Everybody loves shipping for some reason. I'm not entirely sure why that is, but some weirdo named Bobby Schroeder decided to make a silly RPG centered around the magic of shipping. Lo and behold, everybody thought he was bloody brilliant, and now he's made such splendid progress that his game actually has a demo (with a Mac port). Most fangames, even the ones assembled by big teams, don't make nearly as much progress as Bob has in this short period; in my opinion, he deserves a reward. Somebody go buy him a horse or something to make him feel good.
My thoughts on this lesbian horse preview thing are after the break.
In case it isn't clear from the get-go, SLHRPG is intended to be a non-serious game about female horses kissing and going on all kinds of stupid adventures (like Twilight converting Rainbow Dash's basement into a dungeon and fighting censored spoiler enemies). The demo itself is quite short, but quite dialogue-heavy and contains plenty of weird and wonderful easter eggs. If you really wanted to you could beat it in 5 minutes, but you would really be missing out. Several of them made me laugh out loud, which is extremely rare for a video game. Many games will make you chuckle a little inside, but Super Lesbian Horse RPG is overwhelmingly funny. The weird music and ridiculous character portraits probably had quite a bit to do with it too.
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| You should get that looked into, Fluttershy. |
For the most part the visual style is highly reminiscent of Mother 3, although sadly it lacks the swirly psychedelic battle backgrounds. The game has a decidedly retro feel to it, one that is only disturbed by the antialiased text and the decidedly higher-resolution character portraits. Not that there's anything wrong with that, as SLHRPG is supposed to be a big joke, not an authentic Gameboy Color game. The custom pony sprites are a huge plus; they are a very nice break from those blasted desktop ponies and are positively adorable.
As for the battle system...basically, Bobby just reused the default RPG Maker VX system. None of Earthbound's fancy rolling hitpoints or anything, but at least there aren't any random encounters. Since that the enemies have been spoilered out I can't comment on their designs, but given that the overworld sprites seem to indicate that they are standard slime monsters we can assume that they are, in fact, slime monsters. Nice try, Bobbie Sue. Try harder next time!
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| >SPOILERS |
So that's it. I'll post a full review when the game comes out in June, but in the meantime enjoy the demo!
