General RPG Creator Aldorlea Games's Knack for Gameplay Features

I recently played Laxius Force 1, created by Aldorlea Games, an RPG creator that’s obscure even for an Indie developer, in spite of possessing a startlingly large catalogue.  And I’m not gonna mince words: Laxius Force 1 is a bad game.  It’s not terrible--even has a few moments that are kind of good!--but there’s little about its plot, characters, villain, events, or writing style that’s compelling for more than a moment, and there are a lot of elements within it (and its sequels) that are a strange and off-putting mix of uncomfortable and amateurish.

You know that feeling you get when you stumble into a particular corner of Fanfiction.net, or Deviantart?  Like, you’ve found someone who’s got some weird and vague-but-troubling unhealthy ideas about how love and/or sex works, even though they don’t seem like they have a lot of practical knowledge about the subject, and it’s all somehow made worse because the narrative or visual quality is so hamfistedly basic that it kinda feels like a kid made it?  There’s a lot of stuff in Laxius Force that gives you that same feeling.

Here’s the thing, though: even though I had no emotional investment in the characters (and, in fact, actively disliked the majority of the most important ones), and found the plot as a whole no better than passable...by the end of Laxius Force 1, I actually found a strange compulsion in me not to uninstall the game, beat a hasty retreat, and quietly forget I’d ever played it, as would be sensible, but rather, to keep right on playing into the second game.  A compulsion which, in fact, endured long enough to take me into the third Laxius Force, too, in spite of LF2 having ramped up that uncomfortable feeling I mentioned before.*  I’m not sure I’d say I wanted to keep playing this trilogy through to its end, but I did somehow feel the need to do so.

It’s not an entirely new sensation to me.  Witch Hunt and the Millennium quintology, the other Aldorlea Games works that I’ve played, had a similar draw to me as I played them.  I wasn’t sure what it was, but this Indie RPG developer was doing something right, apparently.  And since it sure as hell wasn’t the writing in Laxius Force’s case (and while I enjoyed Witch Hunt and Millennium while they were going well enough, they weren’t amazing, or anything), I had to assume there was something about the actual gameplay that was doing it.

Certainly it’s not the most noticeable part of an RPG’s gameplay, the battle system.  Aldorlea Games titles seem to inevitably devolve, sooner or later, into a game where you’re either effortlessly breezing by enemies with 1-hit-kills and no damage taken, or getting fucking wrecked by them.  They’re like Sailor Moon: Another Story most of the time: there’s no middle ground between being overpowered or underpowered in each enemy encounter.  Not all that fun even by RPG standards, and while I don’t mind RPG Maker’s engine the way some people do, I can’t say it adds much to the experience.

No, the magic touch of Aldorlea Games is not in the combat, but rather in the slightly more mundane portion of an RPG’s gameplay: the exploration and numbers-management.  It all boils down into a few points:


A: Thorough, and creative, exploration pays.  There is a fuck-ton of stuff to find in an Aldorlea Games title.  More, I think, than any other RPG I’ve ever played can equal.  Any piece of furniture can be hiding a sack of gold.  Any bit of shrubbery might provide a curative leaf.  Any given ice crystal might reward you with a stat booster.  Bookshelves are heavy with Mind-increasing items.  1 sword hanging on the wall might be lootable.  And beyond that, plenty of bits and pieces of the background may not provide an actual item reward, but may increase parameters if examined with the right character.  Examine torches with a Fire Elemental in your party, and she might just get an extra HP or point of Resistance from them.  Check the right bit of vegetation, and your pet might just eat it and gain some experience points.  The vast majority of screens in any given Aldorlea Games RPG have secrets to be found within them.

And it’s not always just straightforward searching, too.  Of course there are tricky little secret passages here and there, as many RPGs employ, but there are plenty of hidden treasures to be found that require more than just a normal check-everything approach.  On the rare occasion, for example, it pays to check a treasure chest more than once--a few of them actually are saving their best contents for persistent robbers.  And occasionally there are tricks to finding stuff that are so unusual and unexpected that it’s a wonder anyone ever finds them--there’s this 1 spot early into Laxius Force 1 where you make a quick hop from a cave exit to a little ledge, and if you hit the opposite direction at just the right moment, the leaping character will hesitate just enough to fall down into the crevice she’s leaping, which leads to you exploring a minor cave area with a few extra goodies within it.  You only get a single chance at this, and the timing has to be quite precise--it’s the sort of secret you’re surprised anyone could ever discover (I only know of it thanks to another player’s strategy guide, and Yveen only knows how he/she found it).  Aldorlea Games has an outright obsession with hidden loot, concealed treasure rooms, and obscure, rewarding easter eggs, and the constant feeling of every location in the journey being a treasure hunt helps keep the otherwise repetitive battle-heavy experience interesting.


B: The rewards of that exploration matter.  Most of the time, when you find stuff in an RPG, be it from a treasure chest or from examining a suspicious piece of pottery or whatever else, it’s a nice, positive experience, but you wouldn’t feel too upset at missing it.  The sword in a dungeon’s treasure chest that you happened to miss would have been handy for 20 minutes or so, but the next area will surely have it or a better weapon available for purchase or discovery.  Healing items found before the endgame are potentially useful, but usually you’ll have a giant stack of them in your inventory by the end that you never had need for.  For most of the game, the stuff you find in chests and through careful searching is a minor convenience and little more, with few exceptions.

In an Aldorlea Games work, though?  The stuff you find has significance.  First of all, a lot of the stuff you find is either a variety of permanent stat-increasing items that you can use on the characters of your choice, or minor events that will increase the abilities of a specific party member.  Every now and then, you may find such an event that teaches a character a new skill, even, or an item that can do so for multiple individuals.  This isn’t just happening to find a potion and thinking, “Eh, I guess that was worth the trouble of pressing the X button, maybe.”  This is stuff that permanently strengthens your team!  If you’re thorough, you easily find enough stat boosters in the course of 1 of these games to equal anywhere from 20 to 50 levels’ worth of growth in a specific parameter!  It’s a min/max player’s dream, and even less obsessive audiences are still going to feel substantially rewarded by it.

Even beyond the stat increases, though, there’s weight to the stuff you find in these games.  You’re gonna need healing a LOT, and inn-styled rest areas aren’t always easily accessible at some points in the story--or they’re expensive enough that you don’t want to be using them too often (more on that in a second).  Further, there’s enough lingering status effects in these games that it’s a real good idea to hoard all the curatives you can get, because you never know when you’re gonna be stuck in a part of the game where your party members don’t have a spell to cure a particular status ailment that indigenous enemies are fond of inflicting.** 

Items that cause temporary beneficial effects are valuable, too--not just for the combat utility, as you might normally think, but also because there are occasions in these games where your characters require a certain stat to be high enough to garner a reward from some event or quest, and beneficial status effects may be the only reasonable way to boost the characters up to that value at that point.  There are similar situations which also give value to items that give beneficial temporary boosts--there are some NPCs in the Laxius Force trilogy, for example, who will increase a character’s stats based on the values of a different stat, and you can manipulate this with beneficial conditions to get some amazing results. 

Lastly, items used for attacks in combat sometimes are stronger than what attacks your characters can muster, or possess elements/status effects that you don’t always have access to, making them a handy utility at times.  In fact, there’ve been a good few special boss battles in my time with this developer where the only reliable way to win was to use attack items.  So yeah, even just the act of finding basic items has more weight in an Aldorlea Games adventure than it does in most others.

Next: Money.  In most RPGs, money’s a backburner concern, something that’s rarely so scarce that you need to actively seek it, and even when it’s harder to come by, that usually just means a few minutes of fighting some enemies to get some more.

In an Aldorlea Games title?  Every goddamn cent counts.  There’s some variance of this (money is much tighter in the Laxius Force trilogy, for example, than in Millennium or Witch Hunt), but as a general rule, there’s stuff you’ll need a ton of money to buy that you will really want, or that’s required for a quest, or something like that, and you’ll always be scrambling to acquire said funds.  Enemies don’t tend to drop very much of the stuff, and the ones that do aren’t usually ones you can encounter repeatedly.  Limited-time offers on unique equipment are common, quests that require you to fork over large amounts of cash to complete them are common, exchanges of money for services that permanently improve party members are common, and hell, there are even moments where you’ll have a temporary opportunity to buy an expensive piece of equipment for a character you don’t even have yet that will turn out to be the best armor or weapon they can get.  And because money is so scarce, it makes finding it, in any quantity, almost more rewarding at times than the stat-boosts.

And lastly, the equipment.  With the varying needs of stat or elemental resistances for some battles, the utility of certain beneficial effects, the occasional requirements of 1 particular stat to be boosted to high heaven...it all means that whatever equipment you may come across in your explorations may be something that’ll be valuable for you not just now, but later in the game, too.  The best equipment in the game isn’t necessarily the stuff you find at the end of Aldorlea Games titles!  The Alchemist Hat you find somewhere in the middle range of the Millennium quintology has use throughout the series.  Some of the early Relics you can find in Witch Hunt stayed on my characters up to the very end.  The Luck Ring, Key of Heroes, and Legend Sword you can find in the first chapter Laxius Force 1 are all gear that you’ll have use for right to the end of the third game!  Whereas in most games the stuff you can find is pretty much always just scaled to be slightly better than what you’ve already got, and will be sold off shortly after as new gear becomes available, there’s every chance that the equipment you find in Aldorlea Games through careful exploration will be a reward you appreciate for a long stretch of the game, possibly its entirety.


C: The quest system is rewarding.  In most RPGs, doing sidequests leads to rewards of money, experience points, items, stat increases, new abilities, and/or, most preferably, story-related content like lore, character development, and so on.  And that’s usually it...sometimes a game will have sidequests be associated with some kind of jack-of-all-trades guild keeping track of the jobs your characters are taking, so there’s some satisfaction to climbing onto the top of that, but that’s about it.

Completing quests in some Aldorlea Games, however, has an extra dimension of reward to it.  You not only get whatever tangible benefits come with a quest’s completion, but the game also does a little song-and-dance bit when a quest is completed, in which each party member involved says a little line of reaction to the fact that they’ve helped complete X number of quests--dialogue which changes as the number goes up.  It’s cute, and in addition to whatever you got for the quest itself, the characters involved also get an experience bonus that gets larger depending on how many quests they’ve completed so far.

Additionally, some characters will get a bonus stat increase for each quest completed, which provides extra incentive to have them do so--the cockatrice character in the Laxius Force trilogy, for example, gets +1 HP every time he helps complete a quest, and since you get him very early, you can wind up, by the end of the series, with close to 200 extra HP tacked onto him.  Which is a lot, when the range of fully-leveled characters’ HP tends to be between 800 to 1200.  And considering he’s already a tanky character, that’s all the more handy.

Point is, doing sidequests with this little extra quest system in place makes it all the more enjoyable to complete as much of the game’s additional content as possible.  Admittedly, I usually don’t need extra incentive to do that anyway, as I generally want to get the most out of my RPGs, but it’s still a nice little extra to grow my party members’ strength that much more as the adventure goes forward.


D: The enhancements add up.  Sure, you may only get an extra +1 Strength or a couple more HP for a character from each bonus you collect, whether it be through a quest reward, examining the right spot in a dungeon, joining a guild, or whatever.  But these little increases to characters’ stats happen a lot, and as a result, they start seriously adding up after a while, even before you count the stat-boost items you can dole out at your choosing.  It’s not unusual, from what I’ve seen of Aldorlea Games, for the value of some characters’ most important stats to be 20 - 30% derived from the out-of-battle increases they get throughout the game.  Knowing that these little bumps upward will accumulate into a respectable total keeps them feeling rewarding and relevant, even when most of them are very small increases individually.


These points probably don’t sound all that impressive on their own, in text, and to be sure, they’re minor quirks of game design.  But they’re pleasant enough, compelling enough, that they make the experience of playing some of Aldorlea Games’s works stand out.

I like each area of the game having lots of stuff for me to find, rather than just being strictly defined by the obstacles of monsters and traps within it.  I like the fact that what I’ll find while doing this exploration will often have noticeable, lasting value to me.  When I realized that items carried over even when levels and applied upgrades did not from 1 Millennium title to the next, I started hoarding the stat-boosting items I found through the whole series, and I liked the act in Millennium 5 of using 5 games’ worth of parameter increasing items on Marine’s warriors (particularly since the whole point of the series is to find them and make them strong enough to win the tournament, so the extra emphasis on their combat capability gave a special sense of satisfaction).  Had I played on any setting below Hard, I’d have probably had a lot of trouble maintaining enough losses in that game to get the true ending, with how pumped up the heroes were.  And a min/max kind of player would probably have a field day with this stuff.  I like that characters keep track of their parts in the quests of the game’s course and comment on it, and can receive extra benefits from that involvement.  And I like that making characters stronger isn’t solely the domain of leveling up, but of all the parts of playing the game.***

They’re little boons to the act of playing, but they’re frequent, and they’re many.  It adds up to something that, if not fun, exactly, at least has a significant draw to it.

There isn’t a lot about Aldorlea Games that especially stands out (and what does, such as Indinera Falls’s takes on romance and on endings, is not always positive).  But I gotta give the developer credit here: they’ve figured out some ways to enhance the basic grit and glue of the RPG playing experience, and for that fact, it’s kind of a shame that Aldorlea Games is extremely unknown.  Because I think that some of these approaches to exploration rewards, character stat development, the economy and utility of items and money making them feel more valuable to find, and so on are ones that other developers should take notice of, and start implementing into their own works.  As ever, I firmly believe that what actually matters about an RPG is its narrative content...but it never hurts to make the packaging of that content a little easier and more interesting to deal with.
















* Although, in fairness, LF2 also introduces the last of the major 4 characters, and she’s actually kind of a decent character (in spite of the laughably empty and unhealthy romance she gets thrown into), so there’s some marked improvement over the first game, too.


** Granted, this is sort of more a case of finding a way to get around a design flaw than an actual virtue, but still.


*** Not to mention that it’s a little more logical, too.  I mean, it seems to me like it makes more sense that someone would get stronger and more well-rounded in their abilities from a wide variety of actions and experiences, rather than just having repeated the same strategy to kill a fish monster for the hundredth time.