gemstones, coins, runes, shells, feathers, and other augment items to give your equipment various different bonuses. Unfortunately, augment items cannot be removed from your equipment. Your equipment, in turn, suffers from the sort of pointless attrition that Deadly Sin Studios had the courtesy to remove from the game’s stable of healing items. So basically, used augment items are only good until the store updates its stock of weapons and armor, at which point your augmented shields and broad swords will start to look like month-old pizza boxes and dog poop on the end of a twig, respectively. I always feel a little guilty using an augment item, because I know it’s going to end up being wasted sooner or later (usually sooner).

The writing in DS2 is inconsistent–it’s well-done in some areas, and poor in others. Thematically speaking, it’s great. The game deals with a lot of mature issues: political intrigue, terrorism, criminality, drug abuse, and romance, to name a few. I’ve been trying to decide what happens after a double-cross, if someone gets double-crossed again. What kind of a cross is that? Do you just add one, or multiply? I figure it’s got to be either a triple-cross or a quadruple-cross. Either way, you can be satisfied that there is a lot of crossing going on in this game.

DS2 is ambitious, there’s no question about that. Too much so. The game simply overreaches in places, setting up plot points it doesn’t adequately resolve, or piling on drama that hasn’t been earned. The romance, for instance, frequently comes off wooden, as though the author were writing what he’d seen other people write elsewhere rather than drawing on his own life experience and knowledge of the characters to produce something organic. The experience would have been better with a tighter focus on the things the author knew he could (or would have time to) pull off convincingly.

The main cast is a high point. Ruby (the bad-girl emperor’s daughter) and Maric (an egotistical heart-breaker who is inexplicably appalled by female nudity) are reliably entertaining. Teresa, on the other hand, is serious and dutiful, and while she rarely has things to say that aren’t plot-relevant, she too has her humanizing moments. Your main character is mostly believable, relatable, and not quite the one-note, apathetic, brooding jRPG drama queen his name would lead you to expect (though he does brush dangerously close on several occasions).

Character dialog in DS2 is uneven. While there is no shortage of fun, clever banter during light-hearted scenes, the darker scenes tend toward the melodramatic and corny. Consider this gem: “But we will hold this line with our last dying breath!” Now, I always thought that your last breath was your dying breath, pretty much by definition. But apparently this guy is going to have a whole bunch of dying breaths. Breathing, dying, reanimating, breathing some more, dying again, and so on. And by God, he’s holding that line until he’s done with all of them.

Characters occasionally make strange leaps of logic. In one early mission, you pull a red switch and are hit with an electric shock. Maric announces that you should try the blue switch first. Now, I know for a fact that Maric never saw any blue switch, because a) I hadn’t gone over to it yet, and b) it was far away and behind two separate groups of book cases. In another early quest, you find a love letter in the general vicinity of a skeleton. The letter says nothing about the writer dying. When you later speak to a girl anxiously awaiting the return of her lover, you inform her that her lover is dead. Now, hang on. How do we know that? What if we’re wrong? We just told some girl that the man she loves is compost, based on nothing more than a hunch. Maybe she’ll start dating someone else, and it’ll turn out that the guy is perfectly fine. Nice job breaking it, hero.

DS2 runs slowly on my netbook, with some of the larger maps reducing it to an absolute crawl, but the game would no doubt fare better on a beefier rig.

Harmony wrote the music for DS2 himself, using East-West instrument libraries for the sounds. (For those of you who don’t know what that means, those are the same sound libraries Josh Whelchel used in scoring The Spirit Engine 2.) The tracks in this game range from good to excellent, and the use of high quality instruments really puts them over the top.

With the exception of some really nice custom graphics for the main characters, DS2 relies on stock RPG Maker sprites and special effects. They look nice, of course, but it’s hard to give the game credit for using stock images.

The Verdict: 3.5/5. Fans of the SNES-era jRPG will get many hours of enjoyment from DS2. The game’s writing could have been stronger, but from a design standpoint, this indie jRPG is a worthy competitor to anything I’ve seen released in RPG Maker.

Dubloon is a jRPG developed by Banov that sports a pirate theme, tile-based movement, and visible, wandering enemy encounters. Featuring an odd mix of inspired design decisions and sloppy implementation, Dubloon is the first RPG I can recall having played where the system I played it on made a huge difference in my experience of the game.

In my mind, there are two ways to do a good pirate RPG. One would be to make the game somewhat realistic, modeling factions and events on the foibles of pirates that actually existed (e.g. bandits such as the Barbary Corsairs of North Africa, privateers like the American boats that hunted British ships during the American Revolution, or government-sponsored pirates like Sir Francis Drake of Britain, who terrorized the Spanish Armada in the 1500s). The other way to do it would be to make the game silly and whimsical, treating piracy like the caricature it has largely become in present-day internet culture.

Dubloon opts for the second route. It tells a story that is both silly and, frankly, pretty slapdash. Consider the opening sequence: you start the game without a crew, somehow managing to operate a vessel single-handedly, sail right up to a Navy ship in the dead of night, board the thing, kill a few sailors and (inevitably) get captured. The Navy officers decide to throw you in jail rather than execute you on the spot. Naturally, you escape. The Navy then pursues you for about ten steps and gives up when you duck into some nearby bushes.

These sorts of inexplicable events occur consistently throughout the story. (Spoilers follow.) One character is a tough, take-charge woman who acts as the captain of a crew you belong to. At one point, out of nowhere, she asks for a vote that your character (who is as warm and friendly as a parking meter, and half as chatty) be appointed captain. She gives no reason for this move, and no one asks for any. And everyone enthusiastically votes for him. Why? Who cares! You get to be a pirate captain!

Another character has a father acting as a pirate double-agent within the Navy. (Don’t ask.) The informant father is run through right in front of his eyes, crumpling up and soaking in a pool of his own blood like crackers in a bowl of tomato bisque. And what does this character have to say about it? That’s right: nothing at all! Oh, sure, he says to his pet monkey that they’d better escape. And then he gives your other characters some weirdly detached exposition about it afterwards. He talks about it like it’s just part of a list of equally relevant information.  “My name’s Riley! My dad was a pirate informant! He just got killed! I have a monkey who travels with me!” A good while later, once you run into the murderer again, he finally decides it’s time to be upset about that whole dad dying thing. But his heart still isn’t in it. It’s like Banov wasn’t paying him enough to make the character care about delivering his dialog convincingly.

One thing I really like about Dubloon is the magic system. It’s actually a pretty standard RPG magic system, except that you don’t cast spells with magic points. Instead, your characters have alcohol levels. The alcohol levels go down when your characters use spells, and can be replenished by drinking hard liquor. As your characters level up, their alcohol levels increase. It’s never stated explicitly, but I like to think that your characters just keep getting more and more drunk as the story goes on. It would certainly explain some of their erratic behavior.

As much as Dubloon tries to be about pirates, I can’t help but feel that it could have gone further. Sure, there’s the Navy, and sea monsters, and a smattering of other pirates, and there’s that time you beat up a mermaid, but most enemies you fight have nothing to do with anything. You’ll quickly find yourself fending off animated suits of armor, bugs, wolves, electrified moles, mushrooms, evil bunnies, flying hippos, and things that look like Alf. There’s very little in the way of exploring the high seas, searching for buried treasure. There’s no first mate. There’s no boarding of enemy ships. There’s no making people walk the plank. I feel more like a pirate on Talk Like a Pirate Day than I do while playing Dubloon.

Still, Banov has gone out of his way to make the experience of playing Dubloon a pleasant one. Your characters level up very quickly, enemy encounters are seldom all that difficult, and the game is generous with save points and “song chests” (objects which restore your party’s hit points and alcohol levels to full). I’d be lying if I denied having fun playing this.

Combat is mostly standard issue, active-time combat of the Final Fantasy variety, but occasionally—typically during boss fights—you’ll get little mini-games to “defuse” deadly attacks before they hit your party. By the same token, you can pick up special “battle items,” like shake bombs, which require a little mini-game to charge up a special attack. The mini-games are cute, and help add excitement to some of the battles. By the end of the game, however, both you and your enemies will have such high speed stats that all combat encounters will progress at a satisfyingly frenetic pace, making even regular battles a test of reflexes.

Outside of combat, the things that really make Dubloon stand out are the elements Banov lifts from Zelda games. It’s hard not to be reminded of Zelda: A Link to the Past when you have to use bombs to blast through weak walls, dig up hidden items with a shovel, or trigger switches to toggle colored blocks separating portions of different rooms in a dungeon. The Zelda elements may not be original, but they are nonetheless a welcome addition that help keep Dubloon from feeling too much like a mechanical jRPG.

The controls, however, would have been best left as standard jRPG buttons. Dubloon’s control scheme is clearly designed for a mouse, and becomes horribly clunky when playing on a laptop. Actions you’re expected to perform over and over (such as using healing items, keys and bombs) require you to drag-and-drop, which can be somewhat awkward with a touch pad. Wandering enemies can (and will) attack you in the middle of performing these tasks, which makes the unwieldy controls doubly annoying.

Moving with the mouse is even worse. Your character generally sort of moves in the direction of the cursor while you keep the left mouse button held down, but it’s not coded very well. You will frequently find your character hung up on walls because the game can’t pick a second direction for your character to move in that also heads toward the cursor, and getting your character to exit the screen is sometimes actually impossible because the game won’t allow your cursor past the edge of the screen. Thankfully, there is a keyboard movement alternative that lacks these weird snafus.

There is no keyboard control for running, however, which seems like an obvious oversight. To run, you must hold down the right mouse button. Playing on my netbook, I found this mechanism unresponsive—I often had to right-click three or four times before my character finally decided to start running.

While we’re on the topic of the controls, I have to mention the sailing sequences. You get a ship relatively early on in the game, but you aren’t allowed to explore with your ship directly. Rather, you click an island on your map and proceed through a side-scrolling shooter sequence against Navy ships, sharks, conch-spraying giant pufferfish, and fire-breathing lagoon monsters. Forget exploring the high seas. Apparently, it’s all pirates can do to move in a straight line and not get sunk.

The controls in these sailing sequences are miserably bad. Left-click to fire a cannonball, right-click to move a short ways towards the mouse cursor. It’s playable (albeit uncomfortable) if you happen to have a mouse and you just keep the left and right mouse buttons held down the entire time. Unfortunately, my netbook allows only one mouse button to be clicked at a time, which makes this already-clunky control scheme nearly impossible to use.

For reasons known only to him, Banov chose to have one of the boss battles take place using this engine. I would imagine he did it because ship-to-ship battles are an awesome idea. Unfortunately, the actual experience of playing through this is something like trying to navigate a bullet hell shooter by standing over your ship and trying to pull it around with a three-foot length of string.

The graphics are quite unattractive for the most part, though Banov has thrown in some neat visual effects here and there (most notably the impressive water-rippling effect that kicks off combat). The soundtrack by Prophecy features some good tracks, though it lacks a professional touch. A number of tracks don’t loop properly, many are regrettably short, and all of them have a distinctly MIDI sound to them.

Dubloon runs smoothly on my desktop computer. Playing on my netbook, however, Dubloon runs slowly, particularly when walking around the larger maps. This strikes me as odd for a low-res, tile-based game. Then again, the performance might just be a limitation of Game Maker.

The Verdict: 3/5. Dubloon is a cute jRPG with fresh ideas and surprisingly frenetic combat. On the other hand, it may run slowly on low-end computers, the control scheme is not particularly good, and the story is pretty half-baked. Still, this is probably the only RPG you will ever get to play where you beat up a mermaid—that has to count for something.