Mari and the Black Tower Reviews

RPG Maker strikes again! "Mari and the Black Tower" was one of hundreds of low effort retro-pixel RPG Maker asset/construction kit flips spamming the Steam catalog, made with the RPG Maker video game construction kit... in their own words, "Our easy to use tools are simple enough for a child." Like all RPG Maker "games", this was essentially a bunch of low quality/canned assets from RPG Maker coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club fan fiction. As with all RPG Maker games, the poor quality engine displayed badly in fullscreen and didn't have full HD support or any graphics tweaking options, making this unacceptable for any dedicated modern PC gamer. The point can be made that the intention of RPG Maker is to make demos and small games to pass around friends, and shouldn't be used as a substitute for "professional" game development. Like most RPG Maker shovelware and asset flips, the game featured extremely low quality copy + pasted 2D retro pixel art, looked awful, and had even worse gameplay. RPG Maker is an absolutely terrible construction kit, and never results in games of any reasonable quality or value to gamers. This was a painfully generic RPG Maker asset flip about the developers waifu/imaginary girlfriend being stuck in a black tower... that's pretty much all there is to it, if you disregard all the crap fanfiction and badly done RPG Maker template filling out/asset flipping. "Mari and the Black Tower" didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It had achievements, and they showed us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement was for watching some of the crap anime fanfiction "lore", trivial to get, but less than 26 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the game. The developer removed this from Steam for no apparent reason, leaving this garbage to harm gamers on Android (so this is basically a mobile app), and on the asset flipper/scammer website, Aldorlea, who are famous for spamming literally hundreds of crap RPG Maker asset flips with no value for gamers onto Steam. Good riddance.

Is it real? Yes - a rpgmaker JRPG with good characters, good art, has music, good dialog, a solid game. BUT SHORT. $2 is 2 much. Find something else unless they lower price. ONE TOWN, ONE DUNGEON. (had i realized that i'd not have bought it). For $2 it's "A RIPOFF". Why is because at GameStop you'd get a used copy of Chronocross or FFIX used what for ALLOT LESS money (for playable hours, number of towns and dialog art, number of dungeons etc). Even new in saran wrap the best PS games "cost less" comparatively. The other nay sayer posters are right: only one dungeon (the tower) and you keep on having to light torches (they don't last long - so it gets annoying quickly) HOWEVER: that "worth the money" factor aside: it plays well and is enjoyable as any small RPG, if you don't mind gas lighting allot of torches! It's not bad it's just small and overpriced.

Excellent plot hook and character customization right off the bat. This has got to be one of the good ones. Note that this is the first entry in a larger series, and later entries do canonize Abbie's gender as female, so beware of that when creating your character.

after playing 32 hr in this game it crashes and i am back to the new game? i can see my save file in my folder but dont know how to get the game back? can the developer please contact me? this is frustrating

So whether to recommend was a tough choice. The characters and play are good, but I was disappointed to find out the tower is it. No towns to find and explore, just in and out of the tower, although they do manage to make interesting story quests despite the limited field. My biggest complaint is this - I buy turn based games because I have ZERO hand/eye coordination. On the fourth floor there is a spot with rapidly rotating arrow blocks that you have to dodge. if there's a trick to get by it I cant find it and there is very little info available online. This rendered the game unplayable for me, so if you are like me and will get stuck here then don't buy the game.

i am in love with this game. its cheap so you would think its a short game but it isnt. im in love with it. i love the storyline! i dont have any bad thong to say. i cant wait for a part 2.

[h1]Morgoth is Compensating for Something[/h1] [h2]Story[/h2] The dialogue in this game is overall very light, due to the fact that all the party members are silent protagonists, even Abbie. They do have Mari, their nymph companion, doing most of the speaking though, and she has a connection to one of the antagonists. Personally, I prefer the other games having a set party of important characters who all have story relevance, rather than just having a bunch of random mercenaries. IMO, Keller should have been a playable character here due to his connection to Morgoth. Strangely, the terminology and names used in this game isn't consistent with the rest of the series. For example, Halonia is called Halona and Zamas is called Zumasa, which is weird because they're named correctly in [i]Finding Light[/i]. Maybe this was before the names were finalized? As for how this fits into the plot of timeline 1, the game explains that humanity has a sort of chaotic energy in them that makes them prone to violence, and Zamas didn't like that, so he screwed up the balance of that energy even more to make them destroy themselves faster. As for Morgoth, the final boss, he's supposed to be a decontruction of utilitarianism, since he saw a vision of humans destroying each other with chaos energy, so he believes absorbing that chaos energy into the Black Tower and killing humans is going to save the planet in the long run. Though it would have been more interesting to see more dilemmas where Morgoth had to try to apply that philosophy. It also would have been interesting if Keller debated Morgoth about this, though Mari does point out the flaws in Morgoth's logic. [h2]Gameplay[/h2] This game is definitely more focused on gameplay than story, even compared to KB1. You have several classes to choose from and many ways to build your team. The first class you choose, which is for the main protagonist Abbie, is also the most important since Abbie will also get anti-Miasma skills no matter what class they pick, meaning you have to consider if it's wise to delegate both the anti-Miasma role and the chosen class's role to Abbie. Personally, I made them a Brewmaster because that class can avoid having to use too much TP to perform their role, allowing me to save that TP for anti-Miasma purposes. Note that all characters have TP, but not MP, which means you have to pay attention to how you can regenerate TP for each class. If you use two healer characters, it might even be possible to sustain yourself in weaker areas without having to use items. In a way, I think this game partially inspired the combat system in [i]Absinthia[/i], where you're encouraged to use guard skills to recover a limited pool of MP rather than just having a large MP pool to burn through recklessly. As for non-combat stuff, you're exploring a huge multifloor dungeon like in the Etrian series, and you have to constantly look for ways to unlock shortcuts. As long as you find all the shortcuts, you can make it to wherever you need to go quickly, but I still wish there was a more convenient quick-travel system at times. The town has a day/night cycle that changes when you exit the dungeon or use the inn. While some stores are always around, some merchants are only around at night or only show up randomly. Sadly, there's no way to tell when certain merchants will appear, but there's no penalty for aimlessly advancing time, so you'll find what you need eventually. [h2]Verdict[/h2] 7/10 The dialogue definitely isn't the selling point of the story, though Mari herself does get some good lines in the final boss cutscenes. There is some confusing lore about the miasma and humanity's chaos energy that's needed to understand what happens in some of the other games, as well as Typhus's motives in KB1. The gameplay is a bit more complex compared to the other games in the series due to the class choices, as well as how most of the classes aren't traditional RPG ones, but it's still fun to see how your chosen party synergizes despite their lack of traditional mages.

Decent rpgmaker game with a surprising amount of class choices, not only for the companions, but for the main character as well. All with different skills. The maps are large and filled with secrets. But the whole game is being dragged down by 2 major pains in the ass. The ridiculous frequency of the random encounters and limited line of sight. Exploring everything, trying to do all the quests and finding all the secrets is a huge chore. Even though most of the time you can reliably skip encounters sometimes you get them literally every 3 steps. The game constantly wastes your time. As for the line of sight there are a lot of areas where you can see in a small radius around you and that's only if you have a torch. Trying to navigated labyrinths when you can't see shit only leads to unnecessary back tracking and constant encounters. There are items to prevent encounters, but along side torches you will have to keep opening and navigating through the menu. Either way it's constant interruptions and pointless hindrances. The game is so much better in well lit areas or in areas without random encounters. I know I've missed 2 bosses and an important quest, but I can't possibly be arsed to go again through previous areas. I recommend playing this game while doing something else. I personally watched more than 2 seasons.