Sunday 20 March 2022

Giral (PC)


 This RPG Maker game (or, it at least uses tilesets from RPG, I don't know if it was actually made in the engine) drew me in with two promises on its DLSite page: combat in the style of the first two Ys games, where the dedicated attack buton is eschewed, and you strategically walk into enemies to defeat them, and a protagonist whose sprite and artwork changed when you changed their equipment.

 


Unfortunately, it doesn't really deliver on the first, and while it does deliver on the second, there isn't really a lot of equipment to see in the game (though, to be fair, it is a game that was clearly made on a tight budget, and the character art there is is really great). The problem is that it's not really an Ys-like action RPG at all, instead being a kind of endurance testing game.

 


Enemies attack you once when you touch them, then they die. And each kind of enemy will always deal the same amount of damage to you. So you've got to look at what enemies you can see ahead of you, and judge whether you've got enough HP to make it through them or not. It's really just a question of counting rather than strategy or skill. If you don't have enough HP, go back home and spend the money you got from killing enemies to increase your max HP (one hundred points for every thousand gold).

 


And that's it, really! The entire game is about an hour and a half long, and the final fifteen minutes will be made up of you grinding for enough money to get your max HP to 30100, since the final boss deals 30000 damage, and you need at least 100 left over to win the fight. There's not much more to say about it. The character artwork is nice, I got the game in a sale for next-to-nothing, and I guess it's a potentially interesting idea, that just needs some work to make it into more of an actual game. I hope the dev sticks with it, at least.

No comments:

Post a Comment