Eve of Calamity

This game is amazing, it really lets you just go out into the world and tackle it whatever way you like, the combat is satifying and quick, but bosses can bend over your back if you get too cocky with them. Sometimes you'll find a dungeon that is giving you a hard time, only to go out to the next town, do a few side quests and come back with a vengeance! Or just ignore everything and make a mad dash to the end. It's been a while since I played a game with this much freedom, and it really did scratch an itch I didn't even know I had. I recomend it to any rpg fan to try it out.

Visuals are as seen in the store page's screenshots. Audio is okay. As for the writing... it's not good. But that might be fine; mediocre writing can be excusable as long as the open world design is good. But how do I say this? Exploration does not feel rewarding. Of course this is partially because of the aforementioned mediocre writing making it harder for me to care. Town walker NPCs recycle generic throwaway lines; what purpose do they even serve, other than to randomly step around and into 1-tile wide hallways where they'll annoyingly idle to block your path? The other thing that makes exploration feel unrewarding to me is the random loot in chests, which is a symptom of a bigger problem: loot not being placed deliberately by the designer tells me that the world is not crafted intentionally. I mentioned random loot. Let me also describe my experiences with random encounters and in-combat RNG. At the end of the intro sequence, you are not exactly railroaded but heavily steered towards clearing out what is supposed to be (this is an open world game so you can ♥♥♥♥ off and do whatever instead) the first dungeon: a goblin cave. Inside this dungeon, you can get the 1 Wolf random encounter, which is a walk in the park and can be beaten by just spamming basic attacks, or the 3 Wolves random encounter, which can wreck your ♥♥♥♥ and force you to dip out of the cave and rest. You can get the 1 Goblin random encounter, which is again a walk in the park, or you can get the 1 Goblin Shaman random encounter, which can wreck your ♥♥♥♥ probably harder than the 3 Wolves since it can mass slow your entire party. After running into multiple consecutive hard random encounters in my first incursion into the goblin den, I decided that maybe it would be easier to come back after recruiting a 4th party member. (At this point, you most likely only have 3 party members including your MC.) To this end, I walked around the world map and quickly came across a village where the townsfolk are about to lynch an outsider and you can help rescue (and recruit) them. The village guards started the fight by using their most powerful skills and knocked out my 2 squishies early (targeting them even though my Weapon Master was wearing an aggro-increasing hat) before they could contribute much of anything to the fight, and my frontline had to carry the rest of the fight, barely scraping a win. Since I wanted more EXP for the members that were KO'd, I decided to reload and try the fight again. This time, I got luckier and only 1 squishy got KO'd instantly, and so I had a much easier fight. This was the only notable event in the village. An empty set piece, containing 1 single event and a couple of random treasure chests and foraging patches. But anyhow, I got what I wanted out of that detour. With my full party, I confidently walked back inside the goblin cave, where this time I ended up only seeing the easy random encounters. And at the end, the goblin boss encounter felt easier than the Goblin Shaman random encounter. What an anti-climax. Maybe the real boss was the Shaman all along. Perhaps there is some potential for strategic depth in the combat, but I didn't experience much of that in what I played, where the only real questions I had to ask in my decision-making were "is this fight going to last long enough to justify buffing up" and "is any party member low enough on health to justify spending a turn on in-combat healing". Now obviously, I have less than 2 hours (Steam refund window) of play time. Maybe it does get better. I did catch some glimpses of cool systems (like the potion crafting system, or having class changes and prestige classes along with 10 move slots to cook your own builds) but unfortunately I was not able to experience those systems deeply in my first 2 hours. The only potion recipe I had was for a lesser healing potion (heals 100 HP and can be sold for 25 gold at the general store), which is made from a healing herb (which you can randomly pick from foraging patches and can be sold for 17 gold at the general store). Instead of using these potions to heal my party, I used the basic healing spell Comfort (which costs 10 MP and heals based off Magic stat). I learned this healing spell through a skill book purchased in a shop. Skill books are apparently reusable, so I taught the skill to literally everybody in my party regardless of actual class (because why not, I still haven't filled up all 10 move slots yet anyway). Even for a low Magic stat Berserker, casting Comfort (out of combat, of course --- I'm unlikely to be wasting my DPS's action economy on in-combat healing) is competitive with the lesser healing potion, which makes me wonder why the lesser healing potion even exists if I can instead just buy the cheap MP cost spell's reusable skill book with my starting resources. I picked up this game because I just wanted to play an RPG Maker game with decent combat and lots of good side content, but the overall flaws and the lack of attention to detail that I saw in my first 2 hours (the most important 2 hours where any dev ought to be focusing their efforts on polishing to make a strong first impression and to hook a player past the point of no refund) lead me to believe that this is not that game I was seeking.

Great game

The game is entertaining and has an incredible amount of replayability; the location of companions changes, and they all have unique dialogue depending on the quests you do. Bosses also change. Sometimes, they change elemental affinities or just get swapped entirely, which seems random per run. You also have a lot of freedom when building your and the other party members' abilities, gear, and skills. The game is a fantastic world RPG that has an insane amount of detail, and the fact that it's done in RPG maker is even more absurd. If you like games that are replayable, or just exciting video game experiences, you really ought to do yourself a favor and play this game. Yes, it starts slow; yes, speed is the best stat by a country mile, and once you explore for a while, you can find trivially easy ways to grind things like money if you want to, but this game respects your ability to mess around and find out the consequences. Also, the party members are all great. Flora is the best Aunt.

What i have played of this game is great would highly recommend

Score: 2/5 I purchased EoC based on Humblemud's very positive video review. I will never take him seriously again. With significantly better writing and moderately better mechanical and narrative balance/choices, I would have stuck around to see how the developer(s) handled some of the better ideas/systems/narrative hooks. [b]The Good[/b] 1. Some variety/replayability thru randomized elements. Primarily based on the player's class/mechanical progression choices. Some combat encounters have unexpected twists like [spoiler]bandits bribing you in exchange for their life, or surprise potential party members events[/spoiler]. 2. Freedom of choice for exploration. I was not directly prevented from going almost anywhere by way of invisible barriers, or dumb physical roadblocks, but by mountains or large bodies of water or, less reasonably, absurd difficulty spikes from entering a higher-level zone. 3. Fast movement speed in towns/dungeons and on the world map. 4. Cool boss progression system [spoiler]based on play-time[/spoiler]. 5. I dislike strong meta-gaming in most single-player games, especially speed-running. However, like my appreciation/approval for meta-gaming in Morrowind, or speed-running in Neon White, EoC has good mechanical and narrative support for speed-running (but not the player knowledge meta-gaming required to do so), so I appreciate how it was handled here and want to give credit where credit is due. [b]The Bad[/b] 1. [b]Grinding/Repetition[/b], Balance, and Progression Mechanics a. Leveled zones have large gaps in difficulty, requiring meta-gaming and/or grinding. b. Differences between a character/NPC even comparing their early and mid-game effectiveness/performance is too strong/pronounced. Zero to hero crap (for viable builds/NPC party members). c. Multiple character builds heavily under-perform when approaching mid-game. d. Some choices/strategies for a run (economy/trading in my case) are unbelievably cheesy, but strongly reduce the grind/difficulty of a run (while still being boring and repetitive). Attempting to play the game without cheesing it was moderately boring and highly repetitive for most of my play-time. 2. [b]Writing[/b] Bland and poorly paced. Unbelievable characters blatantly telling the player the plot while placed/engaged in artificial situations. Humor doesn't land. Info dumping. Narrative choices are mostly disappointing, with many having only 1 branch that has a beneficial outcome and the others being uninteresting dead-ends with minor, non-mechanical role-playing benefits (I do not see how attempting to role-play or create your own story in EoC would be anything except disappointing for almost any player). 3. [b]Visuals/Art style[/b] Many parts of the game, especially the characters, are ugly or difficult to tell what you're looking at without the associated text box that has the character name/monster species/description. 4. Some of the music is grating (most is fine or even good).

Eve of Calamity is easily among the best RPG Maker games I've played, standing on its own merits as a worthwhile investment of the 12-ish hours it should take to complete a first playthrough. Though the graphical style is an acquired taste, and in places borrows from RPG Maker MV's default asset pool, this does not noticeably detract from the experience; if anything, the simple (and occasionally ugly) portraits lend a charm to the characters that few games are able to replicate. The writing serves its purpose, which is to communicate information to the player that propels the story forward. Recruitable characters have basic but distinct and established personalities, opening the player to choose from their favorites to bring along into battle. Outside of the opening crawl, world-building is dished out in small doses, rewarding players who choose to explore with a deeper understanding of how the world came to be, what the Calamity is, and why it threatens to return. The player character follows a straightforward but satisfying character arc, beginning the game as a desperate novice and ending it as a hero worthy of the title. The soundtrack has a grungy, unfocused tone that, while not everyone's cup of tea, lends itself well to a world steadily descending into chaos as once-allied regions squabble amongst themselves and a cult dedicated to the Calamity works steadily towards its return. The default RPG Maker sound effects contribute little to the overall feeling, but aren't terribly distracting once you get used to them. The real winning quality of Eve of Calamity, though, is the gameplay. After a short tutorial segment following the game's opening, you are given your first and only real goal: to defeat the Beast of Calamity. From that point on, everything you do is at your own direction, and leads towards that ultimate end. You can visit towns and dungeons, recruit allies, take on quests, and explore the three major nations at your own pace and in whatever order you see fit. Battles are quick and have a satisfying difficulty curve, wasting no time on unnecessary fluff and forcing you to genuinely struggle in the early game, especially before you fill out your party. Once you get into the swing of things, though, you gain the satisfaction of effortlessly cutting down hordes of enemies on your way to the next boss fight. The mechanics are straightforward and easy to understand, and it feels sufficiently rewarding to reach a new class level milestone, unlock a new skill, and figure out how it fits into your battle strategy. As mentioned above, a first playthrough will generally run somewhere in around the 12-hour mark. That's about as long as it takes to visit each town, level up a couple of classes on each of your characters, take care of enough quests to get geared up, and head into the final area to take on the endgame. Even if you try to do everything, it is unlikely you will take more than about 16 hours to complete a run; however, because many of the game's item and character locations are semi-randomized, and there are achievements to earn from reaching the end either very quickly or very slowly, it's easy to justify multiple playthroughs. All in all, Eve of Calamity is a solid game that I would recommend to anyone who enjoys old-school RPGs that value your time.