LV99: Final Fortress is a classic JRPG a la Chrono Trigger or the handheld The Legend of Zelda games, developed with RPG Maker.
In it youLV99: Final Fortress is a classic JRPG a la Chrono Trigger or the handheld The Legend of Zelda games, developed with RPG Maker.
In it you control a classic RPG party consisting of the 3 heroines Ariel, Billie and Celsia, each with a unique character and occupying specific a role in the party. Ariel functions as the parties leader and healer, Billie is the main damage dealer and Celsia casts spells as the party's mage. Together the 3 girls go on dungeon crawls, fight monsters, solve puzzles and gather loot.
The game's artstyle is in typical RPG Maker fashion quite simplistic. You move a 2d sprite through a 2d world, you can clearly make out objects and pathways, though due to a lack of tutorial or an options menu for key bindings, interactable objects in the environment can unfortunately be hard to spot intuitively and require some trial and error to figure out what you're supposed to do.
Curiously for a JRPG the game has little in the way of cutscenes or dialogue, while there certainly are characters besides our 3 heroins that you can talk to and a vendor you can purchase equipment from, the characters are generally fairly sparse with words and only give you very basic instructions or advice. Somtimes at the start of a fight or when interacting with other inhabitants of this world Ariel, Billie and Ceslia will engage in a bit of lighthearted banter, which enriches their characters.
Fights in this game are turn based and work as follows: To start a fight you interact with a with a sphere-like sprite in the environment which can contain any number of enemies, you can find them guarding chests for the most part, though there are some roaming through the levels as well. Starting a fight puts you into a seperate environment a la pokemon where you can choose between 4 actions: Attack, Skills, Guard and Items. Each of the 3 girls also has an HP bar which indicates their health points and an EP bar, you use to perform actions from the Skills menu, as well as certain stats for attributes such as Strength or Defense.
The goal during a fight is to reduce the enemies' HP to zero, which you do by attacking or using skills. Damage you deal is dependent on your equipment and your stats, as well as various buffs and debuffs that can be applied by and to enemies and our heroines through various skills or items. The battles you lead will be the main meat of the game. They can range from challenging to easy and the various pieces of equipment and items you can find in the game as well as the buffs and debuffs allow for experimentation and variation in fights, so they don't get boring easily.
What surprised me was that this game has no leveling system. Your start out with fully leveled characters and influence your stats with gear outside of combat or with items and skills during combat.
Besides the fighting the game also regularly uses puzzles to make navigating the environment more engaging. You have jumping puzzles, sliding puzzles and puzzles in which you have to move objects in the environment to create a pathway among others. There are also occassions where progress is halted unless you own a certain items and little fetchquests in which you need to exchange certain items with various character in the world, to receive a useful reward in the end.
Musik and Sound are mostly appropriate for this type of game. The various pieces of music fit the environments and give them that "dungeony" feeling, though the music is a bit loud on default settings, so beware headphone users. The sound effects are also fitting, though nothing to write home about. They add to the game during fights by giving the monsters you fight a bit of character or as sound cues when navigating the environment, the only complaint I have here is the footstep soundeffect, which is extremely annoying especially in environments with no background music.
LV99: Final Fortress though completely new, makes me feel nostalgic while playing it. While it does nothing particularly new or doesn't really stand out to me, it can still provide plenty fun. Since it doesn't engage in the usual JRPG tropes such as long winded dialogue sequences or cutscenes and has a distinct lack of hand holding as well as no leveling, you can feel lost and confused in the beginning, though that isn't nevesarily a negative depending on one's taste. If you're into classic JRPGs or just straight up stat based combat I encourage you to check this game out and give it a try.… Expand
