2012 In Review 013 - Epic! The Humorous RPG

[Gizmog]

Pre-Thoughts:

This Brovania guy must have quite an ego to claim his game is not only humorous, but also epic right there in the title. Didn't hear anything about this during the year so no idea what I'm getting into. The dude's name is Brovania, so he can't be all that bad. Probably some frat boy shenanigans. Maybe kill a couple vampires. Right up my alley, I hope. He claims on the download page it's gonna take 2 hours, not including combat, so that's quite a lot of humor and pretty epic size, I'd say. Taking a bit of time to download, so who knows.

Thoughts-During:

So far, more like The Self-Aware RPG.

His walk animation is too goofy to describe. Seriously, play the game just to hit down and watch his legs.

You save your game by using items. Kind of cool, but kind of obnoxious too, especially if this is really gonna take 2 hours.

...still more like The Self-Aware RPG than a funny one. Graphics are nice though.

What's the deal with these fish, they don't do any damage, they have gobs of HP, it takes forever. That's not hilarity, that's tedium.

TIME-OUT!!!

Let me tell you about limiting saves. This is an RPG. It says so in the title, and every other textbox reminds you in case you forget. It's hard to describe what exactly makes an RPG a RPG. The best way I've heard is that RPGs are games about preparation. You spend a lot of boring time preparing to fight a boss and get to the next area. If you spent enough time gathering levels, stocking up on potions, buying the latest equipment, or studying his patterns YOU WIN! If you didn't prepare enough, you die and prepare some more. Traditionally RPGs recognize the effort you have made to prepare and let you know before a boss battle by conspicuously placing a save point, a place where you can save your progress before you've committed to fighting a boss who by definition, is the most likely character to knock your slime out. You're climbing up a building in Zozo, you see a save point. You saved before you entered town, but they put a save point there, so you use it. Clibming up the stairs, you see a dude standing in front of a door. You're gonna have to talk to him to get through. There was just a save point. He's definitely a boss. Are you prepared?

Since you just saved, you can find out. You don't want to be over-prepared after-all, because then the rest of the game won't be a challenge. This gentleman's agreement between player and developer lets the developer throw in bosses who can truly be a challenge, while also preventing players from having to repeat hours of grinding if they weren't prepared. It's a beautiful system, it's worked for a lot of years. It's not perfect of course, but there's always room for improvement. Now, in your system, for this "EPIC" yet "HUMOROUS" RPG, I, the player, can save anywhere I like: However, I have to spend 500 GP on a save crystal which is a lot of money, or find them laying around which might not always be possible. This makes them a precious commodity, something which I don't want to waste in case later on I'm really going to need them. I want to be prepared. However, because this is an RPG, I know there's bosses. Because there's no save points, I don't know when they're coming. Random battles aren't a good barometer as to my level of preparedness. So when I run into a guy covered in slime in the forest, I want to save my game: He might be the lead-in to the boss. I have no way of knowing. Yet if I blow my save orb here and he's not the boss, which he isn't, then I've wasted one and later on at the boss I'm gonna have to use another one. I'm in a sub-optimal position. That's bad.

Now, you could say in a system like this "Oh, the player character could just announce "I have a bad feeling, you should save your game!", but if that's the case why not just put a save point there to start with? If you wanted to keep your dungeons feeling dangerous you could let the player save for free at an inn, but charge them money for an item that lets them save in a dungeon. This creates a sort of safety net to prevent hte player from losing all their progress but also allows for an element of risk in the dungeons which the player can spend money they'd otherwise use on potions or weapons to save their game. A give and take kind of thing. Mite b cool

A game like Resident Evil can get away with typewriter ribbons to limit the amount of saves. Resident Evil wants you to be scared and the best way to do that is for there to be an element of risk: You can open that big spooky door without saving the game, but if there's a boss behind it you're going to have lost a lot of progress. In the ensuing battle, you'll be extra careful not to die, and if you get to a weakened state it's all the better limping back to the safe room, hoping nothing ambushes you. There are no "random encounters" in Resident Evil, no grinding for experience or health. The enemies, health power-ups, ammunition and puzzles are all the same every time you play, so in theory when you die you can get back to where you were more easily, now that you know what to expect, and then move into the next area with a fresh sense of fear and unease.

A financial sim or gambling kind of game could also get away with taking your money in exchange for saving your game, because those are games about investments, rewards and risks. If you can save for free before every investment, you can "undo" an unprofitable venture and "redo" it until it is a rewarding one. If saving the game costs a million bucks you're more likely to let things play out, after all even if the deal goes bust, what're the chances of it going a million bucks bust? I'm sure there's other examples where it makes sense as well.

This isn't one of them! It's making me paranoid as hell, and for a "Humorous" RPG where it seems like the main point should be getting to see all the jokes, this kind of thing is really more frustrating than fun. I haven't run afoul of it yet, maybe there are savepoints or countless free save crystals or something, but right now it just seems like very, very bad game design, especially if you're expecting me to finish this thing. The first time I lose a big chunk of progress, I am going to be out of here so fast. I have no stake in this game, no reason to want to force myself through it if it suddenly becomes an ordeal. So hopefully it won't become one!

PLAY BALL!!!

...gonna need a screen shot for that one.

Are ALL the enemies going to do one damage and take 15 hits?

This flekking stuff does nothing for me. If you're gonna swear, SWEAR.

Two mimics in a row, can't run, takes FOREVER to kill them and they do no tangible damage. slime you.

Choice seems broken. I chose no, then changed my mind and tried again, it let me "choose" but he keeps saying "Yeah, I'm really stupid"

Post-Thoughts:

Okay. I'm throwing in the towel. This is a nice looking game. There's been a lot of work put into the maptiles, the walkabouts, the heroes and enemies, basically everything but the hero portrait. The music is good, there's some interesting mining and fishing content and he even scripted an Elder Scrolls style "QUEST" system. He put a lot of effort into everything... except the most important parts. The battles are TERRIBLE. With the exception of one battle very early on, a joke battle against a bunch of slimes, absolutely nothing is any threat to you. The only challenge is how long you can hold down the spacebar. The maps are gigantic, which makes it hard to tell just where you're supposed to be going. And every NPC, every textbox every joke is drawn from the same pool of cliches.

Yes, NPCs tend to repeat themselves. YES, people are whiny losers who give a lot of quests. I didn't laugh once and after the first hundred jokes like this, I vowed NOT to laugh, no matter how funny it might conceivably get as a matter of principle. Fortunately it never tested my resolve in that department. Same "Golly gee, sure is an RPG!" megaslime every freakin step of the way. I will apologize for my rant on save point, it turns out you can obtain quite a reasonable stash of them by exploring but if the game goes longer than I played it you might need them. And since that rant wasn't necessary, I'll go on another one.

Let me tell you about Quest Systems. The reason RPGs like Elder Scrolls, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Fallout, pretty much all the damn modern ones have Quest Systems is to add immersion. Quest systems force you to talk to characters, to explore regions, to see the world. When an NPC tells you "Go to Markarath and buy me a prize hog!" it might *seem* like he's being a lazy bastard, but really what he's telling you is "Hey! There's a city called MARKARTH! Have you been to it? Somewhere in that town, there's a guy who sells hogs! Have you seen him yet? Poke around Markarth until you find him! We have hogs in this world! They're traded back and forth! They're important to our system of living!". It's a beautiful system. It can also serve as a stepping stone to other quests and as a cheap means of judging progress. Imagine that at the end of Act 2, Markarth is burned down by bandits. IF the player had never been to Markarth, that's no big deal, no big loss to them. They might not even realize there was a non-burned version of that city. By using quests as a kind of pre-requisite to progress, you can make sure the player is intimately familliar with the town and its inhabitants before they're tragically struck down in their prime.

Even the most basic of fetch quest/trading sequences, like that epic chain in Link's Awakening serve a general purpose: To let you know there's something you haven't seen yet. That there's a reason to keep going on, to give you some little curiosity to wonder about. And then when you find the mermaid's bra and trade it for a pearl necklace, and trade that for a flute, and trade the flute for an ocarina and the ocarina for a shovel and so on, you're finding all these new things and also back tracking to previous areas. Maybe things have changed in those areas, maybe they haven't. Maybe you go looking for an item and you find somewhere you aren't supposed to be yet. That's okay too, you can make a note of it. It all serves a purpose of keeping you involved. Even Super Metroid had quests. When you try to bomb through a wall and see a power bomb logo, that's a quest. "Come back later when you've found this symbol", it tells you.

From what I saw, this game seems to think the purpose of the quest is the reward. The money, the EXP, the "Sweet Item" you'd obtain for completing it. That's really all it has going for it. The maps are beautiful, but I don't want to poke around in them any more than I have to because the battles are long and unthreatening, I've got no need for most of the loot I'm getting, all the treasure chests I bothered to open were traps, why the slime would I want to explore? All the NPCs tell the same "Ho hum, I'm an NPC!" kind of stupid slime jokes, why the slime would I want to talk to them? They're not introducing me to new game mechanics, they're not telling me things I'm missing, they're in fact reminding me that this is all there is, the whole game is going to be this and if you don't like it now, that's a tough boatload of slime 'cause it's not changing.

If there were an update to this game tomorrow in which Brovania promised that he added more NPCs, interesting NPCs who tell jokes that aren't variations on the same tired theme, and that he'd fixed the battles and they were actually kind of a challenge and there wasn't a zombie in every other coffin and a monster in every box and that they didn't take 3 minutes a piece to fight, I would recommend this game. It's got a lot of the stuff in it that makes a game good, but piles it under almost all of the slime that makes a game bad. I gave up at about the 2 hour mark, I was about level 22 which was higher than the recommended level for any of the available quests, and had just completed the one involving a priest and a demon. Assuming I saw most of what there is to see.