Reaper's Odyssey

Lucky me gets to the dubious honour of being the first to review yet another SRPG creator asset flip/construction kit job from this shovelware developer. Reaper's Odyssey is one of hundreds of low effort retro-pixel JRPG construction kit asset/construction kit flips spamming the Steam catalog, made with the SRPG Studio (it's even worse than RPG Maker!!!) Like all JRPG construction kit "games", this is essentially a bunch of low quality/canned assets from the "drag and drop" construction kit coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club fan fiction. As with all SRPG Studio games, the poor quality engine displays badly 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 JRPG construction kits like RPG Maker and SRPG Studio is to make demos and small games to pass around friends, and shouldn't be used for "professional" game development. Like most JRPG construction kit shovelware and asset flips, the game features extremely low quality copy + pasted 2D retro pixel art, looks awful, and has even worse gameplay. SRPG Studio is an absolutely terrible construction kit, and never results in games of any reasonable quality or value to gamers. The game itself is a very badly written badly translated, painfully generic fantasy themed high school anime club dropout fanfiction... it's so bad it's literally painful to try to play. The implementation here is of such poor quality, the developer couldn't work out how to make the SRPG Studio display in fullscreen, it only runs in a window. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. 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 game all-time peak player count was only ONE player. That's right, only one person ever played this at a time. When I played this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak player count for the game. OUCH. 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 110,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ games on Steam? Reaper's Odyssey has the comically over-optimistic price of $15 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, 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. For comparison, the $15 asking price for this game could get you games like "Phantasmophobia", "SCUM" or "Divinity: Original Sin 2". No pixelcrap is worth $15. If developers want to get paid the same kind of money as real game developers who know how to do graphics properly, they need to learn how to do graphics properly, and not use crappy construction kits instead of doing the job of a real game developer. [quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b] Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]