Heart of the OHR Contest 2016

re: pepsi ranger: I'm probably going to try and make a new viewport that's a bit bigger and wider, but keep the same screen size, as swapping between an expanded viewport and the hardcoded battle size does not sound like a good time. switch to a non-OHR engine, seeing as making new wall/floor graphics is an exercise in tedium and I'd much prefer to have the benefits of something with 3d capacities.

Anyway, another review:

Grapnes 2: Kepnalcide by Taco Bot

0: America is invaded by communists, and a son sees his father killed in front of him and is sent to a prison in the middle of the desert after losing an eye. Years pass, and one day some other prisoner decides he is going to organize a breakout. Taking advantage of it, you fight your way out, board a conveniently-placed boat, go off to another country, and... then do random stuff unrelated to all that. There's one guy you come across who had their color taken from them, which I see being the start of some larger plot, but as-is all the starting stuff seems pretty pointless.

Apparently the plot's going to be rewritten, which is good. Having all the current pieces actually mesh together would be a plus.

But...
Am I supposed to care about the fact that the main character's homeland was taken over and that he's illegally entered a foreign nation, potentially bringing the wrath of whoever those red guys are down upon them? Am I supposed to take it for granted that this nation has such lax security regarding its borders that it won't actually do anything about the pirate living right outside one of its border crossings who can provide perfectly adequate forgeries for nothing? Why do I go from fighting geometry and silly monsters to fighting very human bandits? Even if your game is silly, putting an iota of thought into how these things go together can make something a lot stronger than what's here now.

1: The first thing I wrote down while playing this was that the music was too good for the quality of the rest of the game, so that goes here.

Graphics are bad, and there's no getting around that. You have humanoid characters with perfectly spherical heads, mountains that try to be like those from the first Zelda game and don't quite make it, and overworld tiles that have no edges whatsoever. Even if they weren't bad, though, your main character is still a blue square with an out-of-place mecha eye from a country of blue squares whose conquerors are the same squares palette swapped. Everything that isn't a palette swap or an edit of the main character is designed marginally better, but there's nothing here I'd call out as necessarily good design [except maybe those cactus enemies, at a stretch].
This isn't to say that the fact that the characters are simple is why they're bad. You can have appealing yet simple characters. There's a certain something missing from your designs right now, much of which likely stems from the immense mismatch you have in tones when a character whose father was killed in front of them and who was forced to spend much of their youth imprisoned is a square with stick figure limbs.

2: The main gimmick to the battles are the blueberries [which, contrary to their name, aren't all blue]. They are in 6 colors, and are used from a spell menu: when used against an opposite-color enemy [red <-> green, yellow <-> purple, and orange <-> blue] they do extra damage. Each attack also uses up a corresponding blueberry, so in theory you have to be careful about what attacks you're using, so as not to use them up too quickly on trash.

Of course, this fails on two counts. Enemies aren't that dangerous, but they're just big enough HP sponges, and battles are just slow enough, that you end up conserving more resources just using the berry attacks instead of saving them for later on. You also get a good number of berries out in the field, and I somehow managed to get them to respawn, giving me enough that I felt comfortable selling off a good few just to get enough money for items [keep this, by the way: buying berries in stores would be painful, given their price].

This is all beside the more important issue: it's just not a very interesting system. Really, it's just matching up elements with a tiny bit of flavor, but more importantly there's no real thought in whether or not to actually use the attacks, as could be the case in a more fleshed-out system. Either you have the correct berry and you'd be a fool not to use it, or you don't. Even simple skills can be interesting when they're part of a more in-depth battle system, but that ain't here.

Second character's a nigh-useless damage sponge/item user, but that's been mentioned earlier. Same goes for the painfully low encounter rate on the mountain, making my grinding to get enough items to survive the first boss's pointlessly high HP even more of a chore than it would have been with a more typical encounter rate.

Bosses: there's two of them [three, if you count the obligatory guard in the camp], and none of them are that interesting. Of the three, the most challenging was the bandit boss, but even then, once you get rid of their companions [hint: get rid of their companions first] it's just a case of surviving its singular attack for much longer than is interesting. Do any of them even have more than one actual attack?

The dungeon areas are fine. The second half of the mountain dungeon has some puzzles, which I would have liked a lot more if I hadn't had to go through them multiple times for reasons. The forest has a very literal hedgemaze, but thankfully that's off to the side [an aside: there's not much you can do about it right now, but timing-based minigames with very fast-moving objects just don't work well when you're working in something that's at 18fps]

3: I got to the end-of-demo message, at the very least. Fought through a hedge maze filled with killer robots that were easier to defeat than the enemies outside, and then fought a very boring entish boss.

Serious question: where do you want to go with this? What do you want to do with this? Is this something you see putting serious time into? Is there anything you plan on doing later on with the simple systems you have in place that would justify such work? When would the plot stop being of the random events sort and become something more cohesive? No matter the tone of game you're going for, these are all questions you should be asking yourself at this point.

It's slightly less aimless than Quodia, I'll give you that, but putting down potential threads is not the same as even starting to follow them up. Start making something more concrete out of what you have now, if the systems you've put down for yourself so far even allow that.

Rating:
3/10 seems a bit low so 4/10 for managing to completely muck up an escape/revenge(?) plot with useless junk almost immediately

Dragon Chaser by DragonChaserKev

This is one of a dying breed of OHR games [and RPGs in general, really]: the Dragon Quest clone. Actually, scratch that: were Dragon Quest clones ever that prevalent, as opposed to the far more enticing Final Fantasy clone? Whatever the case, this game makes it very clear where its origins lie, starting from its lawyer-friendly title and its not so subtle ripping off of enemies from the source material.
Not that it does that ripping off very well, that is.

0: A young girl wakes up near a town; apparently, she's a refugee of some sort, I think. Anyway, she goes into town, learns that there's monsters afoot, and then goes out and dies of boredom before ever attacking a single enemy.
I'm only half joking here. There's a gigantic amount of exposition from the various NPCs, describing the general state of chaos the world's come to: towns falling to monsters, volcanoes erupting, the strongholds of humanity seemingly just barely holding on against the tides of evil. All's well and good, and it's clear that a huge amount of effort was put into this game's text... but does it really matter when I'm given no direction whatsoever, made all the more obnoxious by the game's very open overworld and painfully slow rate of leveling?

This sense of wasted effort is a running theme here.

1: This game is the only one here that was physically painful to play, and you can thank the dreadful, dreadful audio for that. Nearly every single sound effect is a combination of overly long, completely out of place, and/or just bad. The only piece of music I could even remotely enjoy was bits of the overworld theme, and that never lasted long. The menu exit sound is a strange clunking sound, the sound effect for buying stuff is an overly long cash register sound effect, and the rats have some disconcerting scream sound effect associated with their main attack [strangely enough, their more dangerous attack has a much more typical sound effect associated with it, which makes the usage of the scream one even stranger].
An aside: thanks to a gradual shift away from the usage of MIDIs, the OHR has a tendency to crash upon a MIDI looping. Convert them to .ogg files or the like before actually using them in games.

The graphics are a bit better, but they're all over the place in quality. The trees are nice, as are some of the objects, but everything else is shades of mediocre to bad. I didn't encounter anything completely eye-searing, but that's probably because I didn't get very far in the game. The enemies, beyond one giant bug I immediately ran away from and the aforementioned rat enemies, are all ripoffs of Dragon Quest monsters. Maybe it changes later on in the game? [Spoiler: I looked in the .rpg file and while it sort of does, the enemies that aren't complete ripoffs are palette swapped to such an absurd degree that it evens out in the end]

The game's a bit strange, in that it can't figure out whether it wants to rip off Dragon Quest 1's aesthetic of everything being made of single blocks, or use less abstract construction. It starts mixing the two at the second town onward, and I'm not sure it works, especially when things are kept abstract enough that you end up walking on top of the aforementioned stone blocks in some halfhearted attempt at a upper level walkway.

Except there's properly drawn out walkways on the castles. What's going on here?

2: As one would expect from a Dragon Quest clone, the intention is that this plays a lot like Dragon Quest: you learn about the surroundings and history of the area in town, grind for experience and gold out in the field, and through leveling up and experience get yourself in a position where you can pass certain thresholds on the world map without dying miserably. The various Dragon Quests each have their own flavors on the theme, with most pushing their grinding into dungeons and/or lessening just how much you need to do, but they all have this. At the cornerstone of this are two things. For the town portions, it is making places that are large enough to potentially hold secrets and/or interesting yet nonessential NPCs, but small enough to not be a gigantic pain to go about. For the battles, it's that they go quickly and that each has threatening enough to be able to wear you down but not quite so threatening that they have the ability to completely murder you if you're as strong as intended.

Let's examine both of these.

First, towns.

Here is the first town in Dragon Quest 1. You come in on the left-hand side, with the two places you'll interact with the most [the equipment store and the inn] fairly close to where you came in, and less important stuff over to the right-hand side.

Here is the first real castle of Dragon Quest IV's final chapter.. You've had four other chapters of getting to learn the various parts of a town, so this gets to be a bit quirkier [in the DS remake and presumably the PS1 remake it was based off of, the castle was entirely indoors], what with another complete party heading out as you go in yourself, but the important parts - the stores, the inn [the church, where you save, is off to the side, but as another part of the castle wraps around it it's pretty obvious] - are on hand directly as you walk in, while the things you'll only need to check once or twice are further away.

Notice how that in both of these maps there's multiple ways out of town, such that once you've gone through once you don't have to trace your steps back through. Also notice that while both of these towns do have open space, neither of them are particularly large.

Here's the first town in Dragon Chaser. Things are a little bit different here. Sure, the item shop, equipment shop, and inn are fairly close to the entrance, but the church is at the far end of town, leading to a sizable walk back through every time you go to save. Another one of the stores [which, as far as I can tell, is completely redundant] is placed with its entrance facing away from the main path, which is both annoying and illogical.
Elsewhere, the save points are even more obnoxiously placed: the one in the brown castle [itself a pain to get to, and as far as I can tell completely pointless beyond minor flavor] is off to very top right of the map, leading to a very long trudge back if you do decide on using it. Furthermore, in all the towns I ended up going to there's only ever one exit out, so in towns that are more labyrinthine than example I linked it's even more of a pain to just get out.

There's stuff - barrels, drawers, bookshelves, and the like - strewn around the place, and on a case-to-case basis [namely, whether or not DragonChaserKev bothered to put down the NPCs needed to do so] you can interact with them, mostly leading to nothing but sometimes giving you items. I'm not sure how to feel about this sort of stuff in general, but there's ways to do this sort of stuff that makes it feel worth your while that just aren't happening here.

All the NPCs do talk a lot, but as it overwhelmingly the case they feel mostly pointless, because neither I nor the main character are ever given any direction in which to point oneself. With that initial knowledge, the NPCs then could have done the mix of worldbuilding and not-so-subtle giving out of directions that many RPGs pull off well. Without that, though, it's all worldbuilding I don't care about because it's all noise to me.

And even if I go and try and venture out on my own, I always ended up facing off against foes that I simply had no chance of beating without ludicrous amounts of grinding, so that path was beyond me.

The battles in this game are bad, and there is no getting around that. At the default speed, each of the main character's turns would take 7 seconds to come up, which is 6 seconds of doing absolutely nothing too many. I had to use the debug key each time in order to make the battles not nearly as interminably long.
This would be bad enough if there was something to these battles, but there simply isn't. You don't even gain the simplest of healing spells until you level up twice, and while you do eventually get hold of a whole host of spells [found out by using the exp-giving debug key, of course] that's so far away from anywhere I got to that they might as well not exist. Everything I fought fell into two categories: either they were complete non-threats, or they destroyed me in one attack [the rats veered in between the two, having an attack that did a measly 1 damage as well as one that did more than half my health that happened at random. These enemies came in groups, by the way]. Maybe there's no in-between when you're dealing with small numbers, but that's besides the point. The gap between the two feels insurmountable, even if I grinded to get all the equipment in the first towns' shops.

The original Dragon Quest, as well as many, many other games, had a neat trick with respect to how they dealt with the progression of enemy strength. They typically used changes in the geometry of the landscape - bottlenecks, bridges, changes in the dominant landscape feature, and so on - to indicate changes in enemy formations. To be blunt, you'd know when the enemies you'd be facing would change. There's a very, very small amount of this here - the enemies to the north of the river above the first port town are of the instadeath sort - but this wasn't elsewhere. I can go right across the big central plain and without any real sign of change go from enemies that pose no threat whatsoever to enemies that can kill me from full health. This, of course, is coupled with the fact that you get next to nothing from either enemies or leveling up, making the whole thing seem awfully pointless.

The fact that I played for 30-45 minutes and leveled up all of 2 times while doing so should speak a whole lot about this game.

As should the fact that not only did I have no idea of where to go beyond the initial area in spite of speaking to most of the NPCs in several towns and castles. As should the fact that I never even saw a proper dungeon, much less ventured inside one.

3: To make sure I wasn't badmouthing a game that was better than what it copied, I went and downloaded the original Dragon Warrior. And...

It's definitely an old game, as befitting what was essentially the first JRPG as we know them as today. It's incredibly archaic, what with you having to stand on chests to open them and having to manually descend staircases, to say nothing of the simplicity of the battles. Even updated somewhat to be somewhat acceptable to the audience of 1989, it's still far from the prettiest of games. And even if I've only got to level 5 so far, I can tell very much that it's 99% grind.

But, but... I still enjoyed it. Even in its archaic nature, there's something to its general construction that makes it so much more appealing to me than many other games that try to copy it. It knows its battles are as simple as it gets, and doesn't pretend that it's otherwise, choosing instead to make them quick. A fight against even an enemy that takes a few hits to go down only takes a few seconds, and unless you count text quickly appearing as a wait there's very little downtime in battles. The game is very much aware of the fact that its battles act simultaneously as a threat to the player, as a way to throttle the player's progression through the overworld, and as a way for the player character to become more powerful. The NPCs are incredibly brief, yet still get what they're saying across. Even the opening scene, where you talk to the king and get some treasures from him, acts as a tutorial for opening chests and the doors, as well as an assurance you'll be able to buy something while starting out and won't be forced to go through the first cave completely blind. Even your final goal - the Dragonlord's Castle - is directly in sight of your starting point, giving the player ample knowledge of their target.

However outdated it may be, there's a reason Dragon Quest had the capacity to showcase the appeal of RPGs to a general public in a way a more convoluted game could not: it got the fundamentals down damn hard.

Dragon Chaser, perhaps befitting its name, tried chasing this legacy, only to fall down hard.

Don't bother with this game.

Rating:
2/10, because if the creator of the game can't even be bothered to play through it, why should you?

Bale
concept : 1/2
graphics : 1/2
content : 1/2
gameplay : 1/2
Presentation : 2/2
TOTAL : 6/10

Dark Planet by Ichiro

This is going to be a short one, as befitting this.

You're part of some organization. You do a training exercise, are given a PDA, get told you need to delouse an electrical substation, and then get thrown out of your offices to wander the empty streets. Ignoring the whole issue of a PDA existing in whatever futuristic time period this is, it's an okay start.

Graphics are fine, mostly, if incredibly plain. The portraits are disconcerting, as it's clear you know better than to have perfectly spherical human heads but not much more than that. There's a certain flatness to everything; perhaps throwing down some shadows on the ground tiles would help with that.

The gameplay is your obligatory tutorial battle, and then walking around. I think the walk speed was increased, which is nice, but the all of 2 maps outside the offices are too big even with that change.

Menus are neat, I guess, but they're pointless to poke around because there's nothing in them. You have your default menu stuff [empty] as well as your PDA, which has an email system with all of one email shown, an objectives menu with the singular unreachable objective, and a tutorial screen, which is useless because none of the stuff listed in there is actually relevant when the game never progresses anywhere.

I can't say anything more than because there isn't anything more to say. I get that you wanted to put in something more substantial than this, but couldn't you have sat out this contest and waited until you actually had something to show? As of now, all you have is a custom menu and an empty town.

And those do not make a game.

Rating: Abstain, as there is no game here to rate.

Dark Planet
concept : 1/2
graphics : 1/2
content : 0/2
gameplay : 0/2
Presentation : 0/2
TOTAL : 2/10

Surfasaurus
concept : 1/2
graphics : 2/2
content : 2/2
gameplay : 1/2
Presentation : 2/2
TOTAL : 8/10

Fruity Quest
concept : 1/2
graphics : 0/2
content : 1/2
gameplay : 0/2
Presentation : 2/2
TOTAL : 4/10


I'm done playing the games at this point. Some nice entries overall. Here are all my scores together for convenience.

Successor's Legacy - 7/10
DragonChaser -4/10
Quodia -6/10
Grapnes 2: Kepnalcide -3/10
Sour City - 6/10
You Need a Hero -5/10
Labyrinthilium -7/10
Bale - 6/10
Dark Planet-2/10
Surfasaurus-8/10
Fruity Quest-4/10

Thanks for the votes, Spoonweaver.

I noticed Successor's Legacy isn't on your list. Are you abstaining from that one?

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Place Obligatory Signature Here

Time for some quick 'n' dirty reviews

The Successor's Legacy (Demo)
This one initially turned me off after the clumsiness of the intro (Took the wrong path at the beginning, not really knowing the starting weapon) and the fact that all I could do was hold control, but after getting the Mayor the game opened up and was very enjoyable. The towns and areas each had their own unique look. However, I had a bit of problems realizing you could dive in the water, and I think there needs to be some kind of indication which berry plants I could pick berries from. But overall it was a good experience.
8/10

Dragon Chaser
This one has potential, but I was very turned off by the bafflingly slow battle speed and the music/sound. There was a lot to explore and worldbuilding, but I wish there was at least a short intro to introduce us to the main character, the world, and the conflict of the game. I'm probably harder on this one than most of the other voters because I've played other Dragon Quest inspired games that were better and had their own unique identity. Also, like Feenicks said, the town layout was a bit wonky.
3/10

Quodia
It was colorful and cute. However, the battle system was slow and the system messages covered up the battle sprites. (I'd suggest putting black space on the bottom of the backdrops so you can move the sprites further up above the message area) There are some little things here and there that could use some attention, like those random tiny houses, the backdrop in the mudcave being grass and not mud, using a burger as a weapon, and the kid/dog being able to be fruitlessly renamed (the game still refers to them by their default names). Good potential here. I'd enjoy playing a more finished version of this in the future.
6/10

Grapnes 2
This game needs some work done. I appreciate the game having an intro that set up the story, however I wasn't sure what Squarey Gary is accomplishing by wandering around this continent. It's the same problem my game had, directionlessness. The random encounters seemed to run out while I was on the mountain, which was troublesome because I needed exp/money to beat the bosses, and the bird guy wouldn't let me back onto the world map. Between that and their uselessness in battle I wanted to turn them into fried chicken. The color mechanic was fine, I had no problem with it. I was worried initially because berries were very expensive, but on the mountains they were plentiful as could be.
4/10


I'll likely have the rest of them tomorrow or Tuesday.

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the quirky recurring villian of the ohr community

Guess I missed Successor's Legacy. Whoops
I'll try to get to it soon

Not having played You Need a Hero or Surfasaurus yet, it's my favorite of the contest thus far.

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Remeber: God made you special and he loves you very much. Bye!

You know, I was getting overwhelmed with how many games there are here, but I decided it’d be pretty darn lame of me to not vote. I recognize the effort put in by all of the designers in this contest, and I have to say how impressive the turnout is this year. There’s a lot of great stuff in this HotOHR batch, so I just want to give a general congratulations to everyone who took part this year. You certainly did more than I did, which is nothing.

Successor’s Legacy
I got stuck in a room in the second dungeon area and couldn’t figure out where to go. Aside from that, I found that this title has a lot of heart, and I’d love to see further iterations of it. The only places it truly lacks is balance and polish, and that is a good sign.
The art style is simplistic but has character. Although there are areas that could certainly do with graphical improvement, I didn’t find the graphics ever turning me off from the game as a whole.
At one point, you, Mammothstuds, mentioned dropping this project in favor of another. I’d like to encourage you again to continue on Successor’s Legacy, if possible. If you are worried about the game and its story being “salvageable,” I do not see any reason this game couldn’t be a great finished product. There’s something to be said for how much genuine fun I had playing it.
Score: 7/10

Dragon Chaser
This game has a lot to explore and nothing to find. Plenty of big maps and branching paths, often with nothing at the end of them. I found a treasure chest once. It had some gold in it. It was disappointing. From the outset, there is little to no direction. I struggled on where to go to progress in the game.
I like some of the art, but some areas have trouble distinguishing wall and floor. Often stone walls and floors were the same color of gray. This made it difficult to tell where the player can walk.
Dragon Chaser is clearly reminiscent of Dragon Warrior/Quest. I like those games, so I appreciate the aesthetic of Dragon Chaser as well. The battles take frustratingly long. The speed stats need to be increased, or the battles need to be turn based.
The music is a bit all over the place. The overworld theme was the most catchy. Sometimes town themes had rhythms that were impossible to follow. The battle theme was not compelling.
Score: 3/10

Quodia
As usual, Froginator provided fantastic artwork in his entry. It’s all very clean and full of life. However, there are some issues with tile alignment. It can be difficult at times to tell where the walls are. I believe this game wants to have pixel-based movement. It does not function well on a grid. That being said, perhaps the artwork and gameplay should be molded around the grid-based mechanic more consistently.
I have noticed this game begins to fall apart in the dark cave area. The jumping platforms have 1. sent me into an infinite loop, making me stuck on an island and 2. thrown me out of the walls so that I was walking around on nothing. Bugs like these are a bit unacceptable in my eyes. Unless these events are intended, in which case, that’s mean.
The mud areas are cool, but sometimes it’s too much. It ends up just making me reluctant to explore because it takes so long to walk along it. I get that the idea is to make it more difficult to run from enemies, but at least make the area smaller or give some dry spots.
I appreciate the writing. It’s comedic and often done well, however a completely silly and fun storyline leaves the player without any direction or sense of purpose. I personally feel no reason to continue playing this game. It hasn’t given me any.
EDIT: I forgot to mention that the battle captions block out the hero sprites. Just move the hero sprites up a few pixels, man.
Score: 5/10

Grapnes II: Kepnalcide
The random enemies are faster than me and I have one attack. I shouldn’t have to turn off battles just to play the game. Either balance it or just don’t have random encounters. It’s a ridiculous time suck to go back to an inn every time there’s a battle unless I happen to level up. Even then, the only stat that increases is HP.
Sorry, but this is unplayable.
Score: 2/10

Sour City
The mini games definitely drove this game forward. The only huge drawback in Sour City was the RPG battle system. The fights took too long and there were hardly enough resources to make it through comfortably. If the battles were removed and the game was left as the mini games connected by some exploration and dialogue, it would be much more fast paced (mirroring the lightning fast mini games) and compelling to play.
The graphics and story content are a bit sketchy, but they are easy to follow, for the most part. Clarity over quality, I suppose. In all honesty, Sour City was not my favorite game I’ve ever played, but I was at least curious to see where it was going, and that says a lot.
Score: 5/10

You Need a Hero
Pretty classic OHR style RPG. Depending on the audience, that could be a great or a terrible thing. I have no issue with it, and besides, I’m trying to be unbiased here. I have to say I was actually really driven by the game as a whole. There were characters and those characters had some sense of development. I find that pivotal in the creation of every story, games included. On top of that, the towns had just enough in them to make them feel worth exploring. I found it interesting to walk into every shop and see what they had to sell and what I could get out of it. What’s more, the other party members would take a seat and have something fun to say. I found that to be a great example of how to do character development right. Have it there, but not shoved down the player’s throat, and have it be organic. I like to see how characters respond to everyday stimuli. Huge plus for me.
The artwork was tolerable. I didn’t have any problems understanding what anything was, but I wasn’t amazed by the graphics either. At the very least, they had a consistency to them. It all felt like it belonged in the game, nothing felt like it was too detailed or too crude for the game as a whole. I can appreciate that.
One complaint I have is with the length of some portions. The community college segment felt like a huge building with confusing turns and rooms. I ended up having to back track all the way out of the school to heal up and get supplies, and it took long enough that I had to take a break from the game. Other than that, I can’t recall having any huge issues with that.
All in all, I liked it.
Score: 8/10

Labyrinthilium
Weird name, phenomenal graphics, great gameplay, and an intriguing story. The music also fit perfectly. I had strange flashbacks to the Harry Potter RPG for the GameBoy Color for some reason… Just to be clear, that’s a good thing, I loved that game’s music. Anyway, it’s gotta be said that the polish on Labyrinthilium is simply impeccable. Feenicks truly went above and beyond in that area. I actually sat down and played this demo from beginning to end without breaks. I really wanted to finish it.
My complaints are few, but I would have liked to see more diversity and reward for exploration. I understand the dead ends being punishment, but at a certain point, finding nothing was a bit demotivating. That being said, I can’t imagine you had enough time to make every nook and cranny of the labyrinths perfect and fun. Looking at the rest of it, every map, enemy roster, and shop layout and inventory had wonderful balance to them. Time was put into the levels of this game, that made itself obvious.
I liked the character design. I enjoyed playing as a demon, especially a high class one.
The battle system was interesting. At first I hated not being able to target specific enemies, but I got the hang of it and it ended up adding way more thought and strategy into the RPG battle system. The after battle xp gain screen actually helped me a lot with being aware of my characters’ stats and growth. Thought that was a great addition.
Score: 9/10

Bale
Fantastic world building and aesthetic, including visuals, audio, and storytelling. This game is a beautiful experience. I’m looking at this tree right now, and I’m just thinking, “damn, that is a nice tree.” All of the sprites, maptiles, and animations look crisp and satisfying, especially the battle animations. The animation where he swings his sword is great. I actually tend to just spam sword attacks so I can see the animation.
There is a good sum of reading in Bale. This isn’t a bad thing, per say. I think it may turn many people off from the game, but I’d say those people are just missing out. The reading isn’t superfluous. There’s real content here, a real, fleshed out universe that gets the attention it deserves. As a player, all of this content makes it worthwhile when you reach the end of a corridor and instead of an item, you find a shelf with books about botany. Not only does this make up for that lack of a treasure chest, it turns out it’s even better. It’s not just an item. You’re exploring this god forsaken building to learn about its roots, and that’s far more valuable.
I have to say I wasn’t a fan of the combat at first. The enemies were tough to avoid and tough to fight, and on top of that, there’s only one spell and one attack to use. However, once the pocket Lint is introduced, (sorry, I had to, his name is Lint and he’s small.) combat really opens up and I felt that, not only did I have choices, but the choices I made mattered.
The more I play of this game, the more I like it. I’d give this a high recommendation to anyone I know. I’ll wait to make sure it’s ‘ready’ first, though.
Score: 9/10

Dark Planet
Not much here. The graphics look cool. Looks like there’s a good universe to be worked in, but this really isn’t a game. I’ll gladly play it when the demo has more game to it, but for the time being, I really can’t give this a real score.
Score: 1/10

I will get to Surfasaurus later. It’s midnight, and not much is open, so I’ll have to spend more time to see what this game is all about. So far, it looks great!

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My pronouns are they/them
Ps. I love my wife

Labyrinthilium
Graphics were incredible, as par for Feenicks' games. The spell system should have been explained, but it added a great risk/reward system to the game. Do I overwrite my water spell to get this cool healing spell? It makes you think. The game is balanced very well, the difficulty curve isn't wacked out anywhere and healing springs and stores were placed well throughout the dungeon. Playing as a demon was pretty cool, it's a nice change of pace. A superb game.
9/10

Surfasaurus
Remember Surfs Up Yuk? It's back, and wearing an animal crossing costume. The surfing mechanic is still the same puzzle based judge impressing fare you're familiar with if you played Yuk. Unlike Yuk, you have to unlock most of the moves, and not being able to shred on a board right away was kind of offputting. The time based events work well with the mobile format, much more than the PC. I think this game isn't everybody's cup of tea, but if you're into games you can just pick up and have a relaxing play session with, it fits. It's very colorful, a lot of time was put into making each npc look unique. I don't think it was really my thing, but it was a unique concept, well made and I respect that.
7/10

Bale
This one has a LOT of potential. I was kind of put off by the infodumping at first, but I actually appreciate the optional nature of it, instead of me being railroaded into reading a bunch of stuff when I just want to play the game. If anything makes me sour, it's big unskippable infodumps before I can get to the actual game. Graphics are awesome and come together to create an amazing atmosphere. Battles were boring, little snake buddy helped a bit but overall they weren't very fun. There should have been more variety in enemies as well, fighting the same monster, and a version of it with hair got kind of old. This game has a lot of potential though.
6/10

Dark Planet
I guess there's a nice menu, and the game looks fine. But there's nothing really here.
2/10

Sour City
The title is Sour City, but this game didn't leave me feeling sour. While people's mileage may vary with the whole adult cartoon/stoner humor sort of setting and dirty jokes, I really enjoyed them. The minigames were fun, and were the highlight of the game. I also liked exploring the city, although I couldn't remember where George lived in it. The battle system is unfortunately quite slow, and it relies a lot on finite resources. A resource based battle system can work, but those resources are very scarce. I literally only found a single bottle of beer the entire game. There's some bugs here and there which need to be ironed out too, but good show so far.
7/10

Fruity Quest
(Someone else rated it so might as well do it too.) This shit is wack, like hella wack. Might be fun if you want to remember being a middle school kid in 2007, though. Heck, I'm going to guess this game was actually made in 2007 and the dev didn't post it until 2016.
1/10

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the quirky recurring villian of the ohr community

Just a note guys, the developer of Fruity Quest never got back to me, and based on the ratings (and my own playthrough of it), it's plain to see that Fruity Quest isn't going to win anything, so I'm not likely to put it on the scoreboard. I really only listed it for those who are completionists and want to play through all of the RPGs released during the Heart 2016 window. But I doubt the author even knows about the Heart of the OHR, and like most people say, the game was probably something the author found on his hard drive and decided to dump into the world. It's fine if you guys want to keep rating it, but I'm not going to myself. That said, I will put it on the scoreboard if it gets at least 2/3rds the votes that the most voted-on game gets. But I will not be giving it the benefit of the averages system, so if it receives fewer than 2/3rds the votes, I'll be leaving it out of the running.

Though, for commemoration sake, I'll still mention it as an unofficial, unranked RPG that appeared during the Heart window, for the archives. But please don't feel obligated to vote for it. It's unofficial. Rate it only if you want to.

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Place Obligatory Signature Here

Fruity Quest : 11/10

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vvight.wordpress.com

How much time do we have to vote? Too tired to fish through the thread to try and find it. I'm sorry!

Until the 30th, if I'm not mistaken. Learning that made me willing to do it, for some reason.

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My pronouns are they/them
Ps. I love my wife