Every so often, after seeing the utter mountains of cheap, no-effort default-asset RPGMaker games being thrown around for ten to fifteen bucks on Steam, I lose hope that the engine can be used for good. A lot of times, I have to forcibly dig up a little treasure chest in the back of my head - the one that contains the memories I have of To The Moon and go back over it to remind myself that no, RPGMaker is not bad inherently, it is just used badly.
Helen's Mysterious Castle is another game being added to that treasure chest. Helen's Mysterious Castle gives me renewed faith that RPGMaker games are not inherently a garbage subgenre.
Helen's Mysterious Castle (or should that be "Helen's Mysterious, Castle", said as a statement of fact) is about a girl named Helen. Helen is completely illiterate and functionally mute, which is to say, she's an RPG Protagonist that can't read signs. (That facet does get remedied later on in the game.) She can only talk in punctuation - ? and ! are the usual options for dialogue - and yet the rest of the world can converse with her just fine.
You wake up one day, talk to your elf brother, who tells you not to go into the ruins.
You go into the ruins, because you have no idea what's going on. Helen has no idea what's going on, she barely knows what words are.
A whole bunch of backstory sort of happens around you while you bumble around trying to get... well, much of any idea what's going on. If you need a story as a motivator, as opposed to as a reward, you might be barking up the wrong tree. On the other hand, I can't really talk about the story, since it's one of those things that spoils itself to discuss.
I really did get an Undertale vibe out of this, except far less meta and also without a pacifist option to battles.
Speaking of - I was significantly impressed with the way that someone managed to make a FFX/Grandia-esque speed-based turn system in RPGMaker. I don't really know how to explain it, so I'll just quote![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
xyzzysqrl from his own post on the game:
Every weapon has three stats:
WAIT is how long it takes to use.
EFFECT is how hard it hits.
DEFENSE is how much damage you soak if something hits you when you're using it.
It's kind of a rock-paper-scissors situation; Bows are fast but relatively weak offensively and nonexistent defensively, swords are all-around pretty average, shields are incredibly strong defensively but don't do anything but block hits, and magic is absurdly powerful and pierces defense (or heals, or boosts your other stats, etc) but is as slow as molasses and leaves you just as defensively vulnerable as bows. Thus, shields stop bows, bows murder mages, magic punches through shields, and swords... well, they're pretty good all around and by endgame you're mostly going to be using an endgame sword and a heal spell for 90% of your combat.
It's still a nice, gritty, fun system with a lot of potential.
The only real problems I had were in coding, mostly - the game has a lot of misplaced translation flaws, wonky characters in the dialogue (rampaging @ signs in particular plague the back half of the game like a Nethack corpse mill) though once or twice I had a problem figuring out where the hell I was expected to go, particularly at the very tail end of the game where you're expected to find a hidden door you have no indication of beforehand. It stumped me about an hour before I finally looked up a playthrough on YT for the answer.
All in all though? Solid-ass game, especially for its price tag. It's two bucks. There's a lot worse things to use two bucks on.
Helen's Mysterious Castle is another game being added to that treasure chest. Helen's Mysterious Castle gives me renewed faith that RPGMaker games are not inherently a garbage subgenre.
Helen's Mysterious Castle (or should that be "Helen's Mysterious, Castle", said as a statement of fact) is about a girl named Helen. Helen is completely illiterate and functionally mute, which is to say, she's an RPG Protagonist that can't read signs. (That facet does get remedied later on in the game.) She can only talk in punctuation - ? and ! are the usual options for dialogue - and yet the rest of the world can converse with her just fine.
You wake up one day, talk to your elf brother, who tells you not to go into the ruins.
You go into the ruins, because you have no idea what's going on. Helen has no idea what's going on, she barely knows what words are.
A whole bunch of backstory sort of happens around you while you bumble around trying to get... well, much of any idea what's going on. If you need a story as a motivator, as opposed to as a reward, you might be barking up the wrong tree. On the other hand, I can't really talk about the story, since it's one of those things that spoils itself to discuss.
I really did get an Undertale vibe out of this, except far less meta and also without a pacifist option to battles.
Speaking of - I was significantly impressed with the way that someone managed to make a FFX/Grandia-esque speed-based turn system in RPGMaker. I don't really know how to explain it, so I'll just quote
xyzzysqrl from his own post on the game:Every weapon has three stats:
WAIT is how long it takes to use.
EFFECT is how hard it hits.
DEFENSE is how much damage you soak if something hits you when you're using it.
It's kind of a rock-paper-scissors situation; Bows are fast but relatively weak offensively and nonexistent defensively, swords are all-around pretty average, shields are incredibly strong defensively but don't do anything but block hits, and magic is absurdly powerful and pierces defense (or heals, or boosts your other stats, etc) but is as slow as molasses and leaves you just as defensively vulnerable as bows. Thus, shields stop bows, bows murder mages, magic punches through shields, and swords... well, they're pretty good all around and by endgame you're mostly going to be using an endgame sword and a heal spell for 90% of your combat.
It's still a nice, gritty, fun system with a lot of potential.
The only real problems I had were in coding, mostly - the game has a lot of misplaced translation flaws, wonky characters in the dialogue (rampaging @ signs in particular plague the back half of the game like a Nethack corpse mill) though once or twice I had a problem figuring out where the hell I was expected to go, particularly at the very tail end of the game where you're expected to find a hidden door you have no indication of beforehand. It stumped me about an hour before I finally looked up a playthrough on YT for the answer.
All in all though? Solid-ass game, especially for its price tag. It's two bucks. There's a lot worse things to use two bucks on.
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