RPGM - Abandoned - Black Garden [v0.1.9b Alpha] [FeyRing]

Black Garden, honestly when downloading the game I didn't expect much but I liked it quite a bit, or well parts of it. The idea of the game felt a bit refreshing for an RPGMaker.

It takes a while to understand the skills and their underlying system but it's not too hard to get used to. After that it's the usual grind to level them up.

The visuals were something that stood out the most.
While, the game interface and such were nothing to write home about, the environmental visuals (like tree and houses... and the random birds) were simply beautiful.

There isn't much the story yet so not much to say there, but it feels like it'll become something good and worth playing in future.

If it's so good then where things went wrong?

Well, let's start with the whole implementation of the idea of the game.
It's way too grindy, and note when I say "way too" I mean it. There's a certain level of grindy-ness that's acceptable, a bit more in such types of games but it gets a bit too much here, multiplied by the limitations of RPGMaker.

Let's take crafting system for one, level 1->2 for most of such skills is quite acceptable, rather good. But, starting from level 2 the experience rewards feel insufficient against the effort it takes for crafting such items. Many such items require items made through other skills such such as Alchemy, but that skill is locked until you complete Safforn's story, the only other source? Well, hope you get lucky and are able to buy the items from merchant at a way "overpriced" cost.
A few recipes simply felt off in the required item quantities due to lack of any intermediate items, and the RPGMaker limitation of 99 items. Addition of small intermediate items like "Bundle of Werewolf Fur" and so would be nice.

Another thing that felt jarring was a lack of slight tutorial of any kind, apart from help books that you might not even get if you don't check the chest in the queen's room when starting. It took me a while to figure out you can buy skills (a temporary workaround until further game development according to dev) on saturdays from an npc in brothel. The problem? The npc only appears on Saturdays, while a certain dialogue hints this fact, most people don't bother checking every dialogue with every NPC, unless it's for a quest. A little nice quest at start for getting to know the important NPCs in town and distributing the faqs through them would've gone a long way.

There's a few other small nitpicking like how the time goes on even during conversations and so.

tl;dr
A game with really nice visuals and an enormous amount of potential being wasted by being too too grindy and engine limitations.

[Review Version: v0.1.5]

Reviewing Version: [0.1.6b]

So, this game got a update and i got some time to play it. With results on me making review update about it.

First of all, i have to say this game is ambitious for a RPG Maker game, like REALLY ambitious, it contains a somewhat complex system to understand in a first playthrough (expect to lose at least half an hour of your life reading an instruction manual, as it is literally the only thing that teaches you how to play the game), another thing i noticed is that by a game desing point of view, this will be a game that works like a farm simulation game, you will need ALOT of your free time to dedicate to it. Another good thing to talk about it's how BEAUTIFUL the assets are, by far one the best things i ever saw running in RPG Maker VX ACE.

But the biggest downside this game has is the grinding, my GOD how it has gridding, i'm talking about korean MMO levels of griding here. Everything and i really mean EVERY DAMN THING about your character needs to level up, from normal stuff like lockpicking, persuasion to ridiculus stuff like JUMPING OR WOODCUTTING (Because apparently the MC is dumb enough not to how to use a Axe to cut wood or use his legs to JUMP).

I'll give you a simple explanation here of how the EXP system works in this game: You have three types of EXP, BATTLE EXP (you win from battles :v ) CRAFT EXP (You can win this in several ways) and COMBO EXP (You can ONLY win this by converting CRAFT XP and BATTLE EXP, this means you need to lose 1 CRAFT EXP AND BATTLE EXP to gain one COMBO EXP, with sucks alot, this basicly means you will waste the double of your time and resources to upgrade a single skill).

For each skill you need AT MINIMUM 100 XP for it to level up, and how much you win you may ask? From the beggining you probaly only win 1 to 5 BATTLE XP (or 1 to 7 in hero mode) from rats in the goblin mines and 1 to 15 CRAFT XP (hero mode), also yes, ALL SOURCES OF EXP IN THIS GAME IS 100% RNG (With the exception of COMBO EXP), you can kill a rat and he gives you 1 XP, you can reload your save and kill the same rat again and he will give you 7 XP, why there is a random EXP system in a game where you have alot of stuff to upgrade is beyond me. This game literally forced me to download a RPG Maker save editor so i could cheat everything about it to just unlock the content behind the gridding wall. And guess what? The game got really fun for me in most parts, since i finally could advance on it without the warnings of "Ohhh you can't jump on this rock because you don't know how to jump"

Final thoughts: My review has been increased from 2 stars to 3 stars, honestly, it's not a bad game, but the MMO levels of gridding for a offline game will kill the experience for many people (Including destroying my experience with it, but now I have a save editor thanks to this game)

Fun little grindy(play on Hero for less really grindy; dont say you weren't warned by this review if you play on minion) game with only one village of goblins but excellent character skill system for grindy system. I feel like my character makes progress and that other things open up as i grind for them. Grind makes it seem really hard at first but is a rather enjoyable crafting system that is really deep and makes you use several skills to make things. Grind is way better when you are working toward something and not artifical like some games. There is an advanced options in the item list, make sure to select it and turn off loading screens and the description once you have seen them and they become irritating. Hope to see great things with this game in the future. (elves, werewolves and others ohh my)

I'll just state the cons for the most part - Loading into new zones is a bit annoying with the zones name and huge 10 second animation blocking the screen.

Complicated system but thats what you get when you try to build something unique/detailed in a cookie cutter premade UI. I would advise to go back and learn/make a UI that fits with all the things going on with the character, many people are stuck on just the basics, its very ambitious and far exceeds what the UI/menu currently can handle well.

Time flows even when in conversations, I dont think it ever pauses.

Not much H animations/scenes. It is very dialog active though, which is not a bad thing.

some praising-
I really like the character creation, skills/ class's and it is better in many ways in non H games that spout sandbox elements and fall short. Graphics good. Music nice. it reminds me a little of secret of mana, just my opinion.
offspring is great as well and I really hope there will be more development in the area.

I really look forward to see where this games goes, another title I feel if complete, could sell really well on steam.

Let these 4 stars be a show of faith to make people look at the game for its potential.

The game as is will be impossible for most people to play without cheating. The time it takes to grind levels in skills even with infinite resources is already insane. The core mechanic is great however.

There is a lot of sex in the game, although most of it could benefit from more CGs. It should also be noted that i managed to play without losing my virginity to anyone until i got sufficiently far with the goblin chieftain, which can be considered semi consensual. Not being abused is very tiresome however and its probably more fun to play as a manslut simply because it requires almost 0 effort.

If you get past the rocky early game you have a somewhat solid game that i can only look forward to when more developement is put in.

Alright,

First things first, this game has the potential to be amazing. I love the setting, and many of the concept ideas once fleshed out (With more CG's etc) will definitely make this game vastly improved.

It's central flaw(s) is it's incredibly grindy and confusingly complex. To the point where I felt it became necessity to use a save editor to try increase my skills vastly. I'd recommend some simplifying of this branch or something, because it's left me bashing my head against the wall at this point.

Hopefully this score will improve as the game develops, but for now, there's a long way to go yet.

Black Garden is an RPG with big, big aspirations. It has lots of systems in place which seem well thought out but the biggest problem is the game isn't developed enough to implement those. For instance, every race of creatures has a preference, on top of this, you can (potentially) meet ones expectations so much that they attempt to kidnap you. There are other cool ideas semi-implemented like how doing certain things will affect characters and their race as a whole. The most shining example of this is being able to turn a "goblin virgin" into a "goblin milf" by getting her pregnant. But as I said previously, the game isn't anywhere near complete and these ideas feel like a great concept that should come into play in the future. But as long as the creator keeps working on this, it doesn't matter how they approach it, it has some serious potential with the unique gameplay ideas, the semi-customizable character, the weighted decisions, and the great art. I'm going to keep a close eye on this game and update my thoughts accordingly. As of now this is a strong start but it's just missing a lot of the basics to make it a solid early version.

As it currently stands this game has a lot of potential to be pretty great but in it's current state it's overall pretty terrible. Experience rates are abysmally low making it so any progress you want to make will take ages. Leveling up most skills takes 100 crafting experience but every task you do tends to give you between 1 and 5 and with this one type of experience shared between like 8 different skills you can imagine how much of a pain this is. This also applies to battle experience but with less competition for leveling. Although to go even further you need one of each experience to craft a combo experience which is used exclusively for skills that aren't quite crafting or combat or quite literally a combination of the two.

The issue with experience combined with the fact that you start with literally a single item to your name (a pet bunny, awful knuckle dusters, or a +1 luck ring) the entire beginning of the game is designed as a failure. Theres only one merchant and the stock is always changing each day, theres no weapons or armors available other than crafting them yourself (you're pretty much fucked if you didn't pick smithing and mining as now you'll need to farm exp and money to unlock it), and the entirety of the game is designed specifically around having skills to do literally anything what so ever.

The biggest issue with having so many skills and so many tasks for each specific skill is that it suddenly creates this void where theres so much to do but literally no way to do any of it. You can, at best, get 7 skills at the very beginning by sacrificing all your stats to be level 1 which means you can do pretty much nothing when it comes to combat and checks. Otherwise ideally you're going to pick somewhere between 2 to 4 skills and make your stats the base human stat of 2 which honestly should be there by default. Starting you out at 1 puts you at an extreme disadvantage because a single point really does make a huge difference which means your use of memory points is limited further at the beginning of the game.

So with so many skills needed, an absolute fuck ton of experience required, and being severely under powered, where does that exactly leave you as a player? Pretty much doing a few tasks at most for days and days just grinding experience and trying to unlock skills and what not. The worst part is that there isnt a skill trainer for each task the goblin village has. Apparently theres a merchant that comes to the 2nd floor brothel every saturday that sells books for 20 silver but with no skills or combat prowess to make money you're likely not even going to be able to afford it. A decent lay at the brothel can net you a single silver if you're skilled enough for perfect sex but that'll still take a few days of grinding your stats.

Overall the game shows a lot of promise but honestly it feels like it has no direction at all except to be excessively grindy to the point where you'd have to play for hours just to accomplish the most mundane goal. The entire beginning of the game is designed so horribly that you have so much to do and at the same time can do nothing except one or two things. It has such a wide variety of tasks as a concept yet restricts you so excessively you can't do any of it at all.

It seems okay for a 0.1 but there are far too many holes in the gameplay.
1. There are too little Memory points and in relation to the necessary skills.
2. For a MC the beginning stats are too low. unless you level them up using Memory Points, everything starts at one point.
3. Fetishes are too easy to get and too demanding to get rid of.
4. Making money is almost impossible.
5. Either the MC is too Weak or the Night monsters are too strong.
Until these issues have been addressed my rating with remain at two stars.