Game Alert: Star Stealing Prince

Ok, so the title may sound like a bad romance novel, but Star Stealing Prince is likely one of the best RPG's out there, which is quite nice since it's also entirely free. The basic premise for the plot is Prince Snowe is the prince of the small and isolated, yet perfectly-happy snow-covered kingdom of Sabine, but one day he learns of a girl trapped in a tower and sets out to rescue her. Obviously, the plot quickly becomes a bit more complicated than this, and it would be best to not give too much away, but it is safe to say that you will see some creepy scarecrows, demons, psychopaths, and more than a few unexpected plot twists along the way. The game also makes excellent use of foreshadowing and interacting with objects and NPC's often rewards you with hints of past events. Speaking of interaction, this game certainly has a lot of it; nearly everything in the environment can be interacted with, often with different flavor text even for two of the same 'type' of object, useful items are hidden everywhere, there are secret passages to be found, and the dialogue for every NPC changes as the story progresses.

If you can see it, you can probably interact with it.

The amount of effort put into this game is honestly astounding and the end result is simply refreshing. For example, even the most minor of NPC's has a hand-drawn character portrait, or often even multiple portraits to reflect changing emotions, so there aren't any of the awkward 'happy portrait with grim dialogue' incidents which often plague RPG's. Cutscenes themselves also frequently consist of a series of impressive hand-drawn pictures. However, even outside of the hand-drawn stuff, the graphics are impressive with a lot of nice little touches and the music always compliments settings and scenes well. The writing is also quite good and even many of the characters outside of the main party are very memorable and interactions between characters never feel awkward or forced. For that matter, I cannot stress enough how pleasant it is to see a male lead who acts in a mature, responsible manner instead of the typical sword-toting 'well-intentioned idiot' (Snowe doesn't even use a sword, he uses a mace and is far better at using both offensive and especially healing magic than he is at melee). Likewise, the female lead is neither a blatant love interest nor a fragile healer. Oh, and you get a dual-wielding skeleton for a party member who is probably about as awesome as you'd expect a dual-wielding skeleton to be.

Combat is fun and challenging, though it is nothing particularly 'new'. There are no random encounters as normal enemies are usually represented by a moving white cloud, although just which enemies are in a fight are randomized. Status ailments, debuffs, and elemental weaknesses play a huge role in boss fights, but even normal enemies can be a legitimate threat if you're not careful as groups of only one or two enemies can still quickly kill the entire party if you simply try to spam normal attacks. Spells tend to drain MP quickly, but are also extremely useful and there are enough MP-restoring items in the game that this usually only becomes a threat during boss fights or if you are too conservative with item use. In addition to spells, there are abilities which consume IP (Item Points); these abilities are directly attached to equipment and there's no way to permanently acquire them while IP itself is consumed in terms of percentage and is gained when characters are hit. A final note on combat is that the fourth party member is the tank of the group and has significantly higher defense than any other character, but unlike most RPG's where such a character either has a 'provoke' ability or, worse, only is useful for soaking up damage if enemies decide to attack it, this character has the much more useful passive ability of automatically taking a hit for any other party member if the hit would have otherwise been fatal to greatly increase the survivability of the group as a whole.

Yes, even butterfly swarms can be deadly if you're not careful.

Dungeon design is, unsurprisingly by this point, also well done. Most dungeons are fairly short if you want to simply head straight to the end, but they tend to also have many side-paths to explore filled with all sorts of nice rewards. Perhaps most importantly, characters do not learn spells simply by leveling up and instead learn them through books found in dungeons; dungeons usually have one new spell for each party member, so if a party member seems to be falling behind in spell quantity, you probably just missed one of his or her books and, with a single exception, you can always go back and look for it. Even though leveling up doesn't grant new abilities, stats in Star Stealing Prince are fairly low, so even one level can make a huge impact if a boss fight feels too tough and the amount of experience enemies give usually increases significantly between dungeons so grinding never takes long. Puzzles are plentiful and, while usually not particularly challenging, usually don't feel outright handholdy either. Dungeons are also even designed to be convenient; if it is a dungeon on the world map, such as a forest, you can simply choose to skip it after the first time through while the larger dungeons often have shortcuts that open up as you go through them to save on travel time if you need to backtrack.

If I had to nitpick, I'd say normal enemies and especially bosses frequently feel as though they have a bit too much health, but this is such a minor issue that it can be outright ignored. Otherwise, Star Stealing Prince is an amazing game with a solid 10-12 hour length, an engaging story, memorable characters, fun combat, clever dungeon design, and a lot of polish and care.

You can download it from here: http://starstealingprince.wordpress.com/