I will review your RPGM1 games.

[Czechs Mex]

Re: I will review your RPGM1 games.

ITS IRRELEVANT.

It's all Greek to me.

Edit:

Okay, I'm FINALLY done with the review. Christ, I feel like I just wrote a term paper. I think I need to work on being more concise. Well, there you go, Hedrum. Whether you like your final score or not, I hope this gives you some good feedback about what you've done well, as well as some possible areas for improvement.

Also, I make no claims to be a pro at this writing stuff, so if anyone has any suggestions/complaints/whatever about the review, I'd be happy to consider your input.

[Czechs Mex]

Re: I will review your RPGM1 games.

Game: Patrick's Journey
Creator: Hedrum

Summary
Story: 3.5/10
Presentation: 7.5/10
Gameplay: 7/10
Overall: 7/10
What worked: party changing system, polished presentation, puzzles that rule
What didn’t work: a phenomenally boring story, puzzles that suck

What happens when you mix vomit and chocolate? Patrick’s Journey, Hedrum’s first endeavor into RPG Maker, takes you on such a roller coaster of stomach conditions, ranging from fully satisfied to nauseous to puking on your controller. However, even with its negatives, Patrick’s Journey exceeds all expectations for a first RPG, and could even teach a surly RPG Maker vet a thing or two about game creation. The details of the journey are broken down below.

Story 3.5/10

Let me give you the gist of it: a group of high school kids notice an unpopular girl at school has been fiddling around with witchcraft. It turns out that the girl’s actually being controlled by an evil lord, and the kids now must find the four magical artifacts that will put a stop to said lord.

As you can probably infer from the quick synopsis, this isn’t exactly epic storytelling. I did enjoy the modern setting, and the dialogue, for the most part, was fairly natural. However, unless you’re a master of your craft, basing your story off an “evil” anything is usually grounds for disaster. It just makes things too cut and dry. I like playing games where you can sympathize with the antagonist – he needs to have some kind of motivation for doing things other than just being inherently evil. In Patrick’s Quest, you probably won’t have a very strong attachment to the evil lord unless you’re generically evil yourself. The main characters are also quite underdeveloped and bland. While there were some notable exceptions, most of the personalities I came across were difficult to differentiate between and even slightly obnoxious. My favorite character ended up being the one that did the least amount of talking.

As the game goes on, the plot eventually does get slightly deeper, but it’s still essentially the same uninspiring stuff from beginning to end. Besides, by the time I actually did reach the end, the story had become so convoluted with inside jokes that I really wasn’t sure what was going on anymore.

I’m not going to lament on this any further, because clearly the story is not the reason you’d want to play this game.

[temporarily removed screenshots]

Presentation 7.5/10

Fortunately, things look up from here. Considering this is Hedrum’s first game, I found the presentation to be quite impressive. The towns and dungeons were by no means beautiful, but they were well-planned and varied. A huge amount of sample dungeons were used in this game, but other than a few unforgivable moments such as a forest maze, they really didn’t detract from the look or feel of the game.

In addition to the decent graphical look, I was very impressed with some of the cut scenes. In one example, a character takes the party around and tells them a story of recent events. The actual scene is recreated at the same time, as if the two timeframes have been superimposed onto one another. It’s a neat little trick.

But my favorite part about Patrick’s presentation? It’s completely bug free, a rarity in RPG Maker games. Okay, there’s actually a couple minor spelling errors, but unless you’re Mora or Big Rick Cook, it won’t bother you in the slightest.

Overall, from a programming standpoint, Patrick’s Journey is probably one of the more polished RPG Maker games I’ve played to date.

[temporarily removed screenshots]

Gameplay 7/10

There were a couple features in this game that really got me excited. First of all, the character changing system is impressive. There are seven characters you have control of throughout the game, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. It’s up to you to determine which group of characters you want to use in which situation. Every character is well balanced, and every combination of characters is useful in one way or another. At some points in the story, the characters break off into separate groups, and you control each of the groups individually. It makes the game less monotonous, to say the least.

Another aspect of the gameplay I’m particularly fond of is the puzzles. All the typical stuff was there – your block pushing puzzle, the sliding on ice puzzle, flipping switches in the correct order, etc. What I was more impressed with, however, were the timing based puzzles. There were some cases where you had to race to a certain spot to avoid getting eaten by a sand trap, and another where you had to avoid a bunch of charging hotties before they cornered and smothered you. These things are relatively untouched in the RPG Maker world, and it’s great to see Hedrum coming up with some new ideas.

However, as good as some of the puzzles are, there’s one piece of advice I need to give:

DO NOT MAKE INVISIBLE EVENTS THAT SCREW THE PLAYER OVER, YOU SADIST.

There’s no reason for them. It just ups the difficulty to level stupid, and tears the control out of the player’s hands. Really, there’s nothing more aggravating than trial and error when all you can learn from your previous mistake is not to do exactly what you just did. The same goes for mazes. If you insist on having a maze in your game, for the love of Mohammad, turn off the freaking random battles. There were a couple other annoyances, too, such as NPC’s blocking my path when I’m trying to leave a room, as well as computer controlled characters using all my expensive weapons as items during battle.

So that’s the reason why the gameplay score wasn’t higher. It had its good points, but there were too many times when the frustration level went through the roof.

[temporarily removed screenshots]

Overall 7/10

This game has such a huge disparity between its good and bad moments that it’s tough to come up with an overall score. Even taking into account the three categories above, there were still a couple things that didn’t sit well with me. First, just about EVERY non-playable character has a name. Why? It gets pretty confusing, because you have no idea who’s important and who’s not. I’m guessing the reason for the excessive naming was that Hedrum wanted to throw every last person he knew into his adventure. And that was another problem. There were just too many references to the creator’s personal life. Inside jokes just aren’t as funny when you’re on the outside.

A simple suggestion to the reader: play Patrick’s Journey for an hour. That’s just enough time to absorb the quality presentation, the sweet party-changing system, and a unique puzzle or two. If you want to continue on after that, go right ahead. But be warned – this game is LONG. And sometimes frustrating. And the story makes you feel like a baby with a turd in its pants – you know you’re waddling around in sh*t, but you really just don’t care.

However, if you’re willing to pick your way through the crap, there’s some serious golden peanuts to be found. Patrick’s Journey is consistently well-presented and sometimes humorous, but occasionally, you’ll even be surprised with a unique puzzle that’s never been done in RPG Maker before. For this reason alone, I feel that Hedrum has made a respectable contribution to the RPG Maker community.

[Hedrum]

Re: I will review your RPGM1 games.

Story. Yeah. Extremely LAME. At least it's the best I could do for my friends.

[ErikaFuzzbottom]

Re: I will review your RPGM1 games.

Is there any way you can not put those pictures in a row like that? It's skrewing up your post.

[Czechs Mex]

Re: I will review your RPGM1 games.

yeah, i just removed them. how was it screwing up the post? forcing you to use the horizontal bar or what?

i wasn't having any problems, but maybe i just have a higher resolution than others. I'll try making the pics smaller if that would help.

And draygone, if you have any suggestions or complaints as far as the actual review goes, let me know, because you're up next.

[ErikaFuzzbottom]

Re: I will review your RPGM1 games.

Yeah, I had to scroll from time to time. I'm running on 800 x 600 resolution. You don't really have to shrink them, you can just stack them top to bottom instead of side-by-side.

[MasterSlowPoke]

Re: I will review your RPGM1 games.

800x600?! Your poor eyes...

[Czechs Mex]

Re: I will review your RPGM1 games.

Alright, I'm going to be spending most my RPGM time this next week working on my contest game, and then I'm going to Italy for a week. But after that, I'll get some more reviews out. Sorry for the slowness.

[Hedrum]

Re: I will review your RPGM1 games.

Is there a place I can send them to?

Oops! Um. I'll be sure to send you my e-mail adress. I could really use those screen shots of the game.

[WilliamKirk]

Re: I will review your RPGM1 games.

SOunds pretty good, Hedrum.

[Czechs Mex]

Re: I will review your RPGM1 games.

Hedrum, the shots have been sent.

[Hedrum]

Re: I will review your RPGM1 games.

Yes, I've received them. I might be uploading them up on my site pretty soon. Who knows?

[Gustaff 13]

Re: I will review your RPGM1 games.

Czechs, are you gonna be doing anymore reviews this weekend? (hint hint)

[Czechs Mex]

Re: I will review your RPGM1 games.

My buddy is back from Iraq this week, so I probably won't be doing to much with RPG Maker, sorry. But I'll try and get two done next weekend, which would be your game and Draygone's.

[Czechs Mex]

Re: I will review your RPGM1 games.

Uh, draygone, are there some custom graphics missing from the download? i think the first three or so weren't found. I don't have a dex drive hooked up to actually check what's on the cards, so I'm not sure if the problem is with my emulator or with the download.