Rating of
1/5
Imagine if ‘Final Fantasy 4’ Sucked…
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/30/13
In the spring of 2012, a large number of Indie developers banded together to offer their games at steep discounts. This event was called “Because We May,” and was an ideological movement pushing back against the increasingly overbearing big publishers that have come to dominate gaming in the 7th Generation. During the “Because We May” event, I learned about a lot of games I’d never heard of before, not even in passing. One of these games was “Monster RPG 2,” a non-sequel to the prototype “Monster RPG” which was never actually released as a finished product, thus making “Monster RPG 2” more like “Monster RPG v2.0.” How could one go wrong with an old-school, 2D, sprite-based, turn-based RPG for 99 cents? Well, a year later, this game finally floated to the surface of my backlog, and I discovered that, indeed wrongness has happened here. In the intervening time between my purchase of “Monster RPG 2” and getting around to playing it, a new version was released (this review is for version 1.10, not 2.1, as I didn’t discover the update until I was over half-way through the game and didn’t want to risk losing save compatibility), but even more telling, the developer, Nooskewl, has started giving the game away for free on a huge number of operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and iOS. Yet, even with the increased visibility of “Monster RPG 2” through channels such as the Apple App Store, the game just doesn’t generate much buzz… because there’s nothing here that’s worthy of attention.
Presentation
I love a good old-school, 16-bit-style, sprite-based game. Those graphics from the 4th Generation have aged extremely well compared to early polygonal engines. Unfortunately, “Monster RPG 2” doesn’t really fall into the 16-bit classical style, but is kind of an odd hybrid of 8-bit and 16-bit graphics for the majority of the game. Each environment, be it a town or a dungeon, is composed of sprite tiles that look passable, but not spectacular. Each character takes up a single tile of space and has one frame of animation, which usually just involves flipping the sprite horizontally to simulate a walking animation. In battles, instead of using the crisp, but minimally-animated sprites from the explorable maps, the game uses larger, incredibly-muddy looking sprites. While the battle sprites have much more impressive animation than the exploration sprites, they are so overwrought that they look terrible. One of the worst aspects of “Monster RPG 2’s” graphics is that the game has no overworld. Instead, the player is simply shown a blurry, sepia-tone map with a few tiles to represent explorable areas. The tiles are connected by one-pixel-wide lines that serve as the paths between them. Perhaps the worst aspect of “Monster RPG 2’s” graphics is the two occasions in which the game decides to throw-in some polygonal graphics just to show how amazing they are… yet the results actually manage to look worse than every N64 game ever, with minimal animation of solid-colored polygons and a few overly-stretched, blurry textures on background elements. If the artists who made this game couldn’t get the sprites to look great, I don’t know why they thought they could handle polygons!
The sound in “Monster RPG 2” is, thankfully, better than the graphics. The soundtrack is mostly pretty good, with a few clunker tracks. Of course, ‘mostly pretty good’ doesn’t qualify as ‘memorable.’ The sound effects in the game are a mixed bag, with the effects for spells and other happenings in battle being solid, but the effects for something as simple as opening a door on an explorable map sounding like something from a 2nd Generation game.
Story
Imagine a world in which the story for “Final Fantasy 4” was re-written and localized by the kid who wrote “Half-Life: Full Life Consequences.” That horrifying hypothetical is pretty much exactly what “Monster RPG 2” is. The writing is stiff, terse, and minimal, while the ‘plot,’ such as it is, hits upon a lot of the same points as “Final Fantasy 4,” including party members such as an elderly magician reminiscent of Tellah, an engineer reminiscent of Cid, an alien reminiscent of FuSoYa (if FuSoYa was an elephant…), an ally being mind-controlled into performing evil deeds, and an obligatory trip to the moon.
Yet none of this story is really fleshed-out or tied together in any meaningful way. The narrative begins with the main character, a girl named Eny, and her friend (?), a black guy named Tiggy (and thus the game immediately runs around screaming, “LOOK AT THE DIVERSITY IN MY CAST!”) out picking mushrooms. Tiggy finds a magical staff lying among some trees and picks it up, only to be mind-controlled into summoning goblins and destroying a nearby town (presumably Eny’s and Tiggy’s hometown). Eny then travels the world seeking a way to free her friend from the power of the staff. She is joined by a revolving-door of allies who mostly have no good reason to team-up with her and have personalities and backgrounds so paper-thin as to be completely one-dimensional. Each location throughout the journey seems like a series on non-sequitur destinations just for the sake of making some stuff happen. While the entire game can be finished in less than 8 hours, it felt like it took much longer than that due to how boring and awful the story, characters, and everything else about the game world are.
Gameplay
“Monster RPG 2” has the basis of a competent turn-based battle system. Unfortunately, the structure built upon this solid foundation is a rickety and ramshackle disaster… and is also incredibly boring. Each character has largely the same commands available in battle: Fight, Item, Defend, or Run (characters can also change rows in battle, just like in “Final Fantasy 4”). Most of the characters have the ability to use Magic as well, with some characters specializing in black magic (like Tiggy, who presumably uses black magic because he is black…), some specializing in white magic, and one capable of using both. Eny, the heroine, unfortunately, can’t use any magic… nor does she, or any other character, have any other kind of special ability that can be used in battle. Thus battles are overly simplified and boil down to characters using the default Fight command every turn unless fighting a boss (during which black magic comes in handy) or when healing (which happens all the damn time).
The battles in “Monster RPG 2” are incredibly tedious, as the enemies typically have far too many hit points to kill them quickly, thus every random battle drags-out out for far more turns than necessary. Some of the boss battles are clever and require strategic use of certain characters’ magic, but most just involve beating on a big creature with a hidden health meter (normal enemies have visible health meters) and healing until one side dies. Of course, the game features a plethora of disposable healing items, including Cure potions to restore health and Elixirs to restore magic, thus ensuring that every battle of attrition will end up in the player’s favor.
The worst aspect of “Monster RPG 2’s” gameplay, however, is the way stats and leveling work, which undermines the rest of the game at a fundamental level. At each level-up, the player is given a number of points and can assign them to the character’s stats in any way. This can lead players who don’t understand how RPGs work to completely screwing themselves with character building (and there is no way to redo stat distribution once it’s done). Of course, since characters leave the party permanently all the time, the player won’t have to deal with a borked ally for long… however, all new characters that join the party have far more points dumped into their stats than should be available to them at their level. While there are some side quests that provide bonus stat points to the entire party, by the end of the game the power disparity between Eny, who is the only character who stays in the party for the entire game, and the last character to join is huge and obvious. Even worse, most of the bonus stat points must be earned by playing one of the handful of awful mini-games that are scattered throughout “Monster RPG 2,” and, of course, the enemies are balanced in such a way that those bonus stats are expected, and not really a ‘bonus’ at all. The screwy stat system isn’t just limited to character leveling, however. Each black magic spell comes in three power levels, and shortly after gaining the next in the sequence, the previous one becomes worthless, dealing 1 point of damage to everything. By the end of the game, the 1st and 2nd levels of black magic only deal 1 damage whether cast by a character or an enemy, while the 3rd level is still useful when cast by players and acts as a one-hit kill when cast by enemies. Finally, equipment seems far more important than character levels, as the game loves to force the characters to struggle through an area filled with tough random encounters only to have a shop available immediately after that area with equipment that boosts damage and defense so much that the difficult enemies that were just mauling the party are reduced to dealing 1 damage and dying in 3 hits instead of 7.
Overall
“Monster RPG 2” is a miserable excuse for an old-school RPG. Between the questionable graphics, grade-school level storytelling, and fundamentally broken RPG mechanics, the game literally has no redeeming qualities. I don’t care how desperate someone might be for an old-school RPG: This is NOT the game to scratch that itch, even for free.
Presentation: 2/5
Story: 0.5/5
Gameplay: 1/5
Overall (not an average): 1/5
