Review: War of Harmony IV

War of Harmony IV 

(Download)
The game does contain some grimdark content, in case that bothers you.

 On May 12th a demo for some RPG Maker game named War of Harmony IV was released, oddly enough without other WoH games I to III. Perhaps Marshall Ruffy thought the roman numeral 4 looked neat, and decided to quietly include it with the game in the hopes that nobody would ask about the missing first three instalments in the "series", or he could be planning on releasing the other entries later on and out of order (the latter of which seems the most likely, given some of his recent tweets). Either way, it's still kind of a weird decision in naming, one that the game itself will hopefully make up for.

As usual, you can find the rest of the review after the break.



 Unlike a good portion of fangames (the vast majority of which are relatively simple Flash games), War of Harmony IV actually has somewhat of a plot, albeit one that vaguely resembles a somewhat generic piece of "epic" fanfiction. It starts off with Rarity and Pinkie Pie venturing into the Everfree Forest to find their missing friends and shortly thereafter throws them into a "Lunar Republic vs Solar Empire" conflict, with Sethisto's non-dragon waifu being involved somehow and using her "regretful victimized woobie" persona. More can be discovered about the plot by following the various alignment paths, if the player decides the game warrants another playthrough.

 Thing is, completing one playthrough takes much longer than one might expect, thanks to some rather annoying bugs that can obscure the screen with gothic script upon entering a room or even give the player an entirely unusable save file after using a certain save prompt that appears shortly after beating a boss. Using multiple save files per game and saving every couple minutes is a pretty good idea unless you're some kind of especially determined sadomasochist. As of now, I've already had to restart the game several times and spent much time replaying large sections that could have been spent advancing the plot if things worked properly.

Touching a statue with glowing eyes probably isn't the brightest of ideas, but Rarity doesn't have much of a choice here.

 Regardless of its issues, WoH IV can be fairly enjoyable on those occasions when it is working properly. It places far more of an emphasis on dialogue and exploration than grinding, which is quite a relief because the combat tends to be somewhat unsatisfying. Bosses tend go down far too quickly, and when combined with the overabundance of health and mana restoration areas the player is rarely in any real danger, which is quite disappointing even for a RPG not focused on combat. I kind of got the impression after playing for a while that Marshall's intention is more to tell an interactive story than anything else, which is fine with me because War of Harmony IV manages to accomplishe that goal for the most part (notwithstanding a few grammatical errors).

 As with the majority of RPG Maker projects I've seen, this one makes fairly extensive use of the default tilesets and music, but stands out by using them in a tasteful manner and not taking advantage of the default enemies (which get really old after you see them in a half-dozen games). Mixed in with the soundtrack are several original pieces by Som3thingUX, which are pretty good but don't stand out as being particularly memorable. There's also some minor visual effects, such as drifting fog and blood rain, that aren't really impressive from a technical perspective but are fairly nice touches, even if the blood felt a bit out-of-place in this type of game.


 To put it bluntly, I have rather mixed feelings about War of Harmony IV. It's not bad or anything like that, but some stability issues prevented me from getting far enough into the project to decide whether I liked it or not. Until a bugfix release comes out, I'll just slap a temporary 5/10 on the project and re-review it once Marshall is able to fix it up a tad.

 Also, I have a sneaking suspicion that the issues I encountered may have been related to my running the game in Wine, although since Windows 8.1 broke my dual-boot setup I'm unable to confirm or deny this. If it's true, however, I might have to re-review things sooner than I thought...

Twilight Sparkle vs Trixie

Twilight Sparkle vs Trixie

 As most people probably figured out by reading the game's title, Twilight Sparkle vs Trixie is about Twilight and her would-be arch-nemesis casting spells at each other. For some stupid reason they decided to position themselves on opposite sides of a hill, which means that they'll be blindly tossing spikeballs and whatnot over it in an attempt to damage their foe. Thing is, the multiplayer feature doesn't appear to be working at the moment and the singleplayer AI has incredibly bad aiming skills. In the course of a long match against it I was never hit once, unless you count the time I had a shield equipped. I can understand wanting to make a game that's easy to get into, sure, but there isn't much of a point in coming back if there's no real challenge.

Why on earth am I shoving all this weird stuff behind the break

Review: War of Harmony IV

War of Harmony IV

War of Harmony IV is an RPG created by Marshal Ruffy which has been under development for quite some time now. You may remember Tuxxy reviewing an earlier build of the game, so I'd like to begin by saying I will NOT take into account that review. I will be reviewing this as if it were an entirely new game. As always, check below the break for the review.

Okay, first of all, I'd like to start off with a pretty clear warning:

THIS GAME HAS SOME PRETTY DARK AND MORBID THEMES. IT ALSO CONTAINS BLOOD.

With that out of the way, let's start with the review. I have a lot of stuff to cover so sit down and get comfy.

Now, about the game's mechanics, it has the standard aspects of an RPG such as Final Fantasy. Outside of battle you move along the map with your first party member, followed by the rest. If you touch an enemy, it starts a battle. Nothing too out of the ordinary. It has a standard equip system, in which you can equip an offense item, a defense item, a magic offense item, a magic defense item, and an accessory(although I did not find any during my playthrough, but I might have missed them).

The battle style is also fairly standard, having your normal attack, Magic abilities, a Guard command which heavily reduces damage taken and the ability to use Items.

Your main character is Rarity, and you are accompanied through most of the game by Pinkie Pie. Trixie is an optional character, and deciding to take her with you or not influences the way the story plays out, as well as activating "Hard Mode" if you decide to add her to your party.

Graphics wise, the game has some strong points and weak points. The backgrounds and general scenario presented look pretty good, the sprites and animations of the ponies are nice as well, but they are quite lacking in amount of animations and the characters and the background don't mix very well together.

Music wise, I liked most of the music presented in the game. It was pretty catchy and pleasant to listen to. Most of the themes in the game have a piano and strings as the main instrument. (Please don't kill me if I said something wrong, I'm not an expert on music.)

But now we get to the main focus of this game...the story. Oh man, this one is long.

The story is very difficult to actually describe, so I will not be explaining it directly, since it is better that you experience it for yourself, and also because, as I mentioned before, it contains some morbid stuff, but I will try to list the good and the bad things I saw in it. First of all, the game is presented in a scenario that, while it's not so common, has been done before in some stories, which is that it starts you off already in the middle of a story. That means two important things: Something already happened, and the characters already know that something happened.

However, here is where I saw the first problem with the story. Most stories that present this scenario usually have the characters themselves do the explaining through either reminiscing or by recounting the events to a character that does not know them. The game did this to an extent, but left too many holes, which makes it hard for the player to be able to properly string together the information they have. As far as I know, this game is the first one of a series of four, which means it should at least give the player something to properly understand instead of scattered bits of information that cannot be connected with each other. It doesn't have to tell the whole story, but at least an understandable part of it that gives the player a clue as to why they are doing what they are doing.

For a good point, those bits of information you gather through the story are quite interesting by themselves, and they have quite a bit of substance each.

As for the pacing of the storytelling...it's not very good. It's quite erratic and tends to break the immersion one can have. Sometimes it jumps too quickly from plot point A to plot point B and doesn't make a smooth transition, and sometimes it takes too much time to close an important point of the story, making it feel too drawn out.

Pinkie Pie, and to a lesser extent Trixie, tend to break the fourth wall regularly.

Now, an interesting thing this game has, is that it gives you "Reputation", which is a value that determines how you(Rarity) stand in the eyes of Pinkie and Trixie(If you chose to take her with you). Of course, as one may expect, this reputation meter is based on the choices you make during conversations and special events within the game, and it determines how certain parts of the story will happen. The bad thing about this, at least for me, is that the game tells you exactly what influence your choice will have on your reputation, removing the possibility of the player having to think a choice carefully due to not wanting to lose(or gain) reputation.

In the end, all the branching paths the story can take give some replay value to the game.

The story itself, as I said, left me with quite a few more questions than I would have liked, and which I know probably won't be answered within the next games in this series. However! At the same time, the parts of the story the game gave me were enough to keep me interested and wanting to seek more information, so in the end, it fulfilled part of its purpose, which is to keep the player interested. Now it's just a matter of seeing if it can fulfill the other part, which is to give satisfaction and closure to the player when the series finally ends.

So, after all this gibberish I've been spouting, I think it's time for the score, don't you think?

I give War of Harmony IV a 6/10.

It had its flaws, I will not lie about that. However, it did manage to capture my attention and hold it, and the gameplay, while not the best, was acceptable.

Side note: I'm sorry if this review seems of lower quality than my previous ones, it was quite difficult for me to review this game, since I am not very good at reviewing storytelling, which was what I had to focus on the most.

Review: Rainbow Dash Shooter Project

Rainbow Dash Shooter Project

Ever since their release the Desktop Ponies sprites have been used in almost everything. Yes, they are good-looking retraux pony sprites but at times one likes to see developers do their own sprite work for a change. I can say from experience that the main problem seems to be that four-legged characters are rather hard to animate properly and simply using a standard set of sprites saves much time and lets the developer work on things other then character animation. The creator of the dully-titled Rainbow Dash Shooter Project claims that his game's graphical resources were created entirely by himself, and this may be either a good or bad thing depending on his artistic talents.

Of course, it is not the graphics that matter most as the gameplay, so how has this project turned out? Find out after the break.

Of all the sidescrolling shooters that I've seen come out of this fandom this one has to be the most ambitious. The player starts off controlling either Rainbow Dash or an OC created within the game itself (more on that later), and can eventually unlock Fluttershy and Derpy, the latter of which must be obtained by finding a special code either ingame or in the game's comments. Each character has their own special abilities but they can all fly, shoot magic fireballs and enter "overdose mode", which basically speeds up gameplay and enables the player to fire at an absurdly fast rate.

At times one almost wishes that the entire game could be played in Overdose mode.

Unfortunately things get worse fast. Unlike other titles such as the splendidly-made Dash the Rainbow Dash Shooter Project lacks a sense of speed and the sluggish controls make you feel like you're not flying, but swimming in a pool of mud. There is also a very small variety of enemies, and until the first boss is complete the player is stuck fighting large swarms of parasprites. Thankfully once the player reaches Cloudsdale a couple new foes are added to the lineup, although you'll still be mostly fighting parasprites throughout the entire game. To be honest it gets boring quite fast, although the addition of a couple bosses helps considerably.

The game's first boss is Trixie, who is apparently too lazy to perform a levitation spell like unicorn OCs can and is being pulled in a flying cart by Fluttershy. She starts off extremely boring, just slowly firing bullets at the player, but it's once you start to damage her that things get hectic. The game practically switches genres from a plain old shooter to a fully-fledged bullet hell game, although the execution is rather sloppy. In the final stages there is no logic as to where the bullets appear from, and the sluggish controls make dodging the high-speed magical projectiles nigh impossible. As almost everypony realizes it is far more fun to skillfully dodge bullets at high speed, not soaking up damage as possible without dying and with the grace of an overfed seal that can barely swim in it's aquarium pool without sinking.

Thankfully Cloudsdale isn't quite as dull as the stages before it.

As for the graphics...I'll just say that the Rainbow Dash Shooter Project looks quite dull. The occasional passing cloud makes things slightly more interesting, but in general the scenery which you will be flying by is completely bare. It also seems that like many people the artist has a difficult time drawing ponies, and it shows. It's nice that he made the effort of designing his own puppets in Flash, but I really wish that he had just used either the My Little Pony Flash Resource Kit or the Double Rainboom puppets instead of his own work, as it would have improved the game's look immensely. Letting the player use  OCs in the game was a nice touch, although it seems that cutie marks do not import properly  after uploading them and they come out as a garbled mess. There also seems to be a distinct lack of manes and accessories to choose from although thankfully it seems that more shall be added to the game fairly soon.


Let me get this straight: the Rainbow Dash Shooter Project could have been a great game, but poor execution ruined it. Put simply, this game was boring. The game looked dull, the controls were sluggish, and fighting endless swarms of parasprites grew tedious quickly. I had high hopes for this project, but they were shot down as soon as I began to play and were so heavily damaged that they were unable to fly again. To make this game better one would have to loosen up the controls, entirely revamp the graphics, tweak a couple bosses and BAM! We'd have a must play on our hands. Thankfully the game is still under development so hope is not lost yet, so why don't you play the game for yourself and give the creator some feedback, eh?

Demo: Trilight

Download Trilight Demo

It's a cold, dark, stormy afternoon (at least, it is where I live) and that puts me in the mood for pony horror games! Trilight is probably better described as "puzzle-horror" - the game puts more emphasis on creatively interacting with the environment than creepiness - but it fills the void all the same.

Flipping between Applejack, Rainbow Dash, and the Great and Powerful Trixie, the player must make their way through a darkened landscape full of traps and mysterious shadow ponies. Each of the three playable characters has their own powers - bucking, flying, and conjuring shadowy blocks - to help overcome obstacles along the way. The demo's only a few short levels long, and never gets very technical along the way, but it's enough to hint at the puzzles and thrills to come in the game's full version. 

My only complaints are a couple of hit box bugs that occur when you run or jump into an immovable object - sometimes, you'll end up sliding backwards or stuck when trying to jump upwards. Still, that shouldn't slow you down much. Have at it!

Edit: The team's looking for a writer and artists - check the comments for more information.

Game: Quickspell

Download it Here!
Note: You'll need 7zip or similar extraction software to play on Windows, plus additional software to play on Mac or Linux. 

If you were at Everfree NW this past weekend (it was an absolute blast, by the way), you may have noticed this game being played extensively in the Gaming Room. It's called Quickspell, and it was created in 48 hours by Sind and Amadiro for the Crystal Games Challenge. It was programmed using the LÖVE Framework, and features sprites from Urimas and music from RoccoW.

The game is a simple two-player game where the object is to knock your opponent off their pillar using magic. During each players' offensive turn, they cast up to four different spells using either the arrow keys or WASD. The other player must cast defensive spells that correspond to the color of the spell being cast. If the defensive spells are correct and are timed well, very little damage will be taken.

Quickspell is a very fun and quick multiplayer game, and it's still in development. I'll definitely be watching for the revamped version of this game. Edit: Download link updated to newer version.

The Sparklepeep Season 3 Minigame Compilation

Several months ago, Sparklepeep over on DeviantArt resolved to make a minigame for every episode of season 3. As the season flashed past, the games just kept coming, and finally, the set is (almost) complete! Find them all below the break!

Episodes 1 and 2:

Flight of the Crystal Princess
Or play on the Equestria Gaming Arcade

In Flight of the Crystal Princess, avoid spikes, collect crystal hearts, and generally try to stay airborne until Ride of the Valkyries wraps up. Surviving may be tricky, but overall this game's not the most engaging or inventive of the bunch.

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Episode 3:

Pinkie Pie Population Perforation Project
Or play on the EQG Arcade

Man, I'd forgotten some of the crazy stuff that went down at the beginning of this season. Forget the hiatus, I have some re-watching to do!

This is actually one of my favorite minigames in the series: it's inventive, skill-based, and has a catchy soundtrack. Blast the duplicate Pinkies with the twibeam, but don't hit the real one!

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Episode 4:

Ye Old Time Foal Slap Simulator
Or play on the EQG Arcade

By this time, any anger and frustration you might have towards Babs Seed has probably subsided. However, if her undefinable manehattan accent still makes you want to smack her silly, this is the game for you. Knock Babs up in the air, aiming for combos and height records - my personal best is 29.65 Scootameters.

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Episode 5:

Thrack It Trixie
Or play on the EQG Arcade

This one earns a medal both for addictiveness and sheer random hilarity. Playing as the Great and Powerful Trixie, teleport around the Pies' rock farm, harvesting the valuable crop to save up for the Alicorn Amulet. Unfortunately, the farm is under attack from an army of untrustworthy wheels.

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Episodes (6 and?) 7:

Pit Ponies

Breaking the trend of earlier minigames, Pit Ponies is a short text adventure starring you and one Rainbow Dash. Injured and stuck at the bottom of a pit, you must dream up a way to escape. Spoiler alert: hugging Dash results in your eventual death from blood loss.

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Episode 8:

Applejack Episode
Or play on the EQG Arcade

Heh heh, Applejack episode. This game could have been made before the episode aired. Anyhow, Applejack's finally earned her 22 minutes of screen time and character development! Click the background ponies away before they steal the spotlight!

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Episode 9:

Pinkie Pie Has a Mustache
Or play on the EQG Arcade

Just the right mustache is the quickest way to peg a character as a dastardly villain. Pinkie's conspired to blast Applejack out of a cannon into a hornet's nest, and it's up to Spike to stop her! At lower levels, this game boils down to a lot of tedious spacebar-holding, but after you've caught Applejack several times the difficulty improves.

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Episode 10:

Catch Fluttershy's Beaver
Or play on the EQG Arcade

Seems Applejack's had just about enough of the beavers mucking around in her orchard. A simpler re-skin of the Friendship is Witchcraft-inspired game Raincloud Defense. Catch the beavers!

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Episodes 11 and 12:

Games Ponies Don't Play
Play this game on EqG's Arcade or Xtux will steal your kidney while you're not looking.

Two (well, sort of three) games in one for one episode in two! Playing as Angel Bunny or Applejack, press keys in quick succession to escape from Spike and Sheriff Silverstar on top of a speeding train. If you manage to survive 60 seconds in either game, you unlock a secret third minigame. I won't spoil it here, but if you fail to unlock it, you're not missing much.

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Bonus:

Raincloud Defense 2: Moonbounce

Our hero Raincloud returns again, in the sequel to his self-sacrificing game of cherry bomb defense. Keep the moon up in the air for as long as possible to save Equestria!