There are several things I really like about the battle system. After each battle you win, your entire party is revived and healed up to full health and they all get XP. So no more hoarding of revives, and hoping that you get a turn to bring one of your party back to life before you kill all the enemies. The bonuses awarded in leveling up are an A/B choice with various trade-offs between the two options. For example several characters can choose to have their next spell be a single target with higher chance to do secondary damage, or target all with a reduced chance.
Combat goes fairly quickly, you select your attacks and targets for all your party members and they are then slotted into the battle order based on initiative checked against the monsters. You click through each attack event until the next round. If one of your party goes down to 50% health the interface outlines go from white to green, and of one or more of your party dies, it goes from green to red. You have to pay attention to how much damage the enemy attacks can do so that you can heal your party in the right round of battle. This is made slightly difficult because every round the monsters get 10% more powerful.
The overworld map is very similar to every NES RPG ever.
The cities are pleasant and filled with friendly ghosts and other undead beings.
The battle screen is static with sound effects and flashes indicating action.
As for the story, it is a post-apocalyptic adventure cast entirely with the undead. You start as the main character, a skeleton by the name of Dem Bones, who quickly meets up with a ghost named Sara who forces you to become her bodyguard as she wants to explore some ruins to the East to learn more about the history of the world. When you arrive at the ruins you meet a technology-obsessed Vampire named Lita who also joins your party. The boss of the ruins is a robot who has been "switched to Evil" so Sara decides that the part should take over the robot's quest to collect the six crystals of macguffin in the city on the center of the map and bring them to some place in a desert. You meet your fourth and final party member, a zombie prince named Erik, when you're thrown into the castle prison of the next town. It seems that Erik's uncle, the king of the castle, has become obsessed with throwing people into jail. That's as far as I got in my play session, I assume the boss of the jail dungeon is either a souped-up jailer, or Erik's uncle the Mad Zombie King.
My biggest complaint about the game is that the enemies in various sections of the overworld, and in the dungeons, seem to be scaled the level that Zeboyd thinks the party should be, rather than actually scaled to the party. As soon as I got halfway through the ruins after Lita joined the party I began getting defeated nearly every other battle. I had to go two areas back just to find some mobs that I could defeat without using skills. This isn't so bad in the overworld where you can get to lower-level enemy areas fairly quickly, but when you're in the dungeons you're pretty much fucked because all mobs are roughly the same level, and if you're not quite powerful enough you're going to have a long, hard ride through the labyrinth.
Speaking of which, the dungeons are huge. This is awesome if your party is strong enough, you can go around exploring because there are at least five chests with either better equipment or large amounts of gold in them. They are hidden down long, snaking paths that frequently turn back on themselves so you have to keep in mind where you're trying to get to. If you're just trying to get out, that can be a real pain in the ass, because backtracking just wastes more time on the countdown to the next mob attack.
All in all, I'd recommend it if you're a fan of older NES/SNES-styled JRPGs. It's fun to have the protagonists be various undead creatures, Dem actually can't speak since he's just a skeleton so Sara "interprets" his thoughts to communicate to the other party members. It's bundled in a 2-pack with Cthulhu Saves the World for $3 retail, Cthulhu is a similar JRPG with art that's updated to look more like SNES game.
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