Recent reviews by Taka

One Manga Day is a very special kind of game. It is a game I recommend. Not because it is good. Oh no, of course not. I recommend it because it is SO BAD. And it's free too. What do you have to lose?

My initial impressions were bad, as it was plainly obvious that the character models were generated with the ComiPo! software, and I gave the developer some criticism about that on the Steam forum. But that is truly the least of the game's problems. The fact is, this is one of the most disjointed, nonsensical, poorly-written pieces of fiction I have ever come across, and I read Bleach.

It doesn't make sense. Really. You are introduced to a team of Manga translators (and it's plainly obvious that they are translating Manga illegally. Not that it really bothers me, I just thought that was amusing) who each have a job in the process of translating a Manga from Japanese to Russian English. You are offered a job on the team and I ended up taking the "Typist" job (which is called a Typesetter by actual English translation groups, by the way) and I was presented with absolutely nothing related to typesetting whatsoever in my entire runthrough of the game. My job was completely irrelevant to the progression of the plot.

Speaking of the plot, it makes no sense. The general idea seems to be that another rival translation group has decided to pick up a project that your group left abandoned for several months and you basically declare war on them for daring to finish what your group refused to finish. But most of the time, it isn't even focusing on that. Instead, we are treated to completely random, disjointed, incomprehensible scenes of absolute nonsense. In the span of my playthrough of what I assume to be one small route, I watched our group talk about translating manga, engage in get rich quick schemes, perform random acts of violence on each other, go to a dance party, go to space and meet God, eat lunch on a Kotatsu in the middle of the park whilst a bird poops on them, deal with "chemists-satanists", and speak to an unexplained entity named Spicy who appears out of nowhere to offer random sagely advice that usually amounts to "Google it". There's also a Dragon-Girl for... some reason?

It just... doesn't make sense. There is supposed to be a flow to a story, yeah? One scene is supposed to lead into the next. But this game completely ignores every established concept of a story. There is no sense to any of it. It's just one random event to the next without anything tying them together whatsoever. And it certainly does not help that the author's native language is Russian as opposed to English, and it clearly shows. There are many, many scenes where the dialog can barely be described as Engrish, much less proper English. And even if it was in proper English, the plot structure is a complete mess and probably still wouldn't make any sense.

So... why am I recommending this game?

Because this should be a prime example of what NOT to do when developing an indie visual novel. It's a learning experience. Don't be this guy. Don't be a chemists-satanist. And shame on you, Steam, and shame on everyone who voted this through Greenlight, because even though it is free, this sets a bad precedent for the kind of content that can be on the Steam storefront.

Overall a really solid racer with well-designed mechanics. However, there aren't many tracks which is a bit of a bummer.

At the moment, the game is basically non-functional on many people's PCs. There are severe lag issues which are related to poor game optimization rather than hardware problems. In addition, it is locked to 720p resolution and contains absolutely no graphical options whatsoever. This is a poor port and until Square fixes these issues, I cannot recommend this game.

Edit: 12/11/2014

The long-awaited patch to "fix" FF13 has arrived and while it brings graphics options, they ultimately serve absolutely no purpose because the FPS issues still remain without even the slightest performance increase. Again, this is not a hardware-related problem, but due to their own failure to program the port properly.

I cannot stress this enough, DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. It is essentially non-♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ due to the sub-30 FPS slowness when the game is supposed to run at 60 FPS. Do not give Square your money on this or any other product. Show them that PC gamers will NOT be satisfied with broken console ports.

Games designed with RPG Maker often get a lot of hate, due to the overall simplicity of the (basic) engine and the rate of sheer garbage that gets pushed out by wannabe game developers who have absolutely no idea what they're doing. But not all RPG Maker games are bad - just look at Skyborn.

It's certainly not perfect. It's a little rough around the edges, there's a few minor mapping errors here and there, there's a couple glitches, and the game balancing isn't the best... but it's okay. The overall mapping is beautiful and well designed, as are the graphics themselves which are largely custom made, featuring only a few of the basic RTP assets that come with RPG Maker. The music is all custom as far as I know, and is actually rather good. My only complaint is that none of the music loops for some reason, it just fades out and starts over.

Gameplay-wise, it's pretty solid, if unbalanced. It uses a variant of the Charge Turn Battle System (the one from Final Fantasy X), which is in my opinion one of the best battle systems available for RPG Maker. All of your party members are decided by plot progression, and you have very little control over what skills and spells they learn (only decided by two class change events partway through the game, which change which skills you will learn), but you rarely feel like you're lacking in skill variety, and most of your skills are actually useful in one way or another. You've got an offensive fighter, a tank, a healer, an offensive debuffer and a sort of battle-mage, and each party member fills their purpose pretty well, except for maybe Sullivan, the tank, who does a great tanking job, but lacks any real offensive options at all.

The main twist of the battle system is the Threat system, which brings MMO-style aggro into a turn-based RPG, where your party member's actions will determine how likely they will be to be attacked. But other than that, it's a pretty standard system, with a very heavy focus on managing buffs, debuffs and threat.

Story-wise, it's a pretty standard rebels-against-the-empire story, with a few little twists and turns. If you like the Steampunk setting, you'll like Skyborn, since it's all about steam engines and airships and stuff like that.

All in all, I'd recommend Skyborn. It's a pretty good JRPG-styled game on a platform with very few good games of the genre. It took me about 12 hours to beat the game, and I did pretty much everything there was to do (to my knowledge), so it's not a huge time investment, but it's fun while it lasts.

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Oh sure, the game is fun. It sure would be great if it worked at all.

Simply put, this game refuses to work without messing with obscure audio settings in Windows, and even after you manage to get it to work, it seems to crash after you do pretty much anything.

Do not buy this game. It is basically non-functional.

Do NOT buy this program! Massive ripoff and extremely limited!

Let me be straight with you, I bought this program from the official site shortly after it came out years ago for $50. It was a gigantic waste of money.

Here's the deal. First off, the program is insanely limited. You are given virtually no freedom whatsoever to design or pose your characters. By default the ONLY outfits are school uniforms in only a couple colors and identical styles. There's maybe less than 10 different hair styles per gender and only a handful of hair and eye colors. The poses for your characters are fixed and you cannot freely move them at all, and there's only a few dozen poses to work with.

There's also a problem with layering. For example, if you wanted two characters to hug each other... well, you can't, because every character is on it's own layer. You cannot pose two characters "together" and have them wrap their arms around each other or something. There's also no real guideline for perspective either so it's really hard to measure characters' positions if they're not at roughly the same distance in the background.

The backgrounds, comic effects and the like are all acceptable. Very little to complain about there. Aside from the fact that there's quite a few backgrounds that simply do not match with the character designs as they're basically just photos that have been run through photoshop filters to look more animated.

But there's more problems. For example the text input has no option to center your text, so all of your text must be manually centered. The program is also extremely slow and takes a long time to load pages and export things even if you have no custom assets on the page. Speaking of custom assets, there's a 3D model importing feature, but it only allows models done in a very specific format and in my experience, half the time they don't import properly and either come out incomplete or outright invisible.

But possibly the worst part of the entire program is the DLC and lack of updates. Here's an interesting fact - the Japanese version came out well over a year before the English version did, and when the English version did come out, it launched with LESS CONTENT than the day 1 Japanese version did. Their excuse was that the English version was cheaper, so they didn't want the Japanese people to just download the English version. They felt it was more appropriate to give the foreigners an outdated product. It was SEVERAL MONTHS with absolutely NO updates to the program before we even got what was available AT LAUNCH for the Japanese version. Of course, by then, the Japanese version was more than a year and a half ahead of the English version in updates and features. I would not doubt that this has continued to be the case.

But it gets worse. The Japanese version had several extra packs of free props to insert into your scenes released prior to the English launch. Several of these did make it into the English release for free, however they actually had the nerve to charge foreigners extra for some of them. When they first launched this pack, it was $15, which again, cost nothing to the Japanese users.

Then there's all the other DLC. If you want to make ANYTHING besides a generic school life series in precisely one single outfit, then they expect you to shell out extra money for crap that should have been in the program from the beginning for free. Well, then again, you can't make anything beyond generic school life series. You've got packs of more school uniforms, some casual clothes, some swimsuits, and stuff like that. And they expect you to pay extra for all of it. It's a ripoff, plain and simple, and even worse is that you get very little for the outrageous prices of the packs. A couple new outfits and a couple colors per pack. I don't know how much they run for these days, but they were about $15-$20 when they came out. For each one. And there was like 5 or 6 of them. On top of the $50 program.

In summary, DO NOT BUY THIS PROGRAM. It's too limited to be of any use, you will be mocked for using it and no one will take any of your comics seriously, and it's just plain a complete ripoff and not worth the money at all. Avoid at all costs.

Good job devs, in ensuring I will never purchase another one of your games ever again. Pretty dirty of you to insert some furry and trans pandering bullcrap into the game 7 years after it came out. I do not support these degenerates and I will not support this game or its developers any longer.

Update 6/27/23: The devs have now aggressively censored the game, removing a large amount of content in the pursuit of liberal puritanism. The devs are trash, and anyone who continues to support them are also trash.