Rating of
3.5/5
Adjective Noun Verb Adverb!
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/10/16
“Adventurer Manager” (“AM”) is the first non-mobile game by Vigilant Addiction Studios, whose sole prior attempt, an iOS ‘game’ entitled “Gobbo,” failed to garner any significant attention from the app-buying public (and, indeed, no longer appears to be available on the Apple App Store). “AM” went through the official Steam Greenlight process and found its way into Steam Early Access for quite some time, as the development team added each layer of mechanics one at a time.
As a finished product, “AM” was originally priced at $12, but events surrounding a sea-change in the development team almost saw it reduced to a Free2Play title with a $2 DLC. The new dev team (still Vigilant Addiction, just different people at the studio) listened to player feedback and instead dropped the game’s retail price to $5 and left the DLC at $2. I, personally, snagged “AM” when it was on sale for peanuts, but did not grab the DLC, as its flavor doesn’t appeal to me.
Presentation
“AM” is one of those intentionally minimalist games with regard to its presentation. The visuals are all 2D sprites with big, blocky, crude pixels. The pixel art itself is rather simplistic, and nothing in the game features more than two frames of animation. That said, while the game isn’t impressive looking, it also isn’t a complete eyesore. Some might find nostalgic charm in the simplistic visuals, but I would have preferred something a little more artistic.
The audio is significantly better than the visuals. The soundtrack, which can be purchased as separate DLC, is full of pleasant, catchy tunes. The main world theme is particularly soothing, which is important in a game where the player will be fiddling with menus and sifting through loot for hours while listening to the same piece of music.
Technically, “AM” is not quite as solid as it should be. For a simple game with simple mechanics, there are a number of minor glitches. One glitch, involving a mandatory character death in the tutorial, got so screwed up in my game (because I didn’t use said character in my first dungeon outing) that I thought I’d be stuck with a Schrodinger’s Adventurer for the entire game, but it did eventually work itself out. Perhaps the worst technical aspect of “AM” is an intentional one: The game perpetually auto-saves after every single little thing, which essentially takes away the player’s ability to reset if a RNG result goes horribly wrong. I can’t stand it when games do this, but fortunately it is easy enough to work around “AM’s” ‘Dark Souls’-inspired compulsive saving by alt-tabbing out of the game and copying the current save file to another location whenever a ‘manual’ save point is desired.
Story
“AM” is a straight-up parody of generic High Fantasy themes. The story revolves around a new ruler who has awoken from a magical slumber to the realization that the entire kingdom has been taken over by an evil illusionist (and former royal adviser) named Miraj. All of the racial communities in the land – with the mind-blowingly creative names of Humania, Elfia, Halflingia, Giantia, Dwarfia, Gnomia, and Dark Elfia – need to be reunited in order to stave off the threats of Miraj and his army of monsters.
As the player advances from community to community, the local offer a handful of quests that they need assistance with (always with hilarious dialog that lampshades High Fantasy racial stereotypes). After dealing with 15 such quests, the player emerges victorious and is free to continue dabbling in open-ended adventuring or tackle the Endless Dungeon which is sold separately as a $2 DLC. It took me roughly 60 hours to tackle the core game, and, though my disdain for purely-procedural content prevents me from having any interest in the Endless Dungeon add-on, those inclined to such repetition can easily play forever.
Aside from the cheesy and amusing dialog and story quests, the rest of “AM’s” story content takes for form of Mad Libs. For those who are unfamiliar with Mad Libs, they were a series of super-short stories with many words blanked out. Mad Libs were sold as a party game, where one participant called for the various blanked out nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech, while the other participants supplied these words without knowing any of the story’s context. The results were typically hilarious and always rather stupid. Such is the way of the bulk of “AM’s” writing. Everything from character backstories to sidequest titles and descriptions to random decision-based encounters in dungeons employs a formulaic block of text with a significant portion of the keywords pulled from random word tables. Just like Mad Libs, the results are simultaneously hilarious and incredibly stupid, which gives “AM” a lot of distinct personality and a unique tone among Fantasy RPGs, which often take themselves a bit too seriously.
Gameplay
When I bought “AM,” I was hoping for an Indie spiritual successor to the fantastic Wii-exclusive RPG Sim, “Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King.” And it does seem that early on in “AM’s” Early Access phase, it was something of a hands-off experience just like what I wanted. However, at some point in “AM’s” prolonged development cycle, the game’s core mechanics were changed to be more hands-on.
The core gameplay in “AM” is basic turn-based RPG goodness. The player can hire up to 48 adventurers simultaneously (for free, even!). Up to four adventurers can adventure in the same party, and up to four parties can be active at once.
“AM” keeps track of time in a rather cumbersome and unintuitive way. As a turn-based game, time doesn’t flow if the player isn’t doing something to make it flow. Thus time stands still while equipping characters, leveling them up, sorting through the gobs and gobs of random loot they find, and so on. In order to make time move, the player needs to MANUALLY guide a chosen party of adventurers through a dungeon, with each enemy encounter causing the clock to tick forward one hour. All adventurers who have been sent on auto-adventure sidequests will do their thing unattended while the player works with their manual party. The game also features a Fast Forward button on the main map that can move time in the absence of manual adventuring, but also brings the risk of an unavoidable monster Invasion that will sack and loot one of the cities in the kingdom, thus preventing the player from entering that city for 2 days and decreasing the city’s Allegiance (which affects market prices in that city and the severity of the city’s racial drawback). Time also ages characters, who are all hired at age 18 and can die of old age starting at 57. In my time with the game, my oldest adventurers capped out at 32 years old, so worrying about characters dropping like flies should be far from players’ minds.
Normal Invasions pop-up randomly, and the player can manually guide a party of adventurers through them as a series of half-a-dozen level-scaled battles that end in a randomly selected boss. Fast Forward Invasions, however, don’t appear on the map and mainly serve as a penalty for using Fast Forward too much in lieu of grinding through a previously-cleared dungeon with a manually-guided adventuring party.
While manually guiding an adventuring party, the group’s Energy (used for special attacks) refills after every battle. However, adventurers also have a Stamina meter that decreases after every battle and only refills when time passes while a given adventurer is idle (i.e., not adventuring or auto-adventuring). If a character’s stamina dips below 300 (from a starting default of 1000), they begin to suffer crippling stat penalties, making them increasingly ineffective in combat until they’ve taken an appropriate rest.
Because Energy refills after every battle, “AM” is the same type of excellently strategic RPG as the latter two “Penny Arcade: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness” episodes. It also gives magic users and other classes with ridiculously potent attacks a significant advantage over other classes.
Character classes in “AM” exist in three tiers. When first starting out, each race only has access to one class. Humans are Warriors, Elves are Rangers, Halflings are Rogues, Giants are Barbarians, Dwarves are Paladins, Gnomes are Wizards, and Dark Elves are Clerics. Upon reaching Allegiance Tier 1 in a given city, basic tier classes – Warrior, Rogue, Cleric, and Wizard – become available for the city’s race. Tier 2 grants access to Barbarian, Paladin, Ranger, and Monk. Tier 3, likewise, grants access to Enchanter, Warlock, Shaman, Arbalester, and Death Knight. Figuring out the best race/class combinations can provide some min/maxing entertainment, as can picking which 5 of a class’ 8 abilities to invest skill points in. Skill sets can be respecced easily and for free, making experimentation a no-liability prospect.
It definitely bears mentioning that magic classes outstrip most melee classes by a significant margin, and the higher-tier classes have access to way more useful skills. For example, I started adventuring with a party consisting of a Dwarf Paladin, Dark Elf Cleric, Elf Ranger, and Gnome Wizard. I found it rather difficult to tackle enemies of an equal level to my party, requiring my team to be over-leveled by one or two in order to maintain steady progress through the story. Upon unlocking more classes, though, I ended up switching to a Giant Barbarian, Halfling Shaman, Dark Elf Enchanter, and my original Gnome Wizard for the rest of the game, and I suddenly found myself breezing through dungeons where the enemies were 10 levels higher than my party. This change in party potency is largely due to the high-damage group attacks available to Barbarians and all spellcasting classes and well as the group healing skill available to the Shaman. All of the other classes felt weak and obsolete compared to this group, which points to balance problems at the core of “AM’s” race/class/skill mechanics.
Finally, “AM” takes inspiration from the ‘Diablo’ series by hemorrhaging a constant stream of randomized loot. Every random battle drops loot. Chests scattered in dungeons drop loot. Auto-adventures produce loot. There’s just loot EVERYWHERE! And, as per usual, most of it sucks, because it is randomly generated with no common sense behind it. Wizard wands that boost strength and other mismatched item/attribute combinations are incredibly common. Fortunately, “AM” features a simple crafting system that allows the player to melt down any and all loot of the first four rarities (out of six) and recast the resulting materials into specific items. Combining certain gemstones (which can be picked up as loot or discovered during the loot salvaging process) with a crafted item can force it to have specific attribute bonuses, making the RNG a little more controllable.
Overall
While not quite the spiritual successor to “Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King” that I was hoping for, “Adventurer Manager” is still an entertaining experience. The Mad Libs inspired story material is frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious, and pairs well with the minimalist turn-based RPG gameplay.
Presentation: 3/5
Story: 3.5/5
Gameplay: 4/5
Overall (not an average): 3.5/5
