Moonchild Reviews

This seems like a pretty good game with nice graphics, but it seems like you have to wander around a lot trying to figure out which direction you are supposed to be going in. Right now I am trying to travel to the elven village from the palace where I started the game and it feels like it is taking forever.

Another nice JRPG from Aldorlea Games. Pleasant art and music, whimsical story. It is allot like the Millenium series but feels different enough I don't consider them the same game. Allot of "bad reviews" seem to not understand that you don't play Aldorlea games in the afternoon as an adult addicted gameplayer - they are for night time for sain people (or for younger players). They are pleasant and relaxing before bed or for anytime to reduce tension or pass some time (ie, not all day). You also don't expext Enix best RPG quality when you paid $2 or what. Difficulty - is selectable - you can play a harder game or not level up. Comments about easy battles are ridiculous. It doesn't force not winning or spending hours in the same area - that's for sure. It's your choice. However it's not a very long game with allot of content. 4 hr? not the 29 it timer shows. Maybe 6hr if your lost in the dungeon like I was.

Doesn't get slaughtered in the first 10 minutes of gameplay. Refunded.

Skip this title and go for better RPGmaker games. I'll keep this short: Early game is awesome. Good action and decent writing. Later the usual JRPG grinding and massive dungeons come into play and it becomes a test of endurance. The #1 review of this game lists very accurately the bad sides this title has. (and i am being much more lenient here on the writing) Oh i know fans of JRPG just love this but for me once the interest starts to wane it doesn't get better by throwing more of the same and harder in your face. Let me remind you that on Steam there are some terrific titles here that can either bring you good writing, good combat or both done better than this. Don't settle for sub-par garbage. RPGmaker games partially deserve their bad reputation and this game is here to remind why that is so.

60 % of the playtime: farming kills for the achievements 25 % of the playtime: exploring gigantic dungeons with dozens of dead ends 10 % of the playtime: reading endlessly long conversations 5 % of the playtime: actually enjoying the game

I love Aldorlea RPG Maker games, because the developer is extremely detailed oriented and take great care in designing and implementing the games. Moonchild is a great example of such a game. I played Moonchild approximately two years ago, and had a wonderful time. I spend 44 hours playing this game, and had a fun time getting all the achievements and exploring every little corner of the gameworld. I had an enjoyable time recruiting a diverse team of 9 characters, all of which have different skills sets. Out of the 9, I grind my group of 4 (only 4 out of 9 are involved in fights) until they reach very high levels of 40+. I love grinding and there are always lots of things to do and lots of side quests to work on in Moonchild. I would like to highly recommend this game to any old school RPG Maker enthusiasts who likes a great storyline and a detailed game world with lots of things to do. You will love this game.

This game is on a level of bad that is beyond words. There is no need to even get into the story aspect of this game. That's like giving someone on death row another 3 months of jail time. Who cares? The level design is beyond atrocious. It's illogical, stupid, brain dead, and a huge waste of time. It takes a 10-minutes maze to get into a town/village. You'll be doing this numerous times because of quests and sToRy. The game calls them dungeons or something (I don't f**king remember, you'd have to pay me to play this game again and pay for the therapy afterwards) but it's a maze. Even though it's a straight forward maze with one entrance and one exit, it's probably designed by a psychopath who enjoys killing puppies. You'll most likely be walking for five minutes straight past multiple levels of the maze thinking to yourself "Gee, everything's going smoothly for once" before you get hit with a dead-end, because f**k you. Monsters designs are a joke too. You can be looking at the love child of Anubis and Hades only to notice it has the strength of a zero EV/IV Zigzagoon. But be careful of some weak looking fellas, for they could possess the power that rivals 69 nuclear bombs combined. This is the same case for skills. You can cast some insanely cool spell with so many flashy colors that'll send an epileptic person to the ER, only to see it deal 5 damage, and you can cast a spell that has the animation that looked like it's created with Microsoft Paint, and see it deal 50000 damage. Just roll the dice on this one. You know you're scrapping at the bottom of the barrel when you're posting some (what I assume to be) German review and whoever "Jay Is Games" is. All of the positive reviews on this page have ZERO credibility, and I'm just gonna go ahead and guess half of them have been paid to write a good review, or is an employee from this company. I would like to state one more time, that this game is SO BAD, that I am out of words to describe how bad it is. I actually went to steam support to get this game back (I had it removed on my account permanently, getting it back took me like 3 clicks) so I can write a review again to warn people to stay the hell away from this game. This game is SO BAD, that it made me wary of ALL RPGMaker games since.

I wanted to complete the game before I reviewed it, but it just seems to be fighting me at every turn. The stats and mechanics are poorly explained, battles seem to run the gamut of effortless or tedious, with nothing in-between, and the dialogue is relentlessly awful. That last point is what gets me the most, actually, so I'm going to go in-depth a bit on that: 1. Every character seems to have some little snark to throw in to every situation, regardless of relevance. This is tiresome. 2. It takes about 6 text boxes for 1 text box of information to be conveyed. The rest is fluffy, unfunny babble. 3. The dialogue has no mind for tone - hamfisted attempts at humor are thrust in everywhere. 4. The *actions/emotes in asterisks* are the worst. They're lazy. What they're attempting to convey does not even require custom sprites, and could be conveyed with halfway competent writing and eventing. My only reprieve from the tedious, pointless battles is the aggravating dialogue (and vice-versa). This game leaves me feeling more stressed than a leisure activity should. It is not fun, and it is not even a tenth as funny as it thinks it is.

I've been looking for an RPGMaker game with a cheesy story that would offer some enjoyable dungeon crawling in my library and [i]Moonchild[/i] seemed like an appropriate candidate. You know, the ones that you wouldn't spare much mental RAM for... and I've finally found it! [i]Moonchild[/i] is a cute game that hails from Aldorlea Games - a really promising RPGMaker based developer team - that will easily offer you 20 hours of gameplay. In a medieval fantasy realm, Queen Calypso's only daughter, Moonchild is abducted! Our honorable knight Gabriel was able to detain one of the heinous criminals, but the man apparently lost his memory. We start our journey to save Calypso's daughter. The word is that Moonchild isn't the only young noble woman who was abducted: daughters and wives of other local monarchs are missing too. During our travels, we'll consult the wisdom of elves, pass frozen wastes to find a Gifted in the ancient arts of mind, infiltrate the domain of our sworn enemy and even find a common cause to work alongside them. What kind of danger a mother wouldn't risk to take to save her child? It seems none... Graphics won't present you anything extraordinary, yet I found environment design to be fitting and beautiful within the limitations of RPGMaker. The game rewards exploring obscure dead ends, so nowhere you explore is an actual time loss. You always find some interesting item or a power up. Soundtrack is pretty, yet it becomes annoyingly repetitive after a while, so I strongly recommend muting the game and playing your own soundtrack in any of these 16 bit games - with some exceptions like ASM or FF series, of course. Someone said gameplay? Oh, it's nothing unfamiliar. We have a 16 bit party of 4 characters at a time - in which we can arrange and alternate with other characters anytime outside of a battle - , turn based battles with basic strategies, enemies with different immunities and weaknesses. We battle, we gain experience and level up, we search for new items to power up and complete a side quest here and then. See, it is your basic RPG. The world isn't that big, neither that diverse, but the main story itself would present you a nearly 20 hour gameplay and its engaging enough. The game also comes with 3 different difficulties for you to pick based on your experience with these kind of games. I'd consider one minus to be achievements. They are mostly based on one specific character having a certain number of kills. It becomes boring to farm characters just for the sake of achievement, and it's a strategic dead-end. You'd already have a party formation that you like better by the middle of the game anyhow. Another thing from the horse's mouth: the ending WAS an unexpected one for me, which is seriously rare in these 16 bit games. I didn't expect that outcome, not at all! You'd like a basic RPGMaker adventure with interesting enough story and cute characters? You've got it. Please also check out Lady Storyteller's Curator page [url=http://steamcommunity.com/groups/ladystoryteller#curation]here[/url] - follow for regular updates on reviews for other games!

Edit: Steam is now showing this review as pre-release. I don't know what the publisher of this game did on Steam to make it think it was in a beta before this, but it wasn't. It was sold as a full release, with collector's editions and everything. It is still a terrible game, and everything in this review is still valid. TL;DR: This sort of game is the reason RPGMaker things on steam have such a negative stigma. It exhibits incompetence at every level. I am now honestly surprised this game has net positive reviews on steam. I've been designing an RPGMaker game myself, and was looking around to see what sort of things had positive reviews on here. I have no idea what game the other reviewers were playing, but it wasn't this game. -The writing is atrocious. It reads like a bad fan-fic of someone elses fantasy world. There is no consistency in writing or tone, nor of the world the people were trying to build. In a purely fantasy setting, why is one character talking about her CV(resume)? The opening sequence was so bad that I immediately closed it and tried to get a refund. Too bad I was past my date for it. None of these characters read like real people. The writing was so bad that the best choice the designers made was including a 'talk to party' function, so I could skip past the horrible writing and still be able to figure out where I had to go. You still have to talk to every inane, useless, and pointless NPC in town for fear of missing a quest, so good luck talking to thirty some-odd NPCs with such riveting dialogue that is important to world building such as "I love this carpet!" -The battle balancing is also atrocious. You can be walking around a dungeon, fighting enemies that look like Hindu gods and Chimeras, and one shotting them easily, but 'deadly snake' can nearly wipe your party with repeated paralysis attacks. No warning or lead up, but I'm so glad that snake was tougher than any boss in the game I fought. You get no indication of what enemies are weak to or what spells work, so whether you choose attack or spells for a new enemy is entirely random, and so many of the clearly 'physical' characters have tons of useless attack spells as well, and quite a few casters don't get any attack spells for several levels that are of any use. You have so many spells to dispel an enemy's buff, but never run into enemies who actually buff themselves. -There is a fundamental level of incompetence in the coding itself. A spell that casts 4 fireballs, will also tick you for poison damage or regen for each fireball. An item that says 'revives and restores 100 life points' will revive and restore you to 1. You will clip right through cliffs and forests in maps. You will cast spells and wonder if they actually did anything, or if the fancy animation was the intended effect alone. -Map design is utterly ridiculous. Almost every map consists of 'overly long corridor, leading to dead end or to the next area, good luck picking'. Several -towns- are behind these dungeons, as well as quest items hidden in the inscrutable mazes that take hours to traverse. Thank god encounters aren't truly random, because I would have quit long before I did. Better finish those quests the first time you are in town, otherwise you'll have to treck through the whole dungeon again to get back...oh wait, the quest makes you do that anyway, because part of it is outside town. Several things are hidden in a dungeon, without any warning that you can never go back once you are finished, including quest items and summons. -The 'deluxe' edition has the official guide, which probably includes maps. I wonder if it also includes the developer laughing at the fact that you bought a 'deluxe' edition of this game. Do. Not. Buy. There are far, far better RPGMaker games for free, and even better ones available on steam.