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Wanderlust: Rebirth
PC (Steam)
Wanderlust: Stillbirth
1/5 stars
I would like to start by admitting that I was the instigator in making the MeltedJoystick crew play through this game. It was an impulse buy backed by a lack of research and a brief moment during which my normally healthy cynicism was impeded by a bout of brain-clouding optimism. It’s 16-bit, an RPG, Indie developed, AND $2.50 on a Steam sale? Bought! Played. Regretted…
“Wanderlust: Rebirth” was developed over the course of 5 years by two guys with a copy of Game Maker who call themselves Yeti Trunk (as in treasure chest, not elephant nose), working on it in their spare time. While it’s obvious that the Yeti Trunk guys put a lot of heart and soul into trying to make their dream game, they only succeeded in making an extremely niche game with an utter lack of polish.
Presentation
“Wanderlust: Rebirth” looks like a SNES game. The cute, 16-bit-style graphics were what initially attracted me to the game. The environments look like something out of a Squaresoft or Enix game from the 1990s, while the characters look somewhere between the games made by those two RPG powerhouses and the goofy characters from “Earthbound.” Character animation is fairly sparse, with most cutscenes taking place between static character portraits via text boxes. While most of the environmental and character graphics look pretty good, there are a couple of places later on in the game where the graphics-generating capabilities of Yeti Trunk were stretched beyond their breaking point by the scope of the game, with ‘scenic’ vistas that look like they were drawn in MS Paint.
But the graphics aren’t all old-school goodness, as someone on the design team thought it would be cool to use non-transparent overlays for a lot of things. There are large clouds that drift randomly across the screen, obscuring the action on the ground. Fortunately, the clouds can be turned off in the game’s option menu. However, the near constant stream of sound effect bubbles and status effect notifications (which CAN’T be turned off) do a good job of taking up the clouds’ slack and making it impossible to see what’s going on during hectic battles.
The sound in “Wanderlust: Rebirth” isn’t anything to get excited about. The music is decent, non-annoying, and completely unmemorable. The sound effects are utilitarian and get the job done.
Technically, “Wanderlust: Rebirth” is extremely solid. The game never crashed or had any major issues. While the game does require a bit of annoying port forwarding nonsense to get online play to work, only the host needs to do this. Since I’m the MeltedJoystick staffer with the least to lose by monkeying around with my Internet settings, I got to host, which usually turns out horribly due to my craptastic 1.5Mbps connection. However, I was pleased to find that “Wanderlust: Rebirth” ran smoothly with almost no lag with 4 networked players.
Story
Four personality-free characters – a fighter, cleric, elementalist (wizard), and alchemist (a misidentified ninja) – find themselves entering a fighting tournament for unknown reasons. After winning the tournament, this team of cardboard cutouts must make their way to the capitol city in order to speak with the King about some important matters.
As it turns out, the tournament was just a façade to find a group of people powerful enough to help the King with a military operation against a neighboring country ruled by a Moonkin. The Moonkin are apparently people born with unimaginable powers that become more powerful as the total number of Moonkin in the world decreases (I guess kind of like the ‘Highlander’ movies?).
While there are some attempts at plot twists and character development among the non-playable cast, “Wanderlust: Rebirth” is far too short and linear to really let any of that happen. The entire game takes place over 10 chapters, each of which takes approximately 30 minutes to complete, resulting in a 5 hour game. There are a number of secrets and optional bosses, but the almost complete lack of visual cues makes the entire experience feel about as opaque as some old NES games, like “Legacy of the Wizard,” and provides more of a sense of bewilderment than a sense of enjoyment.
Gameplay
If “Diablo” had been a SNES game, it would have closely resembled “Wanderlust: Rebirth,” complete with controller support. At its core, “Wanderlust: Rebirth” wants to be a Hack ‘n Slash RPG. However, due to a number of poor design decisions, it is worse than every other Hack ‘n Slash I’ve ever played in every possible way.
First, “Wanderlust: Rebirth” has severe control issues. While each of the 4 playable character classes has unique abilities that make them all play differently, one large problem shared by the three melee classes (fighter, cleric, and alchemist) is that their weapons are stupidly short… like “Lagoon” short… and we all remember how terrible “Lagoon” was! Characters have to practically stand on top of enemies in order to hit them (though the alchemist at least has a nice lunge attack that lets him/her jump through enemies). The elementalist is the only dedicated ranged character, yet manages to be the first to die in every battle due to the fact that he/she is the only character without a block button to defend against incoming attacks. The problem that affects all characters equally is the poor movement controls, which feel sluggish and frequently allow characters to get hung-up on pieces of the environment. “Wanderlust: Rebirth” wants players to dodge enemy attacks and use their reflexes to survive battles, then makes it nearly impossible to make the characters move with speed or precision.
As if poor controls weren’t enough, the game loves to throw enemies that use status effects at the players. I – as the team’s fighter – found myself almost continually poisoned (constantly losing health), asleep (unable to do anything), or stunned (again, unable to do anything). While it is possible to gain some semblance of resistance to these status effects, the only way to do so is through equipment.
The equipment system in “Wanderlust: Rebirth” makes Ebenezer Scrooge look like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Loot drops are stupidly stingy, with the game even admitting that there is a less-than-1% chance of a broken barrel dropping a piece of gear. Enemies are even stingier, almost never dropping actual equipment, but occasionally dropping pieces of debris for use in the game’s crafting system. The crafting system is completely insane in its expectations, requiring the player to first find a recipe as a random drop, then collect variable amounts of two different crafting materials as random drops, then collect three pieces of gear of the same type and of the quality level below the piece to be crafted (following the standard “Diablo” color scheme of white, green, blue, yellow), and far more money than a character will earn through a playthrough of all 10 chapters. The equipment system was even patched by Yeti Trunk in an update to make it feasible for characters to at least buy a set of white (non-magical) gear from the vendor in the game’s lobby.
The final insult in “Wanderlust: Rebirth” is the leveling system. It isn’t really a leveling system at all, but instead a Character Point system, which awards a number of Character Points equal to the completion percentage of each chapter, heaping on an additional 100 CP if the player(s) manage to get 100% on a chapter. These character points can be spent to improve a number of abilities for each character, with increasing costs for each upgrade. It’s also possible to re-spec a character for free at any time, so screw-ups in character building are never really an issue. However, most of the time, we only managed to get 50% chapter completion with no real clues about how to get a higher percentage. We found one hidden boss, but defeating it only increased our completion percentage for that chapter to ~80%. And somehow we managed to get 100% on Chapter 9, despite feeling like we didn’t really accomplish anything.
As if the hatefully designed equipment and character development systems weren’t bad enough, “Wanderlust: Rebirth” also has a difficulty that pendulums erratically from ‘cake-walk’ to ‘impossible,’ even on the so-called ‘Normal’ difficulty (there is no 'Easy'). Most of the game’s more difficult sections can be completed through the use of a ‘revive and continue’ option that appears to the game host when the entire party is killed, allowing the characters to keep going with a score penalty (our all time low score was due to a hideous boss in a later chapter that left us with -16000 points). EXCEPT for the ridiculous final boss, which abruptly takes away the ability to revive and continue, forcing players to take on a cheap one-hit-KO master without dying.
In the end, it seems that “Wanderlust: Rebirth” is only really meant to be played online with a team of 4 completely obsessed players. While there is an option to play single-player with a team of 3 AI-controlled allies, these ‘helpers’ are utterly moronic and, despite having pretty good stats, fight ineffectively and die constantly. Playing this game casually or as a short-and-sweet diversion is all but impossible due to the difficulty spikes and inability to really improve characters outside of the multi-player-only Crawl Mode (which must be unlocked by playing through most of Story Mode), which resembles Roguelike RPGs in its focus on randomization and survival.
Overall
“Wanderlust: Rebirth” is one of the worst Indie games I’ve ever played, made even worse by the fact that, unlike some of the horrible Indie-developed swill available on smartphones, it is based on a classic genre that should be fun to play. But with the developers creating a game to specifically cater to their own bizarre interpretation of the term ‘fun,’ they instead managed to create a game so niche that it’s nearly impossible to get into for those who haven’t already looked under the hood and tinkered with the engine. “Wanderlust: Rebirth” is a 5 hour game that apparently requires 1000 hours of dedicated play to get anywhere. That’s a worse rate of return than “Dungeon Defenders’” Nightmare Mode, and a completely unacceptable proposition for a game that isn’t all that fun to begin with. Even on a Steam sale, this is one game that isn’t worth the money.
Presentation: 3/5
Story: 2/5
Gameplay: 0.5/5
Overall (not an average): 1/5
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