Review for Blackeagle

[TheLordThyGod]

Blackeagle is an OHR RPG released in 2016 by MorpheusKitami. The creator describes it as “a surrealistic JRPG set in a world where all political attack ads are true.” That sounds close enough.

The story starts with a vaguely defined group of burqa-wearing – secret service agents? soldiers? –chatting amongst themselves as an assassination attempt is made against President Christ, who I guess the soldiers were supposed to be protecting (who can say without consulting the README?). This somehow leads to a battle with a group of bellboys, which then in turn somehow leads to another battle with a character named Cardinal (whose significance I still don’t understand). Then suddenly the player has been transported elsewhere, all of the original soldiers except the quasi-titular Eagle are gone, and Cardinal has not only joined the party, but is also rambling about magic and time travel and Mexico. These two motivation-free characters agree to team up to – I don’t know, enact random violence? From there, the player is left to wander aimlessly in search of whatever else the game has to offer (all I found was a new unexplained party member with exaggerated breasts, plus some AIDS jokes).

Blackeagle plays at satire – Eagle wears a burqa; Christ is president (or the president is Christ?), characters namedrop Hitler, Stalin, Marx, and other political figures; and there are references to “America the sick” and Mexico (a.k.a. “Slaveland”) that are not further elaborated on - but any social commentary to be found in the game is undercut by the purely superficial nature of its references and the potty-mouthed lolrandomness of its humor. The game may contain a lot of throwaway gags about socio-political issues, but it seems to have precious little to actually say about any of them. Perhaps that’s where the “surrealism” comes in. Or was that the multiple AIDS jokes? The entire affair has the aura of an adolescent joke informed by South Park or, more precisely, Team America: World Police. It’s actually not too different from the kinds of things my friends and I made as teenagers. In all honesty, it’s not too different from some things I make now.

Blackeagle is a difficult work to examine. Everything about the game is willfully ramshackle - the slanted text of its title screen, the dissonant MIDI score, the dub-siren sound effects, the crude (and aggressively yellow) art, the Liefeld-esque cutscene pinups (digital doodles and scribbles left in), the typo-laden text, the incomprehensible narrative, the sketchy characters, the names/descriptions of items/attacks that communicate literally nothing about their uses, and the seemingly convoluted (but actually just opaque) combat.

About that combat… On my first attempted playthrough, the opening battle with Samson and his bellboys was long and drawn out – I tried every poorly defined attack available, doing very little damage as my characters gradually died out. On my second playthrough I defeated this entire group with a single grenade, which resulted in my characters all gaining two levels at once. From then on, I relied strictly on the only two or three attacks I was sure would do significant damage to enemies. After my third battle (and first random encounter!) my party was at level 12. Having finally being cut loose to explore, I quickly ran into a dead end in the path and couldn’t find anywhere else to go. After about 30 minutes poking around, stumbling into some dubious-passability zones, and fighting way more than enough random battles, I gave up on trying to figure out whether there was any game left to see. I was at level 18.

There’s definitely something fun about exploring Blackeagle. It’s mindlessly irreverent and anarchic in about every sense, and that’s unusual; but it isn’t just unsustainable, there’s nothing to sustain – the characters are never defined enough to root for, and the plot is falling apart before the game even has the chance to NOT explain it. But this is MorpheusKitami’s first game and, hey, my game sucks too. I’m curious to see what this creator’s next effort looks like, and whether they’ll be able to reign in some of Blackeagle’s scatter-brained tendencies. Until then… F.T.A.B.