I'd heard that Everdark Tower is a good beginner's JRPG, so I decided to give it a try. Instead of being my entry point to the genre, however, this game made me want to steer clear of JRPGs forever.
On paper, Everdark Tower was just what I wanted: a short and straightforward RPG romp with nice 16-bit graphics. Sadly, it took me less than an hour to slam my muzzle into its badly designedI'd heard that Everdark Tower is a good beginner's JRPG, so I decided to give it a try. Instead of being my entry point to the genre, however, this game made me want to steer clear of JRPGs forever.
On paper, Everdark Tower was just what I wanted: a short and straightforward RPG romp with nice 16-bit graphics. Sadly, it took me less than an hour to slam my muzzle into its badly designed mechanics. The gameplay revolves around "stars"–a special currency that works in weirdly different ways in the game. You need stars to unlock mandatory choke points in the storyline, but you can also use them to revive yourself after you die in battle, like additional coins in an arcade coin-op. This mechanic makes for some deeply dysfunctional gameplay.
Here is an example: in Chapter 2, I didn't know yet whether stars are more or less important than regular in-game gold–so I decided to spare some gold on items, and use stars to pull myself out of trouble. Right at the beginning of Chapter 3, I found myself in the middle of an unskippable, undelayable combat encounter. As it turned out, there was no way to beat that encounter with the gear I had and the single star I was left with. There was also no way to recover from that situation. I couldn't visit a shop, or roll the game back to the previous chapter. Literally the only way out was to delete my savegame and start the entire game from scratch, getting to that encounter with a couple of additional items–which turned the fight into a trivial clicking exercise.
The whole game is like that: if you have the right item, it's mostly trivial. I could deal with some encounters in a matter of seconds, through the RPG equivalent of button-mashing. Other encounters were boring tug of war exercises, but they still required almost no strategy at all, and they could be solved with the same loop of actions repeated a dozen times. And then there were one or two instances of early fights that made it mandatory to use stars to revive yourself. All in all this game never provided an interesting challenge–just a stream of pointless fights that become mechanical by the last chapter.
To make matters worse, the game's story line feels like it's been written by different people. The ending is competent, and even somewhat profound–but the first few chapters are a giant mess of childish cliches, sometimes bordering on the comical. The main character in particular talks like he's supposed to be the stereotypical cool sullen teenage hero, but he comes across as one of the biggest jerks in the history of gaming. Everybody is kind to him, and he systematically reacts by being a giant douche. The first few dialogue exchanges in the game instantly made me dislike the protagonist.
I came to this game expecting a decent few hours of fun. What I found wasn't worth my time or money.… Expand
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