by Why the heck do I have so many RPG Maker games?
I… can’t even stomach this one enough to give it a proper review. I’ll just sum it up that playing this game is like walking into someone’s fanfiction. The main character is a hot-headed mechanic who’s going to be married off against her will to some rich snob. There’s political turmoil in the form of racial oppression from a race of winged beings, of whom our hot-headed mechanic is self-righteously angry at all the time. In order to escape her fate, she steals the airship she was fixing and flies off into what could only be guessed at to be a generically dynamic series of events that one might describe as an adventure. Oh right, I should have mentioned that there are airships. Why Airships? Because… steampunk I guess. Honestly the airship wasn’t that important and I’ve never been a fan of them in fantasy games anyway.
There are some unique sounds and of what little I heard, the music is original but if you’re familiar with RPG Maker games you’ll hear plenty of recycled material. The art and sprites work the same way–it’s about 50% new and 50% reused. Inherently this is not bad, say if the game was actually interesting in either the mechanic or storyline aspects, but this is not the case. The mechanics seem average and as I’ve already mentioned a bit concerning the story–I feel like I’m reading the secret diary of a teenager’s fantasies. It’s not that there’s anything wrong a diary of this sort on it’s own, it’s just I’m not sure why I would want to play a game about it, let alone buy it (which apparently I did at some point).
Here’s one that popped up a lot that I just could not ignore. Why is there a midget knight? Well, it’s because our main character is a custom sprite that’s bigger than the generic RPG maker sprites. Our poor knight on the other hand is… you guessed it–a generic RPG Maker sprite. You’ll run into this a lot with the NPCs.
No EXP in combat means that the game likely focuses on story aspects and not so much on grinding. This is actually a mechanic I can get behind… but it’s the only one. It’s not that the combat is bad, but it’s generic and let’s face it, we’ve moved away from it for a reason–it’s too simplistic. There needs to be something more–something else appealing; this isn’t the 1990’s where a working combat system justified the making of an RPG. Nowadays, and RPG must justify the working combat system. Since all this game seems to offer is material that would appeal to a Twilight Fan, I’m relegating this to a Tier 3 position. It’s not at the bottom of Tier 3, but still undoubtedly belongs there because of one simple question: Why would you want to waste your time with this?
