Ropetown RPG Review

[Harmill 5]

Game Name: Ropetown RPG

Creator: Ocedic

Download Link: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzqEGuFHynBORFlqZW41c0ROWlU/edit?pli=1

 

Introduction: Ropetown RPG is a game created by Ocedic and intended for his friends. It contains strong language and sexual themes. The story/dialog is not for the faint of heart. It also makes real life references abundantly, so I guess it's intended to take place on Earth. 

 

Story:

The story starts with a man named Rava trying to slay a beast living in a nearby forest. In the forest, he meets a pervert (and supposedly a pedophile) named Rhox who tries to cash in on the prize by helping Rava out. The prize is a membership to the Ropetown guild, and so the two of them travel there. Ropetown has been a victim of a serial killer, and the soldiers need help finding the culprit. The remainder of the story in the demo revolve around finding the serial killer so he can be brought to justice.

 

For game filled with "dumb" and vulgar humour, the story still manages to keep a subtle serious tone to it. While most characters are intended to say ridiculous things, a select few tend to be the voices that drive the plot forward, namely Rava and Elenya. While many may not like the style of humour that fills almost every inch of the game, there's still a valid plot going on that people may still appreciate. It's not a quest to find Chicken McNuggets or something dumb like that - it's a quest to apprehend a serial killer who's been targeting citizens of a town. It's a shame that the demo ends where it does, because it seemed like it was really picking up and heading into a decent balance of "stupid humour" and "serious". I don't think the main villain spewed any profanity or jokes during his lines and appeared to at least have a reason for his actions.

 

For those who DO enjoy random humour, or perverse humour, you may enjoy the world of Ropetown quite a bit. NPCs are not boring generics who only say one useless thing. Most of them will have something random and/or ridiculous to say that can provide many laughs. Many objects in the environment are can be interacted as well, promoting thorough exploring.

 

Another plus for the Story is that there are a few spots where the Player can make a choice. In one case, choosing one option over another allowed the Player to skip an entire dungeon. Another set of choices creating a branching path, where the Player would go to a different dungeon depending on the choice made. This is a very nice touch, and encourages replayability.

 

 

Gameplay: 

Ropetown's greatest strength lies in it's gameplay. It uses a classic turn-based battle system with Yanfly's system. All abilities/spells learned by the party members have a purpose and tend to have unique effects. Effects such as dealing more damage if hitting a target at full HP, or doing more damage the less HP the target has (like an Execute ability). On top of the uniqueness of the abilities, the game allows Players to collect different types of gems that can be "equipped" to spells. Equipping a gem to a spell will provide a new effect, such as adding some fire damage, or providing the spell with a chance to Stun or Poison.

 

Although the spells may be unique and have a purpose, there aren't equal opportunities to make use of each ability. Half of each character's abilities are not optimal for use in random battles and tend to be reserved for boss battles. You also learn all of your abilities fairly early on, so random battles become stale well before the demo ends. There are one or two spells per character that you'll want to use for random battles, and so you quickly use the same strategy for almost all fights. It would have been nice to learn a few more abilities, and design them to take away some of the attention from the crowd-clearing spells that are spammed in random battles (Fire at Will!!!).

 

The game doesn't feature random battles and instead uses the Touch Encounter system. These 'normal' battles were designed so that the Player can't spam attack to win them. Normal attacks don't do very much damage, and so spamming Attack would cause normal battles to take way too long to keep the Player interested in playing. While putting emphasis on using abilities and spells in battle is generally a good thing, it also means that players are going to be using up huge chunks of their MP pools for a single normal battle. Fire at Will costs a third of Rhox's max MP, and it's the best ability for him to use in normal battles 80% of the time (the other 20% is using Mortal Shot to execute an enemy below half HP). All this is doing is forcing the Player to stock up on several dozens of MP-restoring items so that you can forever spam your spells. And since the intent was to push the player away from spamming the 'Attack' command, battles are not very fun if you have no MP.

 

A really nice idea for dungeons was the placement of "motes". When the Player collects a Mote, it bestows an bonus to the party for a certain number of steps. One of these bonuses is a huge slash to your spell's MP costs. While the Mote is active, you are encouraged to capitalize on their effects by fighting as many battles as you can before it expires. This was a really cool idea, but unfortunately, they were one time use and, as far as I could tell, never respawned.

 

Moving away from spells, each party member has several equip slots for actual equipment. While I think there's too many different equip types, it does create potential for even more diversity in each player's "build". The different options for any given slot are different enough from each other, that the Player usually has to decide what he wants more for his party members. MP or HP regen? More ATK? An equip slot that I liked the idea of, but wasn't fully explored in the demo, was the ability to equip a Limit to a character. Limits are your typical super move that requires TP to use. The nice thing about them is that they don't use up the character's turn upon use. If this was explored further, Players could have a lot of fun exploring different Limit combinations with the party members. Buster Shot seemed a bit lackluster in damage though.

 

It didn't feel like character's had much distinction in their roles. I rarely healed during battles, but if I had to, two of the three party members could heal. Without needing to heal, all three party members were always just trying to deal as much damage as possible. You never really had to make the choice of using a less damaging spell that would have a more supportive effect because those types of properties could be added to your strongest damaging spells through the gem system. I placed the gem that gave a ~35% chance to stun to Fire at Will. The only time I never wanted to use that ability was during a Boss fight. Characters have very similar defensive stats, so your only real sense of a 'tank' came from whoever had the most HP.

 

Characters leveled up TOO slowly. It took ages to level up, and even bosses gave only 10% of the total needed experience for the next level. For a demo that lasted 6.5 hours, I was only Lv.9 at the end. On top of that, each level up didn't provide much of a boost in stats. It was hard to feel an increase in power based off leveling up.

 

Enemies are pretty well balanced for the most part. As long as you play the game as it was intended, enemies are not too difficult, but can still make the Player need to heal. They don't have very interesting abilities and a common trait was for every enemy from the halfway point onward have the potential to attack twice per turn. However, since the didn't have interesting abilities, the result was just them doing two normal attacks. Most/all enemies were weak to at least one element, but I didn't find myself needing to pay much attention to them. It seemed like every normal battle had 2+ enemies, so single-target spells always took a backseat. Since each party member only had one spell that could hit multiple enemies, elemental properties didn't play out as prominently as it could have.

 

Maps weren't anything special but they weren't bad either. There's not much to say about the "level design" of the game as it mostly featured paths littered with enemies running around and the occasional branch to get a treasure chest. A nice touch to the monster's map behaviour was that some enemies, like Bats would sit still on a wall and would only move to chase the Player when he moves close enough.

 

Some areas had puzzles, but rarely did they "fit" with the environment and felt forced upon the player for the sake of creating a puzzle. For instance, having to push crates onto switches when you're in a volcano. Nonetheless, the puzzles were generally well thought out though, and there were some that took several tries before I found the solution. I applaud the design for the crate-pushing puzzles.

 

There was a bug in one puzzle that impeded my progress in the game. The puzzle involved searching a for a combination of ingredients (out of 4 ingredients) and there were endless possibilities to guess from. When you attempted one combination, the game would give you one hint per attempt, such as "You have too much X in here". The idea was to use these hints to narrow down the ingredient amounts until you had the correct combination. Unfortunately, there was a bug where I was eventually always being given a hint that made no sense. It kept telling me I had too much of an ingredient in my combination when I had 0 of that ingredient in the combination...This bug made the puzzle impossible to progress and I wound up having to PM the creator for the answer.

 

Treasure chests contain random loot. One treasure chest will contain a few different items: some gold, a healing item, and a piece of equipment. I'm not a particular fan of random loot systems, but it does add to the replayability of the demo. I'm not too sure, but bosses might drop random loot as well.

 

Graphics/Audio:

The game uses standard RTP for the most part. However, there are a few enemies that are of a very different style and stand out like a sore thumb. Music is taken from different video games.

 

Overall:

Ropetown RPG was an engaging demo that was mostly designed very well. There are a lot of reasons given to the Player to play through the demo multiple times such as to try the different paths or to try different "builds". The dialog may not be everyone's cup of tea, there is at least a sensible plot marching through the ridiculous jokes. If you appreciate a more vulgar type of humour, you will most likely find yourself laughing (or at least chuckling) as the characters interact with each other.

 

The gameplay has a great intent, and is still quite a step up from the standard "mash Attack" affair that many RPG Maker games have. The abilities are interesting and unique; there just isn't enough of them and the opportunities to use each spell aren't balanced.

 

The game has a very solid base with a lot of potential and I would eagerly await an additional demo.

 

 

[Ocedic 249]

Always nice to see other reviewers here, hope you write more in the future.

 

Also interesting to see people try RT RPG. All of your criticisms are pretty spot on and I agree with them. I've since corrected a lot of them in my current project, although I noticed characters in my current project still level up quite slow. I guess I favor the Western mode of thought in which most of your strength comes from gear rather than levels, which is more of the JRPG style.

 

Anyway, nice review!