Beyond the Sunset 斜阳下的彼岸

RPG Maker strikes again! "Beyond the Sunset 斜阳下的彼岸" is one of hundreds of low effort retro-pixel RPG Maker asset/construction kit flips spamming the Steam catalog, made with the RPG Maker video game construction kit... in their own words, "Our easy to use tools are simple enough for a child." Like all RPG Maker "games", this is essentially a bunch of low quality/canned assets from RPG Maker coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club fan fiction. As with all RPG Maker games, the poor quality engine displays badly in fullscreen and doesn't have full HD support or any graphics tweaking options, making this unacceptable for any dedicated modern PC gamer. The point can be made that the intention of RPG Maker is to make demos and small games to pass around friends, and shouldn't be used for "professional" game development. Like most RPG Maker shovelware and asset flips, the game features extremely low quality copy + pasted 2D retro pixel art, looks awful, and has even worse gameplay. RPG Maker is an absolutely terrible construction kit, and never results in games of any reasonable quality or value to gamers. Notably the author here couldn't work out how to use RPG Maker to make an RPG... and that's the only thing RPG Maker can do properly... except it's not even very good for making RPGs. Instead, we have a crap E-book/Interactive novel. Presumably the author couldn't work out how to use the craptastic Ren'Py visual novel construction set, so this E-Book is a matter of using RPG Maker top down view to shuffle between passages of text. Badly written text. There's no English translation for the E-Book, but that's ok. It turns out, the language of bad games is universal. We know it's badly written, even without needing to read any of the Chinese text, because if they could write professionally, they'd be published authors. Instead, gamers have to put up with this non-game E-book trash that's written like a high school anime club dropout fanfiction. I can't stress how bad the amateur writing is here... but the fact they tried to self-publish a book on Steam using RPG Maker should tell you exactly how far you should go to avoid this trash. "Beyond the Sunset 斜阳下的彼岸" is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the E-Book, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. Gamers who want a good retro JRPG experience would be better off playing the originals, like Final Fantasy, Star Ocean or Chrono Trigger. This is also competing with over 9,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.