Dragon Fantasy: The Black Tome of Ice

From what I have played, this game is a fun version of Chrono Trigger. And I would recommend it normally if you like this style. But it will get a thumbs down for a massive, massive reason.

I went the wrong way in the game, and the way this was programmed it is impossible to go back. Worst of all, because I when the wrong way without having the right (or any) people in my party, the game locks on a specific scene.

So yea....because of crap programming, I get to start all again. I would be forgiving if it was my error that caused it...but to allow me to go to an area I shouldn't be able to get into, and then trap me in that area by placing someone to block my way back...and then having no way out of not getting locked....that one is on Muteki.

So sorry..no sympathy. Enjoy you thumbs down for not play testing this.

While there's complaints about bugs, and I did find a few minor ones, I found it incredibly fun, and can definitely recommend it.

This is a good game. It not mind blowing but it will keep you entertain for more than 20 hours. The first one was better but this one is recommended. Good story line and likable characters. You want to pick something up for a couple of days fun I would recommend. 7.5/10

I was torn on whether to put a positive or negative review for this game.
I finally decided to go positive because "mixed" felt kinda harsh... Then I do one more fight before writing this review, I capture a monster and get a level up for all characters, yay! Text box announces my party is full (because of the captured monster)... and then crashes.
So negative it is.

This game has some undeniable charm to it: it's nice looking with decent character sprites, animations, quite detailed and beautiful environments/tilesets AND it's definitely not made with RPG Maker!
Music sounds nice though somewhat inappropriate for the pixel artstyle of the game, but no big deal. I noticed BGM loop points are ackwardly implemented.
It has a FF6-style world map with an accurate reproduction of SNES mode 7 pseudo-perspective effect.

However the game also came with all the annoying features from the "good old JRPG days", such as save checkpoint system, a huge fuckton pile of technically-not-random-but-still-forced monster encounters and verbose, mostly uninteresting one-way dialogues. A few generic NPCs have blablablah that span 5 or 6 pages of text box.
Navigating the combat menu becomes a chore, the cursor doesn't memorize your last choice and I think the UI lacks clarity: adding icons, more colors and better layout would help a lot. I felt annoyed that I can have up to 4 characters in combat, yet they decided to go for a UI targeting layout with only 3 visible characters at a time that requires scrolling down to select the 4th character. WTF? The screen has sufficient space to show all 4 characters, why did you do it this way game?

You get the traditional dungeon -> city -> dungeon -> city... approach, with Fedex fetch quests thrown in for good measure that you can get in the city by talking to random NPCs that tell you their life problems and stuff. You can't get any more cliche than that. Thankfully these side quests don't get in your way. You can complete most of them by just playing the main story normally.
The game also has a convenience feature where you can visit a NPC that will hand all side quests reward to you instead of having to remember where was that godamn quest NPC.
I didn't play the first game so I don't know if there is any interesting backstory for the characters. The story felt like events/small plots connected together with no overarching plot. It just feels disjointed and so random, especially near the ending. Humor is hit or miss. Some funny lines here and there.
I fell asleep a couple of times while playing due to the long mostly-empty-but-padded-with-monsters dungeons and filler dialogues. Early boss fights were decent but still, due to game's simple mechanics there is a hard limit to how engaging its combat system can be, it feels "solved" and becomes VERY quickly bland at best, or a chore at worst.
The game had an interesting mechanical twist where your party splits up and you have to play sub plots in whatever order you prefer. It was interesting because the monsters and equipment you got in the sub plot you did first could be used to make the other sub plots easier.

On the bug side:
- At some point, shop menu stopped responding to gamepad input until I "unlocked" it by using the mouse.
- Characters can jump to ackward positions in combat when there are cliffs and other obstacles.
- Slight clipping issues and approximative collision of sprites and map elements, no big deal though.
- Well, the game can crash. Hope last time you saved is not hours ago when it happens!

Thankfully the game can be beaten in 10 hours or so, that's a positive to me as I actually prefer when flawed JRPG-style games don't overstay their welcome.

Such an awesome game and better than the first. However, game breaking glitches ruin it.

Hello Friends! I am writing a review for the game DRAGON FANTASY: THE BLACK TOME OF ICE. Unfortantly, im stuck in the game because of a game breaking bug and cannot continue any further into the game because of the bug. Please see game breaking bug here:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/328000/discussions/0/1769259642876453023/

So how does this bug break the game? Basically, i cannot get further into the game because the game still thinks it is nighttime and it is supposed to be during the day. In ramona's quest after the split up quest, you are supposed to go to a coliseum where a guy blocks the path to get there with a password. The password is supposed to be available from the plunder thief's area, but when i go there, they say they are sleeping since it is nighttime. I found a youtube video about this same section, and it shows it is daytime during their video, so im guessing this is a game-breaking bug. I have already emailed the company that made this game and asked them what to do. If you want to pester this company, which i suggest you do, contact them here:

http://choicepublishing.com/contact

I found no email. Because of the above mentioned bug, i cannot progress further into the game, so i am stuck permanently at this one spot, unless i want to replay the game from the beginning again.

NOT RECOMMENDED due to the above mentioned bug. If this is fixed and i can go further into the game, i will rectify my negative review after i play further into the game, which is only possible after the game breaking bug is fixed!

NOTE: Im not sure playing as Ramona first is the reason for the bug, but i got it after playing as Ogden.

Addenum: There is also several other bugs in the game which i already reported to the company that made the game. I hope they fix it so i can play it later, which at that time, i will change my review to positive.

This is not a perfect game, but it's a lot of fun, and I feel like even if you didn't play the first one (Volumes of Westeria), you could enjoy this game just as well. Well written, and has great music.

I don't understand why the review is bad
my experience is good so far. The music is really nice
really like the battle theme

Bought this for 99 cents. So wait for a sale to pick this up. For that price, it's definitely worth it.

While this game is passably fun, it crashed far too often for me to be able to recommend it. Though there were MANY frustrating moments while playing this, I will almost certainly buy the next one when when it comes out.

I tried playing this on Linux and the very Chrono Trigger like presentation (sans Active Time combat unfortunately) had me ... until I tried taking ANY action in combat, and the game crashes that very moment. Anticlimactic as hell. I'm on Kubuntu LTS for crying out loud, and my graphics driver is the native supported Intel, I've played several Steam games with modern 3D graphics and they NEVER crash, so it's totally unacceptable for a pixel art game to have a Linux port here on Steam, and be this much of an unstable afterthought. It just disappoints people. I have a feeling that this is a quality JRPG, but I won't get to enjoy it. Refund time. :(

I really, really wanted to like this game, but after several attempts I just... don't, and can't.

I'm an old JRPG lover, my two favorite games are Earthbound and Lufia 2, with other games and series like Chrono Trigger, FF, DQ, Suikoden, Pokemon, etc. under that umbrella as well, so naturally I should very much love this game. But unfortunately it falls quite short: to me, it is at best dull and tedious, and at worst obnoxious and frustrating.

I played the first "Book", and while I'm not as big a fan of the older NES-style JRPGs, I found it to be a quaint and decent enough homage to DQ1, FF1, and its own thing for Chapter 3. Not particularly deep or complex, but its inspirations were hardly not such themselves, so it was fine. But this game touts inspiration and homage from much more refined sources, and it fails to live up to them.

The story feels meandering and listless, characters just going from place to place with the thinnest of reasons and explanations when on-rails and little direction given when the world is opened to you. The characters, while sufficient in the first game due to the nature of it, feel bland and uninteresting, their backstories, personalities, and motivations rather thin. The most interesting character is Ramona (and her uncle), but the complete redesign of her character mars attachment such that I had in the first game. Ogden, removed from his kingdom, is too generic and bland now, and Anders barely has presence at all. The villains' motives and actions don't fair much better, at least 5 and a half hours into the game.

The combat system is simultaneously too slow and too fast. Too slow in that choosing options from the menus takes precious many seconds to scroll through, as well as button input for confirming actions feeling lagged. Too fast in that when actions occur, they happen too quickly sometimes to properly register what's going on without a conscious examination. Battles are very frequent, and they are often packed with far too many enemies (sometimes 5+ just jumping onto the screen from nowhere). Combined with frequent missing, rather high monster HP levels for average party damage output, monster abilities that do high amounts of damage, and a low gold yield that seems too little to properly cover refilling items and staying at inns, much less buying new equipment, and combat is tedious chore, if not brazenly overly difficult as well.

I've never been particularly crazy about the monster capturing system, either, even in the first game. It is a requirement at times due to the nature of the party being split up, but the feat of actually capturing a monster can be frustrating. In Pokemon, it's a one-on-one fight most of the time, but this requires you to juggle killing other monsters while just damaging the one you intend to capture, thus forcing you to play a certain way and most likely get more damaged in the process. Additionally, there's no visible HP, just an indicator that the monster is [Beat Up] at a certain point. This point isn't particularly hard to figure out with trial and error, but it's still obnoxious since a part of Pokemon's system is weighing the value of attacking or not, as well as with what attack, based on how much HP the creature has left. Having the Capture Nets be able to fail like a Pokeball would also is annoying, as that's 250+ gold that must go into buying more, rather than healing items or new equipment for yourself.

The music also isn't particularly interesting or inspiring. Music in a JRPG is crucial to grabbing your attention, accentuating scenes, bringing emotion, adding to atmosphere, etc. But there's nothing in this soundtrack that is as memorable, catchy, or mood-influencing as they should be.

And this isn't to mention all the bugs that seem to be prevalent in the game. I hadn't encountered anything game-breaking yet, but I did encounter minor things here and there, biggest of which was a bug where after selling something in a store, the menu would freeze and I'd have to use the mouse to click the Done button, then talk to the shopkeeper again to resume.

Basically, the story feels shallow and directionless, the characters feel bland and uninteresting, the combat is annoying in its tedium and difficulty, other systems lack refinement, the music lacks presence... this all just leads to an experience that I have tried to continue several times over a course of several days, but leaves me distant and going through the motions at its best moments and vocally frustrated at its worst.

The first game, Volumes of Westeria, is worth your time if you enjoy the very first Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy games, and can be completed in under 10 hours. This, however, I cannot really recommend at all. Maybe it opens up and becomes more tolerable as the game goes on, but I could not make it beyond the point I did, despite my efforts.

Well, got to the 1st town after dying about 6~8 times in a row. The music absolutely does not fit. Much of it was too energetic and loud and up-beat for what should have been foreboding and building premonition... as in, something you'd hear in the opening of a movie instead of something that sounded more like the closing credits. 16-bit SNES-era graphics and loud banging orchestra just didn't mix (and I make game-music so that's big for me).

The battles do have a lot of MISSES in them, taking longer than they should, and I seemed to die a lot if I didn't heal all the time, once I realised there was a heal spell anyways. Sometimes they ended up oddly formed, when for example the hero and a crab were at the opposite corners of the screen jumping back at one another and there was a house in the way.

The SNES-era graphics were well done and accomplished what they needed to, it's just a shame that the music was a let-down. Not to say it's bad, but it's just...barely adequete and the pieces just don't fit the scene (though the one that played through the first few boards was fairly to what it should have been). You should get a different music producer.

Where the first game really was entirely awesome - this game is kind of a let down. So if you're going to do another game, try doing it just like the first chapter of the first game, just longer. This game would have benefitted from a Secret-of-Mana style active battle system very well, I might add.

Though I don't personally really recommend this to die-hard SNES-era fans, it's not a badly made game. I am kind of in the middle ground. Would I buy it again, probably not, but it's not so bad that I'd ask for a refund, either.

I may pick it up again later and change my review if it gets better.

I'm really torn about this game.

On one hand you have a love letter to JRPGs of old. The development team designed characters and battle system that are inspired by Chrono Trigger series. The music is charming but none of the tunes stuck with me, these are not pieces you will be humming in the shower.

My biggest gripe with this game is the lack of polish. There are tons of game breaking bugs in the game. Put a monster to sleep to capture them. Game crashes. Try to record footage and exit the game. Game crashes. Fight a trivial monster after a boss fight in a specific location. Game crashes.

Then there are the minor bugs like walking through walls and getting stuck. Meeting goals for achievements that don't actually unlock the achievement. Bugs happen but what's frustrating is that the developers don't care! Look at the discussion board on Steam, a few bugs are listed with no comments from Muteki! I emailed their support email with a link to a private video of the steps to take to break the game and they never looked at the video (the view count never went up).

There's a bug where your cursor gets stuck in your menu and there's no way to get out. There's also a distinctive lack of polish in the menus. There's no way to scroll down by page and instead you must go down item per item. This gets very tedious at the end of the game when you've accumulated a ton of items! It's even worse when you go to equip something, why is it that when I go to equip a chest piece that it doesn't put me in the chest piece items and instead in the "all" category?

Why can't I reorganize my spells? The low level spells are useless at the end of the game so in each turn I have to scroll down passed all the useless spells to the bottom of my skill list (remember, no scroll by page only item per item). This makes each battle takes a lot longer than they should!

There's also questionable design decisions like a heavy reliance on RNGesus. You miss ALL THE TIME. Most modern role playing games seem to be moving away from this gimmick but Muteki seems to stick to old design patterns.

I want Muteki to succeed and I want more indie JRPGs like Dragon Fantasy but I cannot recommend this game unless you're starved for an old school RPG. I will play/buy the next chapter (as I said, I want more of these kinds of games) but I hope Muteki gets their act together.

Wonderful sequel! New graphics, awesome gameplay! Thank you dev team for another gem... Can't wait for the third installment! hehehe A must play for jrpg fans...

This game is wroth very penny. It\'s so much fun and I love the chrono trigger and final fantasy feel of the game. If you are a fan of jrpg it\'s a must buy!

Not made in RPG Maker. Not that it should matter but I'm saying it because I know it does.
Edit.....

The "humor" is really childish and too cheesy for my tastes. While the battle system is the same as one of the all-time greats in Chrono-Trigger I am nearly an hour in and still mashing the same commands over and over again to get my 1 character to kill the same enemies over and over again. That's just wasted potential right there that may be fufilled later on but at this point I am asking for a refund.

While I gave this a "Tenantive Thumbs Up - But Please...please...please tell me they picked a better name for the second town/city/village or this might be a quick turnaround."

There was a quick turn around...

Liked....

Battle System
Ran Well
Retro-Snes Presentation
No Random Encounters

Hated....

Repetive Battles that in an hour of play had made 0 use of things that make the battle system great
Childish Humor
Pacing
Story - Vague (This is part 2 but i can't imagine part 1 will help this much) and unintersting
As far as I played the world here seemed to be pretty generic and bland

3/10

Asking for a refund....

great game... got my snes vibe all over again... must have for chrono trigger lovers

Dragon Fantasy: The Black Tome of Ice is a love letter to Squaresoft's SNES-era RPGs. It clocks in between 10-15 hours long (my played time includes some AFKing). The overall story is above-average and the game is packed with homages to games both classic and contemporary. There is a lot of tongue-in-cheek humor and goofiness, but it doesn't get in the way.

The combat is turn-based, but quick, and you can get by without much grinding if you approach the battles tactically or turn down the difficulty. I recommend turning message speed up to max. Also, there are no random battles; all monsters appear on the screen. They can be avoided and sometimes even baited away from their pack for an easy kill. They even stay dead for as long as you are in the area, often allowing you to backtrack to a campfire to recover hp/mana and save.

Graphics are so-so. There are some clipping problems here and there, lots of resused NPC sprites, and a few common special effects for skills. It has some charm of its own, but don't expect the detail of Chrono Trigger or the smoothness of Secret of Mana. There is plenty of room for improvement, but the graphics definitely aren't an eyesore.

I have a difficult time judging music, but I will say this game does it pretty well. Some of it is catchy, none of it was annoying, and most of the repeat cutovers are well-placed, if not perfect.

If you love SNES-era RPGs (Chrono Trigger, in particular), you will enjoy this game, but I would recommend it to any JRPG lover.

Holy @#$%

Music ++
Gameplay ++
Story ++

If you like chrono trigger and FF6, Or like any retro game from the 90's and have 10bucks(cnd) to spare do yourself a favor