Less annoying than Millen
Less annoying than Millenium.
When I recommend a game, I typically recommend it based on how well it meets it’s advertised hype. After all, that’s usually what convinces you to buy a game. If the game doesn’t live up to that hype, then you were cheated out of your money.
Pier Solar, while not a terrible game, doesn’t live up to that hype.
The biggest hype of Pier Solar is that it is a port of a Genesis/Megadrive game. Forget it, that has no factor here. The graphics have all been updated so it looks like any other decent RPG Maker game. The story never was up to snuff of genesis RPGs. The FM based sound is the only thing that’s left, but it’s not on by default, so I guess even the developers didn’t think that you would prefer the 16-bit version.
So the graphics are decent. I don’t need to explain that because there are screenshots, what you see is what you get. But what’s wrong with the story? Well, I don’t know entirely because I haven’t played the whole thing, but after 6 hours I’m not sure if I want to play through the whole thing. There has been zero real motivation. The first chapter has been about finding a plant to heal the main’s dad. That’s decent motivation for the characters, but I just met these people and have no reason to feel involved. That part’s over, so then they introduced a door that teleports you to a green room, we went to Pakistan, and now there are some furries. That’s neat, but there’s nothing compelling about any of it. Our heros are just exploring out of passing curiosity, just like me, and I don’t think I have the stamina that they do. Speaking of heros, I’ve spent 6 hours with the same 3 people and I don’t dare try to spell their names without looking it up. They are not compelling characters. They are all young scientists who are good with weapons and magic. If they could change weapon/element types, they might as well have been all the same character. JRPG’s are supposed to be deep and compelling, and that hasn’t happened yet.
Everything else is pretty typical. The battle system has a neat “gather” feature which acts as a multiplier while fighting. Required for certain spells. That’s the only thing that seems worth mentioning. Battles are actually rather simplistic because you can’t seem to share elemental powers between characters. Eg: fire based weapons are only available for the fire based character. The overworld also has the typical “get stuck on corners/can’t tell what is or isn’t a wall” features that you expect from RPG Maker games.
You can’t expect Phantasy Star out of every retro tribute game, and WaterMelon made a lot of effort for a comparable 16-bit game. Without the 16-bit hardware, however, Pier Solar is just another of the many fan made RPGs on Steam.
Post by: saturdayxiii