#13 - Helen's Mysterious Castle
It's been a little bit, huh? Honestly, this isn't due to getting bored or anything, and I have been playing various things that are pretty good, but! Not so good enough that I felt compelled to talk about them at length and why I like them so much.
Until Helen's Mysterious Castle, which I recently had the pleasure of playing on stream about a week-ish prior to this post. An RPGMaker title that came to Steam in English back in March 2016, roughly two years after it originally came out back in 2014. It's a short title that you can easily knock out in around six to eight hours, postgame included, but within that six to eight is such an absurd amount of charm and an astonishingly fun combat system with a good sense of exploration and a story that knows how to be equal parts silly and also when to invoke serious or even an occasional "HELL YEAH" moment.
If you've heard the term VIPRPG thrown about when it comes to RPGMaker games, incidentally, Helen's is a good little look into what that scene is about. I don't want to go too deep into detail about the VIPRPG subculture and all that it entails, so instead I'll refer you to an extremely good write-up by Kastel, someone who is far smarter than me. Treat it as homework!! But it's the fun kind, trust me!!
I don't want to talk too much about the story--it's not that long of a game, really, and the plot beats are fun to experience on your own. So instead I'm going to focus on what makes Helen's such a fun game to go through if you're a gameplay-obsessed sicko like I am.
The major part of the heart and soul of Helen's is the combat. As you can probably tell, it's a custom battle system that is focused purely on one-on-one fights, all presented in this side view. You don't take turns per se--instead, all of your actions have three stats to them. "Effect", which is typically either the amount of damage dealt or how much healing a healing command will do. "Defense", which is typically a flat reduction to how much damage would be taken by an attack. And "Wait", which indicates the amount of time until a command goes off. Once both Helen and her opponent have chosen commands, the time will automatically proceed until one side's Wait hits 0 and their command goes off. (If it's a tie, incidentally, Helen's command will go off first.)
What makes this so compelling is a few things. First, you can carry up to 8 items at a time. A few might be ones that can't be used and just provide nice passive bonuses--that Power Bangle giving a flat +4 Effect to all your commands is pretty handy! But there's numerous weapons all with unique properties that can make them better or worse for certain fights. Bows tend to be fast and pack an okay punch, but have miserable defense, so getting hit while shooting them is dreadful. Magic is devastatingly strong and pierces the enemy's defense, but is painfully slow on top of having no defense. Swords strike a balance of good attack power and defense, but many of the chunkier swords do tend to be on the slower side, meaning you may have to endure more hits overall. There's even shields which are pure defense, if you just need to turtle up against an incoming attack.
It's not uncommon to carry 3-4 weapons, a shield, a spell, and a couple of passive items. Each turn, you'll have to be thinking about what's the best tool to use against the enemies, and how to really optimize combat both in terms of 'how do I end this quickly' and 'how do I end this without taking too much damage'. It takes a while before you learn a method of healing in combat and it's quite slow, so using it carelessly won't get you anywhere, though it does make keeping yourself topped off between fights much easier to such a degree that the postgame dungeon has a few things to say about that in particular!
Of course, this is all one half of the formula. Enemies in Helen's all have game plans of their own, and each new enemy is an obstacle for you to work out. Some enemies, like Lizardmen and Dracobeasts will switch to high Defense commands if they see Helen prepping to attack with a weapon, forcing you to figure out if you should try sneaking in defense piercing commands (at the risk of taking heavy damage, since those commands generally offer 0 defense to Helen) or figuring out how to get your swings in before they can put their guard up. A couple of bosses will very specifically move to counteract your commands, using low Wait weapons to sneak in hits if Helen is charging up a spell.
Perhaps most hilariously is how at least one boss reacts to the Metronome item--a 0 Effect, 0 Defense, 1 Wait item acquired later in the game that lets you basically pass time to see what the enemy's next command is going to be so you can pick the best option to deal with it. Said boss will instead just react with their own version of waiting with a 0 Effect, 0 Defense, 3 Wait command, all but telling you "sorry, pal, you're gonna have to go first".
This is a constant back and forth throughout the game. All the while, while Helen herself doesn't necessarily get stronger, you do get more max HP via beating major story bosses, finding max HP boosters in breakable objects, or even falling in battle and being sent back home, at which point you'll be woken up with a juicy +1 Max HP steak.
The steak is optional, incidentally, if you're worried about accidentally game over grinding or anything like that.
You do get actual experience points from fights, but these are actually used to improve your items from +0 to +9. Bows get stronger, swords will get both more attack and defense, and spells typically get wait time reductions. You can grind infinitely if you'd like since enemies respawn, but this isn't required. If you're not grinding, this means you've got to make some choices about what you upgrade and when. That Mythril Sword upgrade sure looks nice, but wouldn't it be better if Thunder was a little faster? What if you just made your shield stronger so you had a better fallback for when you needed to tank up? Maybe you should save the experience entirely for a new weapon that might be around the corner...?
Alternatively, you could be like me when I was streaming this and I, er. I sort of forgot how to level items briefly and did the entire first chunk of the game with 0 upgrades at all. Don't ask. Please do not ask.
Okay, if you must know, it's because I played the game years ago but never finished it (for some reason...?), and somehow turned "remembering that there is a blacksmith in this game" into "I cannot level anything until I find the blacksmith". Honestly--pretty funny, so good job to me.
Anyway, that's a lot of words to express the joys of Helen's Mysterious Castle's combat. It's a game with a lot of it, and while it might sound like it'd get exhausting--"you mean I need to keep track of every enemy's patterns?! I have to figure out a strategy for every single enemy at all times?!"--it's not really THAT bad. First, the game utilizes symbol encounters you can dodge, although some may be in narrow places where doing so can be a little trickier. Second, as you start upgrading your weapons and getting more options, most non-boss fights only really take a couple of hits to put down if you're willing to be aggressive. Third, as a reminder, the game is not even 10 hours long at most, so by the end I didn't really find myself tired of the fighting or anything like that. Most bosses were dealt with on my first attempt, though a couple were real nail biters and the final boss definitely took me more than a couple of attempts.
There's definitely at least one really strong weapon you can get if you pay attention to certain things the game tells you about, so that helps quite a bit, too!
Helen's Mysterious Castle also has a good feeling of exploration over its run-time. Areas aren't generally too big, there are occasional secrets to find if you're observant, and whenever you see a chest (or a floating magic book, or a sword stuck in the ground) there's a nice sense of excitement--what new piece of equipment will you get this time? Will it be something that shakes up your battle plan? The areas all having diverse tilesets and their own BGMs also lends a distinct flavor to each area of the castle and makes each environment stick out just a little bit more. The area depicted above is my favorite, especially as the plot advances and the time of day shifts and the view of the sky updates accordingly.
Speaking of the music--as you might have guessed, there's some music you've likely heard in other RPGMaker titles (the boss theme from Demon King Chronicle makes a surprise appearance!) but there's a lot of good picks. I always feel a little funny commenting on BGM choices when it's pieces that weren't created specifically for the game, but at the end of the day, good music is good music, and Helen's Mysterious Castle has good music. I don't mean that to sound like 'ah, it's using royalty-free or stock RPGM BGMs and that's bad', incidentally... just because it wasn't composed specifically for the game doesn't mean there's not a certain level of artistry in picking out good choices for the game, and I'm a person who loves video game music, so it's all the more meaningful to me when it's good regardless of whether it's a unique composition or something I may have heard used in other games.
Hell, ask me about how normal I am about ASTLIBRA's title screen theme showing up in Demon King Chronicle.
Anyway! Helen's Mysterious Castle is lovely. A fun, punchy battle system that can encourage some creative planning based on what items you've chosen to bring with you and upgrade, a simple but engaging enough story that knows when to have fun with itself, a pleasant run-time that ensures it's hard to get bored or tired of the game, and while I'm always a fan of RPGMaker aesthetics in general, I do really think the game looks nice in terms of map design and tilesets. It's definitely a game I've fallen in love with, and I'd gladly recommend it given its extremely low asking price on Steam.