Survivor Charlie
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(These were supposed to go up at Inside Pulse Games, but a delay in relaunching the website has me antsy and since I downloaded $50 worth of Indie games, I'm anxious to see if anyone actually gives a shit about full length reviews for them. This is one of two completed thus far).
The Way Too Indie Review of Breath of Death VII: The Beginning
by Charlie Reneke
Breath of Death VII: The Beginning
80 Microsoft Points ($1.00 US)
4/22/10 RainbowDespair
I have no clue what I was thinking when I bought this. In my nearly thirty years on this Earth, I've beaten exactly two non-Mario RPGs: the original Dragon Warrior on the NES and Final Fantasy X-2. The only reason I owned Dragon Warrior in the first place was because it came free with a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine. Before I started collecting games the only three RPGs I owned were it, Earthbound, and Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. In general, I just find the turn-based combat to be about as exciting as planting a seed and then sitting there waiting for it to start growing. Which I've tried before, but it never actually got big. Perhaps it was because I didn't water it. I would have, but I was afraid that if I ran to get a can of water, the thing would start growing and I would miss it.
Where was I?
Breath of Death. It aims to be an homage to and a parody of classic 8-Bit era RPGs, and in this it succeeds, I guess. I'm not exactly the right person to be judging the merits of these types of games. I could never see how people could just walk around, waiting for a random battle to occur and grinding your way through them until you level up. Apparently the makers find the grind not so fun themselves, so they made it easier than kicking a field goal with an aborted puppy fetus to level up. At the start of the game you level up after literally every battle. That slows down a bit later in the game, but if you go more than five minutes without leveling up then you're playing the game too slowly. Every new level brings you a choice of how to upgrade your character, but after level 30 that ends and you simply are given the option of upgrading all your stats by 10 points or, um, upgrading all your stats by 10 points. But by then you should be close to finishing the game, likely because RainbowDespair was as eager to be done making it as I was playing it.
I promised myself that if I was going to force myself to review this crap that I would at least see it through to the end. The promotional material for BOD7 promises four to six hours of gameplay, which isn't too shabby for a game that cost two dollars less than a gallon of gasoline. BOD7 opens with an opening sequence not unlike the way NES-era Mega Man games would... or perhaps it's a tribute to Crystalis.
if I know. The storyline is that the world was blown up by atomic bombs and now is populated by the undead. They're civil and happy though. Until evil things show up, and then the shit is on. The main character is Dem, a skeleton warrior slash silent-protagonist, though that's on the grounds that he has no tongue. He's joined by various other intentionally clichéd characters on a quest to destroy some evil thing and save the world.
Gameplay is your typical menu-driven RPG junk designed for the average boredom-enthusiast who loves this sort of thing. When you encounter an enemy, you click attack and then take turns whacking each-other until one of you dies. The game uses a combo system for attacks but I never thought much of it and it never seemed to make a difference. If one of my characters was stunned during a fight, I would usually just keep whacking attack and survive the battle, at which point anyone who died is restored to full health, along with all characters that survive, plus you get five of your magic points back. Yawn.
I guess the selling point of BOD7 is that's it's light-hearted and parodies the whole genre and video games in general. It all starts when the first boss spouts off the classic awful line that Dracula uses at the beginning of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. I think RainbowDespair missed the point of why that line was so funny in the first place: because it wasn't meant to be funny. Not too long after that "gag" the game referenced the "master of lock picking" line from Resident Evil, at which point my superior frontal gyrus officially called it quits and went into a coma for the rest of the night. Every single joke in the game fell flat. I rolled my eyes so many times I half expected a virtual Michael Richards to appear and start calling me racial slurs. Instead the female sidekick Sara started doing a parody of the Pokemon theme song.
Truthfully, the guys at RainbowDespair have talent as game makers. They created a functional RPG that, from what I gathered, really appeals to fans of the genre. The graphics are a mixture of 8 and 16 bit retro goodness, and the game even has a pretty decent soundtrack. But they really should have hired someone with a decent sense of humor to write the script for the characters because every line of dialog was a failed attempt at being funny. There is literally not one single laugh to be had here, and since the promotional blurb for the game says "Laugh! Cry! Laugh some more!" I feel like I should get at least 66 cents of the dollar I paid back, because the guys behind this game are not as clever as they think they are, or even close. Since most 80s era RPGs featured broken English as the result of hasty, low-budget translations, maybe that's the route they should have gone. Or maybe they should have ditched the whole RPG concept and tried to make a game that was fun.
For the record, I did accomplish my goal of seeing Breath of Death through to the end, but almost failed on account of howing annoying the final level was. When it was all said and done, a little over eight hours of my life was gone. I know that the game actually promises less than that, but I died about four times as much as the average RPG veteran will. And then after the end credits rolled, I started Googling it to find out what everyone else was saying about it and I found out there was a run button. Sigh. I also seemed to keep going to the wrong places and fighting guys who overpowered and killed me because I wasn't meant to travel to that part of the map yet. Oddly enough, that gave BOD7 an almost quirky retro charm about it, because such scenarios are flat out impossible in modern JRPGs.
Oh, and it's worth noting that Breath of Death has two modes of difficulty. I played on normal mode and died more often than people who stick their heads in jet turbines, so I imagine the hard mode would have had my ass for lunch and not left any room for dessert. There is no auto-save feature so I suggest anyone out there who gives this game a whirl frequently dash back to the nearest town or save point every time you level up. That would be roughly every three minutes. Oh, and there's an optional boss fight somewhere in the game that I never found.
No Rating because really, I am the wrong guy to tell you if this is good compared to other RPGs. If you enjoy crap like the original Final Fantasy titles, by all means buy it. You might even get some of the references to classic role playing games that I'm guessing I missed. Notice I said "get" and not "laugh at." The main selling point of Breath of Death VII is that it's supposed to be funny. It's not. I've seen videos of baby seals getting clubbed that had a better sense of humor than BOD7 has. It makes the Scary Movie franchise mistake of writing a reference to something the audience will be familiar with and then expecting it to get a laugh. Apparently that works sometimes, too. I remember being at the theater when a trailer for Scary Movie 2 hit. At some point, a parrot said "you are the weakest link, goodbye." Nearly the whole audience laughed. I wanted to personally walk up to each person, ask them what exactly made that funny, and then hit them upside their head with my shoe and tell them howing stupid they were.
That's all BOD7 really has to offer in the gag department: references to other stuff. And I'm sure the Pringles-bloated, socially-retarded nerd patrol that this game is designed to cater to will laugh every time the game references Mass Effect or takes a line from the Simpsons. Because, you know, they play those games and watch those shows, and thus it's funny that someone else who made a video game saw the same shows and made a winky-nudgy reference to them.
Ignore the failed comedy bits and you have what I assume to be a totally competent RPG with none of the obnoxious padding that would make me put the game away before I finish it, never to be played again. Although there was no point in time while playing this where I was not bored, the average turn-based, entertainment-hating RPG fan will totally love the play mechanics and likely do more with the level system and combo attacks than I did. Once I figured out that "unite" worked 90% of the time and killed everything on screen in a couple hits, I was pretty much just doing that and then running to the village to refill my mana. It wasn't a very creative way of playing the game on my part, but then again calling one of the areas "MotherBound" wasn't funny on their part, so really I was just doing my part to balance the universe.
The Way Too Indie Review of Breath of Death VII: The Beginning
by Charlie Reneke
Breath of Death VII: The Beginning
80 Microsoft Points ($1.00 US)
4/22/10 RainbowDespair
I have no clue what I was thinking when I bought this. In my nearly thirty years on this Earth, I've beaten exactly two non-Mario RPGs: the original Dragon Warrior on the NES and Final Fantasy X-2. The only reason I owned Dragon Warrior in the first place was because it came free with a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine. Before I started collecting games the only three RPGs I owned were it, Earthbound, and Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. In general, I just find the turn-based combat to be about as exciting as planting a seed and then sitting there waiting for it to start growing. Which I've tried before, but it never actually got big. Perhaps it was because I didn't water it. I would have, but I was afraid that if I ran to get a can of water, the thing would start growing and I would miss it.
Where was I?
Breath of Death. It aims to be an homage to and a parody of classic 8-Bit era RPGs, and in this it succeeds, I guess. I'm not exactly the right person to be judging the merits of these types of games. I could never see how people could just walk around, waiting for a random battle to occur and grinding your way through them until you level up. Apparently the makers find the grind not so fun themselves, so they made it easier than kicking a field goal with an aborted puppy fetus to level up. At the start of the game you level up after literally every battle. That slows down a bit later in the game, but if you go more than five minutes without leveling up then you're playing the game too slowly. Every new level brings you a choice of how to upgrade your character, but after level 30 that ends and you simply are given the option of upgrading all your stats by 10 points or, um, upgrading all your stats by 10 points. But by then you should be close to finishing the game, likely because RainbowDespair was as eager to be done making it as I was playing it.
I promised myself that if I was going to force myself to review this crap that I would at least see it through to the end. The promotional material for BOD7 promises four to six hours of gameplay, which isn't too shabby for a game that cost two dollars less than a gallon of gasoline. BOD7 opens with an opening sequence not unlike the way NES-era Mega Man games would... or perhaps it's a tribute to Crystalis.
if I know. The storyline is that the world was blown up by atomic bombs and now is populated by the undead. They're civil and happy though. Until evil things show up, and then the shit is on. The main character is Dem, a skeleton warrior slash silent-protagonist, though that's on the grounds that he has no tongue. He's joined by various other intentionally clichéd characters on a quest to destroy some evil thing and save the world. Gameplay is your typical menu-driven RPG junk designed for the average boredom-enthusiast who loves this sort of thing. When you encounter an enemy, you click attack and then take turns whacking each-other until one of you dies. The game uses a combo system for attacks but I never thought much of it and it never seemed to make a difference. If one of my characters was stunned during a fight, I would usually just keep whacking attack and survive the battle, at which point anyone who died is restored to full health, along with all characters that survive, plus you get five of your magic points back. Yawn.
I guess the selling point of BOD7 is that's it's light-hearted and parodies the whole genre and video games in general. It all starts when the first boss spouts off the classic awful line that Dracula uses at the beginning of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. I think RainbowDespair missed the point of why that line was so funny in the first place: because it wasn't meant to be funny. Not too long after that "gag" the game referenced the "master of lock picking" line from Resident Evil, at which point my superior frontal gyrus officially called it quits and went into a coma for the rest of the night. Every single joke in the game fell flat. I rolled my eyes so many times I half expected a virtual Michael Richards to appear and start calling me racial slurs. Instead the female sidekick Sara started doing a parody of the Pokemon theme song.
Truthfully, the guys at RainbowDespair have talent as game makers. They created a functional RPG that, from what I gathered, really appeals to fans of the genre. The graphics are a mixture of 8 and 16 bit retro goodness, and the game even has a pretty decent soundtrack. But they really should have hired someone with a decent sense of humor to write the script for the characters because every line of dialog was a failed attempt at being funny. There is literally not one single laugh to be had here, and since the promotional blurb for the game says "Laugh! Cry! Laugh some more!" I feel like I should get at least 66 cents of the dollar I paid back, because the guys behind this game are not as clever as they think they are, or even close. Since most 80s era RPGs featured broken English as the result of hasty, low-budget translations, maybe that's the route they should have gone. Or maybe they should have ditched the whole RPG concept and tried to make a game that was fun.
For the record, I did accomplish my goal of seeing Breath of Death through to the end, but almost failed on account of how
ing annoying the final level was. When it was all said and done, a little over eight hours of my life was gone. I know that the game actually promises less than that, but I died about four times as much as the average RPG veteran will. And then after the end credits rolled, I started Googling it to find out what everyone else was saying about it and I found out there was a run button. Sigh. I also seemed to keep going to the wrong places and fighting guys who overpowered and killed me because I wasn't meant to travel to that part of the map yet. Oddly enough, that gave BOD7 an almost quirky retro charm about it, because such scenarios are flat out impossible in modern JRPGs. Oh, and it's worth noting that Breath of Death has two modes of difficulty. I played on normal mode and died more often than people who stick their heads in jet turbines, so I imagine the hard mode would have had my ass for lunch and not left any room for dessert. There is no auto-save feature so I suggest anyone out there who gives this game a whirl frequently dash back to the nearest town or save point every time you level up. That would be roughly every three minutes. Oh, and there's an optional boss fight somewhere in the game that I never found.
No Rating because really, I am the wrong guy to tell you if this is good compared to other RPGs. If you enjoy crap like the original Final Fantasy titles, by all means buy it. You might even get some of the references to classic role playing games that I'm guessing I missed. Notice I said "get" and not "laugh at." The main selling point of Breath of Death VII is that it's supposed to be funny. It's not. I've seen videos of baby seals getting clubbed that had a better sense of humor than BOD7 has. It makes the Scary Movie franchise mistake of writing a reference to something the audience will be familiar with and then expecting it to get a laugh. Apparently that works sometimes, too. I remember being at the theater when a trailer for Scary Movie 2 hit. At some point, a parrot said "you are the weakest link, goodbye." Nearly the whole audience laughed. I wanted to personally walk up to each person, ask them what exactly made that funny, and then hit them upside their head with my shoe and tell them how
ing stupid they were.That's all BOD7 really has to offer in the gag department: references to other stuff. And I'm sure the Pringles-bloated, socially-retarded nerd patrol that this game is designed to cater to will laugh every time the game references Mass Effect or takes a line from the Simpsons. Because, you know, they play those games and watch those shows, and thus it's funny that someone else who made a video game saw the same shows and made a winky-nudgy reference to them.
Ignore the failed comedy bits and you have what I assume to be a totally competent RPG with none of the obnoxious padding that would make me put the game away before I finish it, never to be played again. Although there was no point in time while playing this where I was not bored, the average turn-based, entertainment-hating RPG fan will totally love the play mechanics and likely do more with the level system and combo attacks than I did. Once I figured out that "unite" worked 90% of the time and killed everything on screen in a couple hits, I was pretty much just doing that and then running to the village to refill my mana. It wasn't a very creative way of playing the game on my part, but then again calling one of the areas "MotherBound" wasn't funny on their part, so really I was just doing my part to balance the universe.
