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 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.

Dead State is a compelling, high-tension RPG set at the beginning of the zombie apocalypse – a deadly illness is rampaging through the world, turning those infected into the walking dead. As society is beginning to fall apart, the player must organize a scant handful of allies, working on fortifying a shelter, scouting for food and supplies, making uncertain alliances with others, and attempting to hold together a group as humanity teeters on the brink of extinction. And although the zombies lurk as an ever present threat, the biggest obstacle to the player may just be other humans with the same goal: survival at any cost.

I’ll be honest: when I first saw this, my immediate thought was something along the lines of “Jesus Christ, do we not have enough zombie games? Is it really that hard to think of something original? Why not just go and call it “I MAED AN RPG W1TH Z0MB1ES 1N IT!!!1″?

On the other hand, the way it’s described makes the setting sound like Fallout, a desert wracked with anarchy and occasional wandering bands of ghouls. That can’t be a bad thing. And considering that Double Bear is run by veterans of Obsidian and Troika, I think we may be in for a real treat with this one. Check out the RPS interview with Brian Mitsoda.

Here is a list of the games that were finished within the time constraints of the challenge:

–If Only, a short but funny time-travel RPG in Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style. (You’ll know if you won because you’ll get some cake.)

–Multi-dimensional Man, an RPG with Cursor*10-style mechanics.

–Retroactive Quest, a time-travel 3D action RPG rendered in pixelated style.

–Tiny Puppy RPG, a distressingly cute RPG in which you were born as (what else) a tiny puppy. You must bark to scare away other dogs and seek out your bone.

Hit the jump for the rest of the games…

Here are the others which made some progress but didn’t manage to make it in under the deadline–hopefully to be finished in the future!

–Aether Gears, a steampunk RPG in Unity where scientists successfully discover the existence of aether in the late 1880s and use it to power machinery. It has really nice 3D graphics, but not much else yet.

–Docken Quest, a 3D RPG in which you are a photographer who must travel to the past with your camera and prevent bad things from happening by gathering documentary evidence (i.e. taking pictures).

–Dwarven Commando, a remake of the C64 game Commando with axe-throwing dwarves and goblins.

–The Gateway Circle, a party-based RPG involving a supernatural alternate history of Stonehenge.

–Nexus City, an RPG about…well, I don’t know what it’s about. But Terry Cavanagh is working on it, and it looks interesting.

–Sunset Mirror, a 3D RPG in Unity involving steampunk, nazis, assassins, and time travel by SophieH of Linear RPG fame.

I think we’ve all learned something from this challenge: don’t be too ambitious when you’re working under time constraints. (Or, more specifically: 1.25 weeks really isn’t enough time to make a 3D time travel RPG.)

Road Gangs is a vehicle based RPG set in a post-apocalyptic United States. Your gang must find a number of nuclear scientists hidden in cities all over the country and use them to disable a certain number of nuclear silos before it’s too late. Vehicle combat is real time, there are 23 vehicle types in Road Gangs and all vehicles have over a dozen upgrade options available.

The game is currently Windows-only, but Blackwater says they’ll be releasing a Mac version “soon.” You can grab the demo here, and unlock the full game for $24.95.

Word has it that the game will be hitting Stardock’s Impulse store around September 10th. Until that day arrives, you can try out a demo, already available right here.

Heroic lead characters rarely make mistakes in fiction – at least, crushing ones. The exceptions come right at the start of a story, and the story is about recovery from that failing. Because if they make too many mistakes, they stop being heroes. Jack Bauer going in to rescue a hostage after being told it’s too dangerous doesn’t usually lead to the hostage getting their throat slit. It leads to Bauer stabbing them in the eye with his celphone.

Because, in fiction terms, the writer is almost always on the side of the hero. In any fair universe, Batman would be annihilated from orbit by the first supervillain with any sense. However, the odds are stacked on his side. They won’t act with the full level of their powers, with the full freedom that a human would do – because if they did, the hero would be negated. Whatever Batman does, will be basically right. Batman always wins.

The effect of Blizzards choices about choices means that it always results in a heroic story staring Raynor. It’s a story which each player customises according to their own decisions, but it’s still a heroic story. Because if Blizzard gave you room to fuck up, they wouldn’t end up with a hero as heroic as they need to.

Because – this is the key thing they’ve realised – the idea of “meaningful decisions” doesn’t necessarily mean that any of those meaningful decisions need to have a negative consequence.

Go ahead and give it a read.

In my dream the night before, I was hired as the newest member of Rock Paper Shotgun, the PC game reviewing website. In this dream, RPS had an office. (I have no idea if they actually have an office, but I suspect that they don’t.) The office was big—I would even say lavish. The main part of it was very hip, with an open layout and strange ergonomic chairs. The chairs were low to the ground, and essentially looked like double-wide coffee tables warped into a wavy ‘S’ shape, covered with brown shag carpeting. They were comfy. The foyer was more of a classy affair, with marble floors, gold elevator doors, and huge sculpted gold plates running up the walls in 1920s art deco style.

And there were girls. Now, I’m fairly certain that real-life RPS has no female staff, but in this dream, their offices were positively overflowing with cute girls, several of whom kept shyly making eyes at me when I first walked in. There was also an older lady, a language coach, who worked there. She looked a bit like Betty White with a red dye job, and walked around the office clucking at people to use the proper British pronunciation of things. She insisted loudly at one point that bouquet is properly pronounced “buttock,” at which point I decided to go around asking people if they wanted to smell my bouquet, hiking up my shorts on one side and thrusting out my hip suggestively. The girls loved this.

I then decided that I should go meet the core RPS team, so I sat down on one of the ergonomic chairs where a bunch of guys were hanging out. Having seen the likenesses of most of the RPS writers, I can confidently say that Alec Meer and John Walker were nowhere to be seen. I felt like I ought to say hi to Kieron Gillen, but I had to find him first. I wasn’t sure if the balding fellow with glasses sitting near me and staring at the floor somewhat dourly was him, and I felt too awkward to ask.

After a few minutes, I noticed a red carpet flanked by those little “line up here” stands with the cloth strips. Many well-dressed people were clustered around the carpet and cheering, while others walked down it and into the office. Apparently I had arrived just before the start of an indie games festival of some kind. I looked down at myself and felt relieved that I had had the sense to come to the offices dressed in dress pants, dress shoes, and a nice pastel green button-down shirt that one of my ex-girlfriends was nice (or perhaps exasperated) enough to buy me at Express Men some years back. I looked for a spot to stand, and found one near the far end of the carpet with some of the girls. Five of us posed for a picture together. I was having fun.

And then I woke up. It was 6 AM. And my head was killing me.

I do not remember the justification for my dreamworld hiring. I do remember thinking that RPS hadn’t made the right decision. I certainly felt awkward enough through most of the dream. And in retrospect, my writing for IndieRPGs.com wouldn’t have been a very good reason to hire me on: my style is very different from theirs. They practice new games journalism, seeking to convey the experience of playing a game through personal anecdotes, while I undertake the more mundane task of seeking to describe a game’s various bits and pieces and evaluate what works and what doesn’t.

But of course, there’s a better reason why hiring me would have been a doubtful move: I’m a game developer. The whole scenario got me thinking (not for the first time) about the awkwardness of my position as a designer who also reviews other peoples’ games. There is a fairly obvious conflict of interest there, of which I am acutely aware. On one hand, it behooves me to only say nice things about other peoples’ games, since a bad review risks alienating industry contacts, potential future collaborators, and people who might be able to support me or my work in other ways. On the other hand, there may be a perception that if I write negative things about a game, it’s to try to make my own games look better by comparison. (I would never, ever do this, by the way. It would make me look like a huge jerk, hurt sales, and jeopardize my ability to network with other indies.) In this way, every review I write presents me with a double-bind.

So given the risks, why review other games? It would certainly be safer for me to keep my big fat mouth shut and just go about my business, making games and leaving the reviewing to people who don’t. The short answer is, I feel a duty to the community. Indies have to review other indies. Derek Yu does it. Paul Eres does it. And they should. Not because we ought to sit in judgment of one another, but because without that process of talking about each others’ games, indie games coverage would be sparse and tightly focused on only a small handful of comparatively well-known titles.

Indie RPGs get it the worst. They are the most difficult games to make, and yet they are mostly invisible: mainstream sites ignore them, of course, but so do indie games sites. They show up on TIGS now and then, but not terribly often. The Indie Games Blog seldom features RPGs. Gametunnel used to review indie RPGs, but they are now defunct. JayIsGames won’t review commercial games that are not sold on BigFishGames.com, which in turn carries very few RPGs. Even RPGWatch (which I love, by the way, and which regularly features indie RPG news) doesn’t cover indie JRPGs, a subgenre which accounts for probably 70 to 80% of all indie RPGs. Jay Barnson’s blog, the Rampant Coyote, is a good resource, but he doesn’t do reviews. And so on. And so on.

The truth is, I simply got tired of complaining about it. I realized that whining on the internet wasn’t going to change anything. I simply had to roll up my sleeves and change it myself. So that is what I’m doing—or at least trying to do—one review at a time. I’m not saying that I’m the right man for the job. I’m saying that I’m the only man who showed up to the interview. That has to count for something.

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.

Here’s the trailer: