RPG Maker Let's Play - Shadow Star (Part One) - Game Critique
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Hello everyone and thank you for our patience while we dealt with an amazing, but deeply involving, project. We’re back! In this RPG Maker Let’s Play, we begin a journey into the world of Shadow Star by Ghaleon, revisiting one of our favorite games, and one of the most successful videos on this channel.
This will be a full play-through of the current build, from start to finish. Thank you for your support, Ghaleon! Let’s make this game the best it can be.
The presentation value in Shadow Star is 10/10 from the moment you start a new game. For an RPG Maker MV game, it has the look and feel of a professional grade title, and it’s obvious that considerable love and care went into its creation. The special effects are top-notch and reminiscent of a 32-bit JRPG, and the music is simply divine (although there are a few scenes where we would recommend changing the music).
Please, for the love of all things, developer, fix it so that 'X' goes to menu like most RMMV games!
The battle engine presentation is unbelievable, with the best graphics and UI we’ve ever seen in an RPG Maker game. Other developers, please take notice that this is how you do it. Don’t just reskin, and definitely don’t just recolor MogHunter… create your own battle UI that looks like it belongs to part of your game. It makes all the difference in the world. There are a few technical errors with the battle engine: (1) Commands take a while to fulfill, slowing the battle down in a weird way, and (2) The camera sometimes acts weird, zooming around for apparently now reason, sometimes even twice, but it’s a minor nuance. Also, the dash just shuts off at the strangest times, and it doesn’t work.
The balancing in the battles is A+, and from being able to spam the Attack command in the first dungeon to one of the best First-Boss fights we’ve ever had, we felt like we were being challenged just enough to make the game enjoyable. The encounter rate was too high. We highly recommend on-map encounters for this game, and if the developer is going keep it as random encounters, then the rate needs to be lowered by about 40%. If that means increasing the XP of the first dungeon to balance, so be it. The town attack scenario absolutely needs to have the goblins on screen, even if at set locations, with the critical path laid out by way of overturned carts, fell trees, etc.
While the writing itself is good, we had big issues with the story progression. There is a lot of writer’s convenience in this game, stuff we obviously didn’t catch the first playthrough a few years ago. The way the potential Goblin attack is dismissed prior to happening, the way Lance and Bryce’s father is against them going after Julie, the way the entire town (which is quite small) no-sells the death of several citizens, and the way Bailey just sort of pushes Lance and Bryce along—none of it works. We offer comprehensive ideas on how to possibly fix these problems and urge Ghaleon to rework those scenes.
Also… Julie’s father would either be legless or dead after having his leg crushed by a large boulder. So… yeah.
But once those issues are resolved, with such a strong presentation and battle mechanic, this game is going to be something truly amazing. We can’t wait to continue playing!
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