Indie developers have been making games honoring the so-called ‘golden age of JRPGs’ for far longer than the age itself ever lasted. Glance at any role-playing game community on any given week and there will be something new marketing itself as the spiritual successor to something or other. Diehard Japanese RPG fan that I am, I look into each and every one of them.
The latest title to pique my interest isOn A Journey, developed and published by Mowlo Silk using the RPG Maker MZ engine. There’s no word yet on a release date, but I was given the opportunity to check out the game’s now public demo, and overall, I like what I’ve seen. If you’re as imprisoned by this subgenre as I am, I’d wager there’s a fair chance that you’ll like what you see, too.
On A Journey’s preview experience is relatively short. I was quickly introduced to two of the story’s main characters, the middle-aged and muscular Uther and his junior partner, Tristan. They’re on a bridge, and their plan is to leap down onto a moving train, plant some explosives on some ethically questionable cargo, and get off the train no worse for wear.
Uther and Tristan are freedom fighters against a tyrannical kingdom; the cargo is meant to enrich said kingdom. It’s simple stuff, but I get the sense there’s more going on with On A Journey’s setup than meets the eye in the limited demo. In any case, right off the bat, I was tasked with timing a button press for a quick time event to get these two lads safely onto the train. As I would learn over the next 30 or so minutes, Mowlo Silkreallyloves this quick time event bar.
That’s not to say I was put off by it. Quick time events get a bit of an automatic eye roll sometimes, but every instance within On A Journey’s demo was simple, forgiving, and designed to immerse the player just a little bit more in a game that, while pleasant-looking, is understandably limited by its RPG Maker roots. What I’m trying to say here is that I enjoyed needing to quickly push the left and right buttons a bunch of times to cut a rope later in the demo, because it was a nice sprinkle of additional gameplay seasoning over a dish that I would have forgiven for being a tad bland.
Which brings me to the roots of that dish: the battle system. I want to emphasize that this is a short preview of On A Journey. Plenty more might unlock over time. The train mission, however, only manages to showcase some rudimentary tidbits. Uther casts ice spells; Tristan casts lightning spells. (As does Tristan’s sister, Izzy, who joins midway through the demo.) Your enemies are iron-clad knights and mechanical menaces; broadly speaking, it’s Tristan’s and Izzy’s lightning spells that do the heavy lifting against their obvious elemental weakness.
When a character takes enough damage, their ‘Fury’ meter fills to its maximum, at which point they use a special multihit attack to whack a foe for loads of damage. We don’tneedto draw obvious parallels between Fury attacks and Final Fantasy’s Limit Breaks - after all, plenty of other JRPGs use a similar mechanic - but the literal ‘ATB’ bar that must fill up for each character before you can give them a command is a rather on-the-nose nod to the famous franchise.
MP, the resource required to cast spells, is somewhat sparse throughout the demo. Mana Potions, which refill the meter, are thus a precious commodity. It’s hard to say whether spells will continue to cost such a large percentage of a character’s MP pool as the game goes on, but if so, I’m of two minds on that development decision. If it’s done well, by supplementing the party’s alternative actions with viable and engaging attacks, then the strategic usage of MP will be reminiscent of something like Shin Megami Tensei and its many associated spinoffs. If it’s done poorly, by failing to provide anything that doesn’t cost MP save for simple and ineffective physical attacks, then it’ll be a total drag.
The demo’s gameplay portion concludes with a boss fight against a robot knight that Uther was sure he’d deactivated prior to the mission, but which anyone who’s played a JRPG knew they were bound to encounter nevertheless. The boss has two distinct stages, a gauge that displays its HP in percentages down to the hundredths (54.76%, for example), deadly combo attacks that will drop the target down to about half their health in a single round, and some gnarly heavy metal background music.
Whereas the random encounters en route to the boss were total pushovers, the boss tested my grasp of the fundamentals. Once again, this is thanks to the sparse MP; casting lightning magic over and over again would predictably have ripped it to shreds, but I couldn’t rely entirely on that angle. It was down to Fury attacks, then, but the boss had a strange move that would actively reduce a character’s Fury meter, so I had to mix things up along the way.
As things stand, I don’t know what to make of On A Journey’s plot; there’s just not enough of it in the demo to get a strong feel for it. I do think, based on what little is in there, that there’s an opportunity at hand for Mowlo Silk to flex some decent worldbuilding in its cross-continental storytelling. The evil empire doesn’t just want to harvest a vital natural resource to strengthen its army. It also wants to construct a ship designed to explore a mysterious landmass, so at the very least, there’s an interesting wrinkle in an otherwise-standard scenario.
It’s clear that the developers are banking on leaving a bigger first impression with On A Journey’s gorgeous anime cutscenes. These were fairly frequent throughout the demo, and rather lavish relative to what must surely be a shoestring budget. The artists have put their best foot forward in establishing the look of the game’s main cast, and more than anything else, I’m excited to see further cutscenes when the game launches.
On A Journey isn’t going to turn heads among those who harbor no lasting love for JRPGs, and it remains to be seen how much narrative and mechanical meat there is in the full version. But the demo has turnedmyhead, and I look forward to seeing more.
