This review is part of the IGMC 2018 Secret Santa event.
Before we start, a little bit of context. I've personally never resonated with WRPG aesthetics, both in terms of game design and visual/presentation. Frankly, had I had not been assigned this game to review, I probably would not have tried this game. However, I'm very glad that I did, as The Last Journey delivered a solid and surprisingly long (in the context of a game jam) experience.
Visuals
The visual presentation for maps, characters (sprites & portraits), monsters, and cutscene stills are nothing short of excellent, and goes to demonstrate the advantages of the graphic designer and game designer being the same person. If measured purely in this dimension, The Last Journey easily stands out from the rest of the competition. However, while the style is very distinct, it unfortunately also exacerbates the visual clash between PVGames and non-PVGames assets.
In particular, seeing the slightly modified RTP icons and default special effect animations alongside the aforementioned graphic assets creates a jarring experience. Overall, visual coherency could be improved drastically if a bit more time and work could be invested in these two aspects and bring them up to par with the other categories. A final small nitpick would be the lack of customization of system colors. While not a deal-breaker by any measure, the fact that a game with such high visual aspirations did not at least swap out the default blue system text, orange and light blue HP/MP bars screams a missed opportunity of a low-hanging fruit; especially considering that PVGames already made modifications to the PNG file in question in order to modify the window style/arrows. (It's right there, dude!)
Sounds
The music in the game is serviceable but not memorable. However, given that western games usually tend to have ambient/atmospheric music instead of melody-driven/memorable tracks, this may not be a bad thing to the target audience that the game is trying to appeal to. A positive highlight is the choice of using non-RTP sound effects. Customizing sound effects is an area often overlooked in most RPG Maker projects, and the fact that The Last Journey has them goes a long way in giving the game a distinct personality.
Story & Characters
Without spoiling the content, the story of The Last Journey is a neat little package that demonstrates clear narrative structure, and manages to cleanly wrap up most loose ends by the time it finishes telling its tale. It's not groundbreaking by any means, but it's also engaging to the point that the narrative doesn't detract or take away from the experience as a whole. Characters are a bit more generic, but given the relative large cast of around 10 characters given its length, the absence of character development is to be expected. In summary, The Last Journey is about telling a story THROUGH its characters, instead of telling a story ABOUT its characters.
Gameplay
Overall, gameplay is solid. On the exploration side, the maps and mini-puzzles are well-executed, and the use of popup icons to signal interactive elements helps the user experience. A small suggestion would be to increase the detection radius of the popup icon, having it display perhaps when the player is 2 tiles away instead of 1, as sometimes treasure chests blend into the environment a little too well.
Progression and customization systems are standard RPG fare involving leveling up, upgrading skills, and upgrading equipment either through shops or optional battles (that lead to treasure chests). It's standard, but it's standard because it works.
For battles, the buff/debuff bonus system is an original touch, and credit should be given to the attempt, but to say that it adds strategic depth is highly questionable. That is, even without the benefit of dealing more damage when more buffs are applied, players are already inclined to buff because buffs are a positive thing to begin with. The addition of the bonus system does not really change how a player would play. Hypothetically, if the system was (for whatever bizarre reason) designed to create DRAWBACKS to overbuffing allies and debuffing foes, THEN it would force real choices because players are now trading off mutually exclusive sets of pros and cons. The fact that most abilities (even normal attacks) of every character adds some sort of buff or debuff also doesn't help, because again, it doesn't add real choice. Battles strategy boils down to a singular "put as many buffs on allies, put as many debuffs on enemies" approach, with the characters' skills happily pushing the players along despite any potential objections or alternative approaches one might have.
Another slight issue is the cool-down nature of skills. Having a cool-down system to force players to make choices is great, but the lack of information on how many turns left in the cool-down is detrimental to the system as a whole. Especially since cool-downs persist across battles. Due to not having the cool-down turn information readily available, I consciously choose to NOT use skills at all because I didn't want to end up in a compromised situation if a boss or treasure chest encounter was waiting around the corner. If this information was presented somehow or if the cool-downs reset after each battle, it would have addressed this pain point a lot more.
In terms of difficulty, while I was aware that there are different difficulty modes, I didn't modify them in my play-through. There didn't seem to be any progression incentives to play the game on higher difficulty, and the implications of the strategic depth issue mentioned above unfortunately did little to motivate me to challenge myself for challenge's sake. Having said that, if higher difficulty modes involves more than just raising the stats and numbers on the enemy's side, then perhaps that should be better communicated to the player (along with rewards, if any).
Conclusions
While The Last Journey might not have reinvented the wheel or delivered anything groundbreaking, I'm fairly certain that that wasn't the point, so it's perfectly fine. As an orthodox WRPG (or at least leaning that way visually), it does what it sets out to do well, and is a very solidly executed game; especially considering the time constraints and the game jam context under which the game was made in. All in all, this was a job well done, and PVGames deserves praise for the smooth delivery of what the project set out to do. So if you're like me and have avoided WRPG-looking games, it might be worth your time and effort to give The Last Journey a try.
Misc. Notes
- Agility stat is explained to determine turn order, but given 1) there's no way to check during battle, 2) there's no way to know an enemy's Agility stat, this also seems to be something that in theory gives players something to think about, but in practice there's nothing players can really do.
- While it's nice to have status effect hover-overs after they've been applied, it would be a lot nicer if there was a way to surface that information in-game BEFORE having the status effect applied. (Yes, I know there's the Primer bundled with the game, but no, I'm not going to read it and have a doc open while I try to immerse myself in the game.)
- Speaking of Status Effects, there seems to be a few debuffs that had the same descriptions and the data wasn't put in?
- Super minor point: why does the King talk and look like a peasant? I'm not very knowledgeable of royalty speech patterns but would a King address his retainers with Sir?
Feel free to ask me for any clarifications!
Cheers,
hadecynn
