RPG #20: Monster's Den Review

Monsters' Den isn't your typical Japanese-style RPG made in Flash. Instead, it feels a great deal like flash Dungeons and Dragons. You begin the game by creating a party of four characters. You have five classes to choose from--Warrior, Cleric, Mage, Ranger, and Rogue--each with their own strengths and weaknesses. You are then thrown into a randomly-generated dungeon and left to explore and fight.




Because the dungeons are randomly generated, every game is different. Relatively-speaking, that is. You can expect pretty much the same thing out of every game, however: a series of rooms. Some will have loot, others will have battles that yield you loot if you win. Needless to say, loot collecting is pretty central to advancement in the game.

You can only see the rooms you've been in and those adjacent to them, so exploration is the other major motivating force here. The random dungeon generation definitely helps with this, since you never know what's up ahead...except that, generally speaking, it's going to be rooms that are empty, have loot, or have monsters. A little bit more variety in the randomly generated room content would have helped make the game more compelling. (The shrines in Diablo come immediately to mind.)

Regardless, there's something to be said for simplicity, and Monsters' Den is definitely fun. If you grew up on AD&D and the games that it spawned (I'm looking at you, Eye of the Beholder), you'll probably think this game's a blast.

Biclops Games, the creators of the series, have recently released an updated version of Monsters' Den called Monsters' Den: Book of Dread. It contains the first game, plus a new campaign and a survival mode. It also contains a couple of new character classes, the ability to buy and sell items, and better in-game music.

The interface is more polished as well for the most part, though inexplicably, the character and options selection screens do not feature a "back" button. This means that once you select a campaign or a party, you'll have to either reload the game or start playing and then quit to change your selections. This isn't a huge problem, but it can be annoying. Additionally, the loading time has doubled from the first release, so those with slow connections may opt to the play the original instead.

RPG #19: Sonny Review

Sonny, by Krin Juanbanich of Sinjid fame, is probably the most popular RPG in Flash as of the time of this writing. Sonny begins with an interesting and mysterious premise: you have been killed on board a ship, and yet you are somehow brought back to life as a reanimated corpse, minus all your memories, by a blind man named Louis.

Sonny wastes no time throwing you into the action with a scripted tutorial battle. For anyone who played Sinjid, the structure of the battles--and indeed, of the game itself--should be pretty familiar. You spend the whole game fighting a series of turn-based, Final Fantasy-style battles. You can recover and upgrade equipment in between these battles, and if you gain a level, you will have a point or two to spend upping your stats and progressing through a detailed skill tree. Other than this, there's very little to do outside of combat.

There are some major improvements here over Sinjid, however, that help make up for the limitations of the game's extremely linear format. For one thing, battles are much more engaging. This is so in part because the engine is slicker, with support for multiple characters on each side of the battle and a neat camera system that follows each character as it attacks. The vastly improved graphics and music certainly don't hurt things, either.




Also, the abilities seem more well-balanced, with a good variety to choose from right from the very beginning that make a real difference in terms of your combat strategy. More powerful abilities have a longer "reload" time and cost you more "focus" (magic points, essentially--in spite of the similar name, focus in Sonny doesn't work the way it does in Telepath RPG. You can skip turns till you're blue in the face and you won't regenerate any focus).

Ultimately, the thing that keeps Sonny engaging in spite of its linear structure and repetitive gameplay is the sheer amount of scripted dialog and plot events that occur during combat. We get all of the plot development we need sandwiched right into the nonstop battling format, and it actually works fairly well. The voice acting is great and the dialog is reasonably well-written, both of which keep it believable. Just as importantly, however, is that the format itself allows us to get the juicy tidbits of the story without sacrificing the instant gratification of constant, unending action. Just don't expect very good character development out of the equation.

In some ways, the linear nature of the game itself is a plus--we don't have to figure anything out. We just have to beat the battles while the story is spoon-fed to us. If trudging around a world map, talking to townspeople to trigger quests, and being attacked randomly could all be evaporated out of the Final Fantasy series, we'd probably be left with a crisp residue very much like Sonny. And while it's hardly the deepest RPG around, there's a reason Sonny is so popular: it's really fun, and easy to play casually. If you haven't played Sonny yet, do yourself a favor and go do so!

RPG #18: Mystic Circle Review

The last couple of months have seen a wide variety of notable new Flash RPGs appear. One of the less-recognized new releases would have to be Mystic Circle. With nice in-game graphics and a versatile game engine, Chapter 1: The Magic Mirror holds some promise, though it does have a few rough edges.

Mystic Circle is probably the first Flash RPG I've seen that contains a full-fledged quest log, as well as the first to let you create your own items. The Quest Log is quite detailed, and does a great job of helping you keep track of what's going on. It would be a great feature if there were a greater variety of quests for it to keep track of.

Unfortunately, once you've completed your training quest, Mystic Circle doesn't even bother with the pretense of a storyline. The guy in charge of your encampment--Babicil--promptly informs you that he has no idea what you should do next, and from there on in, the game consists of wandering around, looking for broken pieces of the goddess's magic mirror.

Combat in Mystic Circle is straightforward, and the game's control scheme offers some variety, though overall it doesn't feel quite as polished as it should. You have the option of moving around either with the WASD keys, the arrow keys, or by clicking your destination the screen with your mouse, Diablo-style. It would be nice if the rest of the controls were better thought-out, however: you can only attack enemies by using the keyboard, and you can only interact with NPCs and objects in the environment by clicking on them with the mouse. This gets somewhat confusing, and can actually get you killed when you're trying to open a door, a chest, or just respond to an in-game prompt in the middle of combat.

Mystic Circle shows a lot of promise, and for those out there looking for a fairly full-featured action RPG to play around with, this is a good choice.