Short reviews, disappointing RPG Maker games edition

Yume Nikki is a mess, though it's a mess no studio or wholly quiet mind would have the audacity to make. You know the Lunar Palace in Secret of Mana, where the entire puzzle is finding one exit in a huge, featureless void? Imagine if they made an entire game out of that. Thus forms the bulk of a quest across one girl's dreamscape to locate 24 alternate personas and get a "denouement" that thumbs its nose at plot or game objectives. I admire a title that's so personal and rawly uncommercial, but actually playing it can be a chore: the level design gets monotonous, with too much trudging around large, empty spaces looking for the one or two lone points of interest. The heroine's neato personas (a yukionna; a broom-riding witch; a severed head that just sloughs along the ground) rarely have any use or effect in the game, and the level of player-unfriendliness can get downright comical - I mean, Jesus Christ, look at this. Perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree trying to evaluate Yume Nikki as a game, but as pure phantasmagoria, it's also problematic; the weirdness remains within a predictable and calculated framework, if that makes any sense (those big, empty warehouse spaces, paved with wacky tiles that make odd sounds; looping claustrophobic mazes with pea-green palettes and parallax floors), yet at the same time is overall way too far into the designer's personal frame of reference ever really to communicate any ideas or impact the audience emotionally; it's a joke with no target or punchline. It suffers in comparison to Ib, which paired its surrealism with sprightly puzzles, striking tableaux, and a compelling world and characters. (Or the PC game Weird Dreams, which is infinitely more frustrating gameplaywise but condenses into a natty 17-minute video.)



I knew something was up with The Longing Ribbon when it tried to scare me with a Pokemon graphic. The product of a designer with talent but not the maturity to wield it well, Ribbon wants to be a Sweet Home haunted-house RPG adventure and does sporadically offer some spooky exploration, capable use of horror-movie dream logic, and effectively quirky mechanics (you gain level-ups and power boosts by investigating the mansion's nooks and crannies). It stumbles, though, with uneven gameplay pacing (asking the player to make several decisions about stats before they've fought even a single battle), out-of-the-blue instadeath QTEs, tone-breaking Kingdom Hearts-esque character design, and puzzles that're equal bits hit and Ao Oni-league miss. The deal-breaker, though, is the most loathsome supporting cast I've encountered in a game - two dirtbags who batter and verbally abuse their friends and ostensible significant others, steal from strangers, and are jerks to animals. Naturally, then, they survive to the end, and the only two likable characters, the dog and the kid, bite it. This is the definition of "too clever by half."



Perhaps the best in class here but still kind of foundering, Palette follows a psychologist as he helps an amnesiac patient explore and build on her few remaining shreds of memory to uncover her identity. The idea behind gameplay is pretty interesting: the gamespace consists of the half-remembered glimpses of places that populate the patient's shattered memory, connected by dark hallways and blocked off by walls of glass and locked doors. The heroine's "life bar" represents her mental endurance, which wears down as she accesses painful or buried memories and increases in capacity as she activates synapses and associations, allowing her gradually to break through deeper mental blocks. In practice, though, gameplay is aggravating, as the map is not compactly designed and finding the way to the new area your latest revelation just opened becomes an exasperating hunt through dozens of rooms (if you're not sticking religiously to a walkthrough, you will need to map). Presentation, while the game's greatest strength, is also a double-edged sword. The mindscape is striking: memories are cast in a sepia tone, illuminated only by the presence of the one color that features in the protag's most disturbing, centerpiece memory (red, naturally), while elements of her memory that are still fuzzy are traced on the mise-en-scene in white, like chalk outlines. The nuts and bolts of the inteface, though, are rough and buggy, at least on my machine (I always had to resize the window a couple times on startup for the graphics & colors to display correctly - and couldn't get them to do so at all for the above screenshot - and you need to sort through spoileriffic graphics just to find the "start game" icon hidden in the depths of the install folder). Meanwhile, despite the game's striking method of telling its story and its poetic ideas on why our memories hold onto the odds & ends they do, the story itself needed a few more, or a few fewer, pieces to be coherent, and I wish more had been done with the palette gimmick. Very promising ideas and not a bad game, but could use a remake - and it got one, on the PS1, actually, with the funds the creator won from Enterbrain's RPG Maker contest. I'm interested to see if the update delivered on the premise's full potential.
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