RP
A Demo Review by Iblis
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Let's face it, an OHR user's first few games are never amazing. Sometimes they might have a neat premise or better than average graphics or the even more rare music which is both original and good, but typically these are not enough to save a beginning game designer and serve as little indication of their eventual success or failure. Nay, there is only one thing that can tell you whether a beginner's game has potential or not, and that is effort. If a game didn't have effort put into it then it probably never will, and if it did then with consistent application of that effort it can overcome any flaw it might have had. There was some definite effort put into "Rp," and while it is not perfect, it does have potential.

One of the first things you'll notice upon starting up the game is that it has a plotscripted intro sequence! You don't just start in the top-left corner of an empty map with a buggy step-on NPC intro, this game uses plotscripting! Aside from just being a good technique in general, it gives a really good first impression. Plotscripted dialogue scenes appear throughout the demo as well.

The graphics are mostly decent enough, not great, but even at their worst they're never shockingly bad. The hero sprites are the best of the graphics, they animate well and each look different from each other. The walkabouts weren't as good, because they all looked really similar. It can be really useful to have one basic walkabout model and use that to make all the others, but you have to change them enough that it doesn't look like 100 copies of the same person walking around. I think part of the problem was the proportions, they gave very little room for hair which is typically a big part of differentiating walkabouts.

The maptiles were pretty standard really, the grass and sand used a lot of airbrush which doesn't look good, but none of it was that bad. The bricks in the castle were too small and made the walls and floor look basically the same, but still only a minor problem. The worst of the graphics were, as usual, the backdrops. They had that splotchy look that says immediately to any long-time OHR user that they were made using the blur tool. Although backdrops are big and I know it's difficult, they should ideally be made using the same pixelling methods you use to make maptiles, because that's the only way they can fit in with the rest of the graphics. Similarly, the map for the airship was this 3D image that looks extremely out of place with the rest of the game, it would be much better if it was just made of regular maptiles. One positive thing can be said about the battle backdrops though: despite the fact that the first battles in the game take place on a beach, the game does not use sandsea.bmp at all!

The most notable feature of this demo so far is definitely the "Mechana" system. Mechana are magical crystals that you equip in order to give your characters spells (and some stat increases). This is a pretty impressive feat of plotscripting, to change the hero's skills based on their equipment. To make the system more interesting, you can also use a Mechana crystal on a character in order to teach them that skill permanently, but this consumes the crystal so you can't use it again. This could potentially be a really interesting skill system once you get a wider variety of crystals.

Unfortunately, the Mechana system doesn't amount to much yet. You never really need any magic in the demo, physical attacks are more than enough to win every battle (bosses included) and there are plentiful healing items if you need them. Pretty often the magic attacks weren't stronger than my physical attacks anyway, which is a big problem. This would be a really cool system if there was some strategy 1involved with who gets what crystal and which ones you use or equip, but at the moment it just doesn't matter yet. If magic attacks were more necessary, and if there were other types of spells available as well (stat-changing spells for example), it would be much improved.

The heroes also each have one special ability, which is a nice touch. Your first two heroes have improved attacks, one hitting every enemy and one hitting multiple times, and there's also a woman who can steal. The fourth hero's special attack didn't do anything for me, there must've been no attack in the menu because I couldn't even select it.

As I said earlier the battles were quite easy, and they were rather repetetive due to the fact that you only needed physical attacks. To make things worse, they were also very slow. The heroes and enemies all need their speed increased by several points.

For the most part the map design was fine, though the caves were a little mazey and the towns were kinda dull. The world map though, which you can see above, was just three boring blobs of land. Since they only contain enough land for the places you go in this demo, I can assume that the map will be added to later, but still, these aren't the most interesting continents you could make.

Speaking of the towns, although they were visually rather uninteresting I don't think I ever met a person who said "Hi!" and nothing else. Everyone actually had something to say. There was also a house in the first town that taught the player about the game, much like that house at the entrance to Narshe in FF6. This was a nice feature except that there were many wandering NPCs inside it and they kept blocking the exit!

I'm not sure how well I can judge the story so far. Not much of the overall plot has been revealed yet, there's a war going on and this mysterious crystal that was just dug up and there are a few evil plots but it hasn't developed much yet, and of course it's the beginning of the game so I wouldn't expect it to. There's plenty of time in the rest of the game for the plot to come together. The best part of the story is the fact that it's always clear what you have to do next. You're never just wandering to the next place because it's the only place you can go, there are always objectives and you're told clearly what to do. And again, the story is acted out in plotscripted scenes, which is nice. The bad part about the story so far is that characters join you for no real reason and your heroes don't have much of a reason to recruit them, as is all too common. In one case your heroes have a really good reason to NOT want someone in your party but you recruit them anyway. The easy way to fix this is to give these new characters a past that ties them into the main heroes' storyline, some reason that they should really want to help.

The game had no music, which made it a little less interesting of course but since it's just a demo it still has time to get some.

Since Mike W is new to Castleparadox people might suspect that he is a newbie, but this is definitely not a newbie game. It's not perfect by any means, but there are some really good ideas here and I hope "RP" matures into the excellent game that I know it can.