ILLUSION

This game was made by someone that was really passionate about making games. He worked so hard on this project all alone for 8 years and started just when he was a kid. I'm writing this review to support the developer and to send him a message to keep making games and keep doing what he loves. A lot of hard work, dedication and love went into this game. And all of this for only the price of 2$? definitely buy this, support the developer that made this awesome nice game.

RPG Maker strikes again! ILLUSION 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." Unlike the vast, vast majority of RPG Maker "games", which are essentially a bunch of low quality/canned assets from RPG Maker coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club fan fiction, the 2D retro pixel art assets here seem to have been made manually, by hand. We can tell this, because they look considerably worse than the stock assets provided with Kadokawa's construction kit for children. The crap high school anime club dropout fan-fiction, however, is completely authentic and absolutely on par with all the other crap RPG Maker asset flips infesting Steam. In fact, this is the 335th crap RPG Maker game I've had the misfortune of reviewing on Steam. It's an epidemic, polluting the Steam store with low quality trash. There's a garbage, meandering, pointless story about a young girl living with an adoptive family who goes looking for a flower that grants wishes. The story is esoteric in nature and seems to have been intended to be somewhat comical? There's no actual comedy. The writing is particularly bad and is either poorly translated or written with a very poor grasp of English... regardless of the reason, the writing is trash. Unfortunately, that's the core of the game, as the RPG elements are a minor component to the game, so RPG fans looking for a crap RPG experience instead of a crap visual novel experience will be disappointed. 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. RPG Maker is an absolutely terrible construction kit, and never results in games of any reasonable quality or value to gamers. Gamers who want a good retro JRPG experience would be better off playing the originals, like Final Fantasy, Star Ocean or Chrono Trigger. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 4 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. ILLUSION is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.