Grade: B-
A horde of PCs join up to defeat the dark lord in this RPG comedy
I was immediately drawn in by the premise of this oddball top-down RPG. “Why are we fighting the dark lord with just 4-6 characters? Why wouldn’t we bring everyone we’ve ever met to the battle?” So from this starting point, you start the game by going around town and talking to every NPC. All of them, without exception, join you in your quest. At the end of the prologue, 99 NPCs come with you; all have custom skills, stat blocks, and abilities. There are accountants, barbers, merchants, performers, and all of the typical fantasy classes.
The variety is overwhelming, and the lengthy snake train of NPCs that walk behind you is highly satisfying. In your first battle, the dark lord was not expecting to fight a whole town and came underprepared. You defeat him easily.
Gameplay struggles after the strong start
I would have played through this whole game and enjoyed the silliness, but one UI issue kept me from doing a complete play-through. When you are on the battle screen and flipping through characters, there’s no way to reference the archetype of each player. So say I wanted to find Joseph the Accountant to do some financial damage with his “cook the books” ability (a real thing), but you have to remember the NPC “Joseph” is an accountant. On-screen, it just says the name, not the class. I could make my own reference cheatsheet, but that’s work, and screw that.
In addition, the game just got boring after a while. The enemies would take dozens and dozens of hits to kill, and my brain was wholly disengaged when I scrolled through all the NPC options. So the premise of this game was incredible, but the reality was mind-numbing in implementation.
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