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It's got the backing of Devolver. Oh, and gods this thing has an install size of 25gb.
Quirky Indie RPGs - Depression is optional
- Thread starter Sparky Lurker
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Sparky Lurker
kiwifarms.net
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EarthBound: Superstar Saga launch trailer:
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- Mar 24, 2019
Does anyone here have opinions on this? I am suspicious.
Same question for Cricket and Plucky Squire.
Sparky Lurker
kiwifarms.net
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- Dec 6, 2017
Gravity Falls: Innocent Sin launch trailer:
Star Quirky launch trailer:
It seems more like a 3D platform first with a few Zelda-like sections and minigames on it.
Sparky Lurker
kiwifarms.net
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I played it for five minutes, really just the tutorial, and thought it was dogshit. Mechanics looked interesting but game just felt bad to play.
This looks surprisingly good. I will check that one out. And by that i mean i will pirate it.
Played it for a bit, like the setting, dislike the combat. I've been meaning to give it another try.
It's fucking excellent. Next to LISA: The Painful the only worthwhile RPG Maker game IMO. I wrote in another thread how anyone into classic JRPG who hasn't played it yet should do so ASAP.
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LucasSomething
kiwifarms.net
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- Jun 21, 2016
I have played the moro's poddle demo that was announced in the last Mother direct for around 2 hours and while i didnt finish it, i think it's a really high effort rpg maker game that feels like it might compete with Jimmy pulsating mass as "ugly af game that is actually kinda awesome", but it has some big flaws.
It's about this protag boy that keeps his mouth perpetually open taking the wrong train to a different city and then trying to find his way back home. The boy looks absolutely hideous and everyone else is weird and ugly, with the top down view also showing doors to the side and below from, it takes a while to get used but i guess it feels surreal.
It's a certified quirky jrpg with many npcs having jokes but i find them mostly unfunny with a few good ones. One i particularly like tho is a "reverse doomsday" street npc that rings a bell and says the lord is coming to save us all and if you pay him 1 coin he literally calls god to give you advice on where to go next, which is a really clever joke on a hint system.
(why did THIS out of all shitty jokes make me laugh lol)
But the real meat of the game is how the combat is really deep. All party members have skill trees that you have to physically walk on (the skill TREE) and a lot of spells with unique uses. The MC is kinda basically and mostly has normal swings that hit hard on different enemy types but the second character nettle has a fun necromancer/mage/bloodmancer archetype.
She can't attack but she makes enemies bleed which lets her use blood spells on them, but some enemies like plants and ghosts can't bleed. She can necromance mark enemies so when they die they become skeletons that support you but if you use at a ghost it charms them. And her mage tree is just normal cure and elemental magic.
(Enemies have all have "races" with their own mechanics and weaknesses)
But what makes it stand out is the weird high effort on small details. The presentation on tutorials and the skill tree is great and the combat screen is really animated. At one point you go meet Nettle after she posed as a model for an artist and for a split second there is an animation of her pulling up her dress just as she appears onscreen. There is also a random encounter prevention system, where beating enough enemies on a zone spawns a chest and lets you reject ignore fights, while also showing a step counter for next fight.
But there a few critical flaws imo that will prevent this from popping off potentially less than jimmy
1-The MC looks like a walking blowup doll. And the game is ugly as hell. Presentation is still a lot better than Jimmy but Jimmy is salvaged by the mix of cutesy pixel sprites and actual GORE and horror monsters. Jimmy also has a lot of inspired and symbolic monsters while pratically all in Moro are random animals, bugs and plants.
2-It's a sloooow game with a loooong demo. Like, if you hate turn based rpgs this will NOT change your mind. The intro is very slow, with the MC in his house, then in the station then in the forest. There are also too many npcs so it feels like a chore to talk to them. The MC will also physically nod with every dialogue choice which slows it down further and is awful when rejecting random battles (another thing Jimmy already solved, you just press cancel while walking). I watched someone on youtube play the demo for 3 hours and quit it. I'm also not sure what the fuck the plot is at all?
3-It's rather hard and misses happen way too often. I'm talking battles not ending because the MC misses 3 times in a row. You can't miss in Jimmy and that's how god intended. Feels like every random battle against 3 worms with 12 hp takes more than a minute because of this. I also didnt unlock offensive spells cause they were expensive point wise and it made the problem worse.
For comparison, Jimmy has a pretty damn tight demo that is the first island. It was still a bit over 2 hours, but it has a pretty good escalation of unlocking classes, meeting all protagonists and recurring characters, surprising you with the horror and setting up the main villain. Moro ups the fun when nettle joins but her necromancer playstyle slowsdown combat further and there isnt much else to motivate beyond new weird npcs.
It's about this protag boy that keeps his mouth perpetually open taking the wrong train to a different city and then trying to find his way back home. The boy looks absolutely hideous and everyone else is weird and ugly, with the top down view also showing doors to the side and below from, it takes a while to get used but i guess it feels surreal.
It's a certified quirky jrpg with many npcs having jokes but i find them mostly unfunny with a few good ones. One i particularly like tho is a "reverse doomsday" street npc that rings a bell and says the lord is coming to save us all and if you pay him 1 coin he literally calls god to give you advice on where to go next, which is a really clever joke on a hint system.
(why did THIS out of all shitty jokes make me laugh lol)
But the real meat of the game is how the combat is really deep. All party members have skill trees that you have to physically walk on (the skill TREE) and a lot of spells with unique uses. The MC is kinda basically and mostly has normal swings that hit hard on different enemy types but the second character nettle has a fun necromancer/mage/bloodmancer archetype.
She can't attack but she makes enemies bleed which lets her use blood spells on them, but some enemies like plants and ghosts can't bleed. She can necromance mark enemies so when they die they become skeletons that support you but if you use at a ghost it charms them. And her mage tree is just normal cure and elemental magic.
(Enemies have all have "races" with their own mechanics and weaknesses)
But what makes it stand out is the weird high effort on small details. The presentation on tutorials and the skill tree is great and the combat screen is really animated. At one point you go meet Nettle after she posed as a model for an artist and for a split second there is an animation of her pulling up her dress just as she appears onscreen. There is also a random encounter prevention system, where beating enough enemies on a zone spawns a chest and lets you reject ignore fights, while also showing a step counter for next fight.
But there a few critical flaws imo that will prevent this from popping off potentially less than jimmy
1-The MC looks like a walking blowup doll. And the game is ugly as hell. Presentation is still a lot better than Jimmy but Jimmy is salvaged by the mix of cutesy pixel sprites and actual GORE and horror monsters. Jimmy also has a lot of inspired and symbolic monsters while pratically all in Moro are random animals, bugs and plants.
2-It's a sloooow game with a loooong demo. Like, if you hate turn based rpgs this will NOT change your mind. The intro is very slow, with the MC in his house, then in the station then in the forest. There are also too many npcs so it feels like a chore to talk to them. The MC will also physically nod with every dialogue choice which slows it down further and is awful when rejecting random battles (another thing Jimmy already solved, you just press cancel while walking). I watched someone on youtube play the demo for 3 hours and quit it. I'm also not sure what the fuck the plot is at all?
3-It's rather hard and misses happen way too often. I'm talking battles not ending because the MC misses 3 times in a row. You can't miss in Jimmy and that's how god intended. Feels like every random battle against 3 worms with 12 hp takes more than a minute because of this. I also didnt unlock offensive spells cause they were expensive point wise and it made the problem worse.
For comparison, Jimmy has a pretty damn tight demo that is the first island. It was still a bit over 2 hours, but it has a pretty good escalation of unlocking classes, meeting all protagonists and recurring characters, surprising you with the horror and setting up the main villain. Moro ups the fun when nettle joins but her necromancer playstyle slowsdown combat further and there isnt much else to motivate beyond new weird npcs.
- Joined
- Dec 12, 2022
Plucky Squire is Zelda-like, it's good, and haven't actually encountered anything pozzed about it. It's not indie, though. I was actually surprised at the size of the credit roll, not just the amount of people, but the groups/companies as well. It's a proper AA title.
Cricket is pozzed, though. It starts out okay, but falls apart when you reach the junkyard. From unnecessary conflict from a trailer trash bitch who had no reason to join the party, to introducing a party member who's a they/them. Seriously, her very first line is "I am a they!".
Something that stuck with me is the scene that precedes her introduction. Her family leaves to go on some sort of scientific trip, and ditch her in the process. They keep using they/them in the dialogue, but you don't know they're talking about her specifically since it's neutral language. Only after the fact you realize, and it hit me: It sounded impersonal as fuck. Who talks like that about singular siblings and offspring?
After a few more scenes of annoying internal conflict and pronoun shit, I dropped it since I felt like my time was better spent on something else.
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- Jun 7, 2020
Is Black Souls considered a Quirky RPG or are Japanese H-RPGs out of the realm of being quirky?
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Pirated Bloomtown.
While I don't dislike it so far, it's definitely aping on Persona 5 too much. Even the fuckin' talking dog is teaching me how to make lockpicks, and he doesn't have the excuse of being a phantom thief before meeting him.
While I don't dislike it so far, it's definitely aping on Persona 5 too much. Even the fuckin' talking dog is teaching me how to make lockpicks, and he doesn't have the excuse of being a phantom thief before meeting him.
LucasSomething
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jun 21, 2016
I played the demo a while ago and talked about it here
Tried the final game for a bit, it's extremely zany (talking alpacas telling you to get a magic carpet to cross the desert what) to the point i'm not sure i personally can't take anything seriously at all. Combat is also unnecessarily stressful with how tight the minigames are, but if you get a perfect you literally take no damage so it feels awful cause you're either immortal or die fast (just like Knuckle sandwich).
But my main reason to quit was, ironically, the UI. It's just way to hard on my eyes and it's a pain to navigate the pixelated skill tree and instead of using normal terms the game is full of bullshit stats like "resonance" and other stuff that i still don't understand.
(difficulty settings)
I also pirated the game and started today, it's literally "Persona 5 at home" but as someone who didnt play P5 or a persona game in a while it's fine.
They took some obvious feedback from the demo thankgod cause now the map is much more clear where you to find your objective and you can find important locations on the map and fast travel (i dont think you could in the demo) which kinda trivializes the time system completely but it's better than running forever.
They also seemingly removed the KINDNESS stat cause i can't find it anywhere! It was useless in the demo as far as i remember and probably only existed because this game rips all the social stats from persona 5.
(rip kindness, i actually agree with it being cut)
But the main thing i learned recently is that apparently there is NO TIME LIMIT IN THE GAME so in the end it's, ironically, not much like persona at all. This is probably better to keep the pacing more tight but it also means there is no long term resource management or anything, you can kinda grind stats or farm money working as much you want. You can also go in the dungeon every day before 9pm and get out at 9 30 without wasting anything.
Will play more and see how it goes, my only frustration is how often i miss attacks, which is weird the game was patched to allegedly solve this problem. 90% melee chance sure feels like 9% sometimes.
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- Apr 6, 2020
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I still have a bone to pick with the map. It's less of a proper map, and more of a combined quest journal/map. So if you want to view your current location, but don't have an active objective in it, you can't actually view its map. It becomes more noticeable when you get to the farm.
There's also an oversight in the fast travel system. Screen transitions between maps take time, while fast traveling doesn't.
The miss chance is insane, but goes both ways. More often than not, I see party damaging spells/attacks miss at least one target. I also don't believe the 50% miss while under woozy status, it's probably higher.
Fixed turn order is also weird, and you can tell they did notice but otherwise just put a bandaid on it. Hugo's a tank with his stat line, but he naturally learns damaging spells and can take advantage of them by always acting last.
Sparky Lurker
kiwifarms.net
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Shocked that nobody's brought this up yet. Pipkin, a Pokémon-like Earthbound clone with Undertale and Stranger Things elements.
Genuinely one of the least-creative games i've seen in a while. The only good part of it is the Halloween theme, but even that rings kind of hollow when the designs are so generic and the game itself looks so nonthreatening.
(the trailer is edited by a schizophrenic who can't linger on a shot for longer than half a second, so I picked out some better shots to spare you the trouble of watching it.)
It even has that stupid problem where it rips off existing games so hard that it emphasizes the parts of that original game people didn't like in its marketing.
I think it says a lot that the #1 selling point is just the fact that it advertises itself as being "fall/Halloween" aesthetic first and a game second.
Genuinely one of the least-creative games i've seen in a while. The only good part of it is the Halloween theme, but even that rings kind of hollow when the designs are so generic and the game itself looks so nonthreatening.
(the trailer is edited by a schizophrenic who can't linger on a shot for longer than half a second, so I picked out some better shots to spare you the trouble of watching it.)
It even has that stupid problem where it rips off existing games so hard that it emphasizes the parts of that original game people didn't like in its marketing.
I think it says a lot that the #1 selling point is just the fact that it advertises itself as being "fall/Halloween" aesthetic first and a game second.
- Joined
- Jun 7, 2020
I never got the appeal of "anti-grind" or "grind-free" as a tagline for these games. Like it doesn't have to be Disgaea levels of grinding, but it almost feels like a complete dislike for the genre of game you're making. Either way it's a sign of a shitty game.
- Joined
- Dec 12, 2022
Alright, I finished Bloomtown, it's okay but that's about it.
It is very much P5-at-home, but honestly lacks depth all around. From having the same party the entire game, to spell lines that boil down to single/party, the game doesn't change much as you go through. Since you can't replay previous dungeons, that severely limits what's actually available to you for your pool of demons, and that results in the end game where foes are actually weak, and the final boss doesn't actually have resistances apart from status effects.
Lucas brought it up earlier, but now that I got the whole picture... Yeah, RNG is a mess in this, but what's really annoying is just how opaque everything is. You have no idea what's the odds of spells missing, the accuracy stat for weapons seem to be a crapshoot and One More Turn is also chance-based with only Chester having higher odds of procing it on a weak point. Heck, you'll probably find out the latter is chance-based when you actually unlock or look at his friendship perks.
All around, this is a pretty shallow experience. I chuckle thinking back to the Steam discussion board for the game with a specific thread: "I applied as a designer for this game: They didn't call me back. >65 replies"
Not sure how you could have saved this game, bud.
The soundtrack slaps, but that probably the only lesson they took from Persona: Have more than 1 battle track. And then proceed to drop the ball by having the final boss use the same boss track as everyone else.
It is very much P5-at-home, but honestly lacks depth all around. From having the same party the entire game, to spell lines that boil down to single/party, the game doesn't change much as you go through. Since you can't replay previous dungeons, that severely limits what's actually available to you for your pool of demons, and that results in the end game where foes are actually weak, and the final boss doesn't actually have resistances apart from status effects.
Lucas brought it up earlier, but now that I got the whole picture... Yeah, RNG is a mess in this, but what's really annoying is just how opaque everything is. You have no idea what's the odds of spells missing, the accuracy stat for weapons seem to be a crapshoot and One More Turn is also chance-based with only Chester having higher odds of procing it on a weak point. Heck, you'll probably find out the latter is chance-based when you actually unlock or look at his friendship perks.
All around, this is a pretty shallow experience. I chuckle thinking back to the Steam discussion board for the game with a specific thread: "I applied as a designer for this game: They didn't call me back. >65 replies"
Not sure how you could have saved this game, bud.
The soundtrack slaps, but that probably the only lesson they took from Persona: Have more than 1 battle track. And then proceed to drop the ball by having the final boss use the same boss track as everyone else.