Spirit Engine 2 is a near perfect RPG. It combines the kind of gripping story and dialogue that you find in interactive fiction with the character advancement and monster bashing of RPGs. The graphics are simple pixel art yet stylish with a hint of Japanese Anime flavor. Even better is the music; many indie games don't even have music, but for Spirit Engine 2 the talented Josh Whelchel, composed fanatastic soundtrack that weaves emotion into the dialogue. The story is well written, but almost completely linear--to the point that plot-altering choices may be an illusion. However, you forget about the linear plot, because you become focused on the the characters and how they deal with the problems they face.
Spirit Engine 2 uses a skill-based RPG system similar to the pencil-and-paper RPG GURPS or its derived cousin, the Fallout games. You beat monsters for experience points, and leveling up gives you skill points to spend on different skills.
Two reasons why you should play this thing:
The dialog is deeply engaging; you are never tempted to click your way through without reading. You can play from nine pregenerated characters that are thoroughly fleshed out, each with a unique background, and and each reacting differently to every situation. Each character keeps a diary, and it is fun to read how each character sees and feels about what is going on. Spirit Engine 2 has the most believable and well-developed characters I have seen any RPG; on top of that, the story is completely unpredictable.
Spirit Engine 2 is a resource management game. The skill points allow you to specialize or diversify in specific skills. Unlike typical skill-based RPGs, you earn Skill Refund points along with your experience points that allow you to take skill points away from one skill to enhance another. This enhances the resource management element; you must shift skill points to increase skills that are more effective against specific enemies, such as a boss. This breaks suspension of disbelief to a degree -- how does one unlearn a skill and master another skill in the same day? -- but the loss is forgivable, since resource management adds another layer of interesting strategy.
The only thing that keeps this game from perfection is that even on "Easy" setting, I have a hard time beating some of the bosses.
Spirit Engine 2 was once $15 but has become freeware since February of this year -- a great price for the 2008 Game Tunnel RPG of the year.
The perils of the obvious
It seems the challenge of this game is to find the optimum setup for each skirmish. If you know the secret combo, then the fight itself is easy. So it's a kind of puzzle game. Skill point relocation is necessary, because if player invested in "wrong" skills, they wouldn't be able to optimise. As for rationalisation, I guess you could say characters shift focus between skills rather than learning or un-learning them.
The biggest mistake this game's author made was to assume every player would be just as familiar with the mechanic of the game as he was. There are about 10 skills for each character, three character classes, five damage types, and a few rule-breaking actions. On top of that, damage resistance plays a major role, but the game uses the most complex model it can without resorting to nonlinear relations.
So it does start as a puzzle game, but it quickly devolves into guesswork. You just can't juggle this many variables in memory.
Once you've played for long enough, you begin to understand the system intuitively. But the game doesn't even give itself a fair chance, because not only did I have to rely on guessing, but most skirmishes produced stalemates. It seems like battles tend to drag on by design, given the prevalence of regeneration mechanics (you can't even knock the enemy out for good!). A pity, really, because it does feel like it could actually be interesting, if given some polish.
This is actually a fairly difficult game design challenge, so the author is largely excused. After all, what most commercial games do is tone down the difficulty to the point where an optimisation mechanic not unlike this one becomes irrelevant. That's not a solution to a problem - that's just giving up.
One way to manage complexity is to limit the number of changes in the system that can happen in a given amount of time. We want five damage types? Fine, but let's start with just one, and then add another one once an hour. The player is supposed to optimise their setup? Great, but don't expect them to tweak all fifty parameters at the same time.
By the way, the writing is heavy-handed and follows the usual jRPG-ish convention of elaborate overstatement, but I can see how the characters could appear "deep". They all have a whooping total of two personality traits instead of just one.
Ambitious Attempt
JZW, I hear 'ya. The developer was ambitious and did a fantastic job on art, music, story, and gameplay. What needed more work is a detailed tutorial of the combat system and monster encounter and boss battle balance.
BTW the manual is excellent and explains everything, including the details of the formulae of combat system.
Perhaps if he has team, he could iron those issues out.
JZW, I think your proposing
JZW, I think your proposing rigid difficulty scaling - which is the problem you identify with the authors work - he's set the difficulty to suit him. If you install a rigid difficulty, then you'd just make a difficulty suited to you, which doesn't solve the problem.
I think one (perhaps simplistic) way to have fluid difficulty is that less skilled players have some grinding activity they can do, which lowers the difficulty of the challenge the more it's ground. While a skilled player can skip the grind. But as you say, commercial games just water down challenge entirely.
~~~
Philosopher Gamer Blog
My latest short game - Bullet Prose: Have No Part
A different take on RPG/Adventure design
@sebastian,callan: Guys, I am looking ahead to your opinion about my roleplaying adventure game, to be released this summer. Hopefully it receives some coverage here at PTT.
Dev background and tech tidbits here.
More "on hands" info and bullet lists at the product page at one of our distributors. (sorry about the poor page design there, I created a brushed up version to replace it, but the tidied-up page is non-public yet)
100 Rogues - hyper-simplicity over complexity?
You may want to check out the iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad game 100 Rogues. It's kind of on the other spectrum of The Spirit Engine, as a hyper-simplified Roguelike. It is almost puzzle-like in that the game revolves largely around the decisions a player makes given the situation presented to them, rather than focusing on things like inventory and stats. It's surprisingly fun.