By Kevin Kauffmann on September 10, 2013 at 2:10pm
I guess it’s my fault; after Rain-Slick 3, I was eagerly anticipating what Zeboyd and Tycho would do with the final chapter in the Penny Arcade series. I tore through Rain-Slick 3 with zeal, a smile plastered on my face from beginning to end, and I played all the DLC that came with it. I went to a panel at PAX East just to see glimpses of what they were doing. I was excited for a great, retro RPG.
What I got barely inspired a shrug.
If you’re not familiar with the series, Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-Slick: Precipice of Darkness is a story based off characters in the popular Penny Arcade webcomic, and it’s had some difficulties in the past. The first two entries were largely disregarded, nobody seemed to like them, but then Jerry Holkins, the writer of Penny Arcade and Tycho's real-life counterpart, took to the internet and wrote out the third entry. This attracted the folks over at Zeboyd and they created a retro RPG a la 16-bit franchises like Final Fantasy and it was AWESOME.
I really just wanted more of the same.
However, with the final part of Tycho’s “Quartet for the Dusk of Man,” they decided to mix up the gameplay that I had already loved and cherished. They went with a Pokemon model, using “Monstorbs” to trap monsters and creatures that dwell within Rain-Slick’s universe. The characters I knew and loved were forced into “trainer” roles and, effectively, neutered them from really having an impact on the game. If they were assigned to a monster, they had access to their abilities, but I really never bothered to use those abilities anyway. It really didn’t change much, honestly, many of the tactics and abilities developed in the third game were transferred over directly to the monsters, but I also did not care at all for any of the creatures in my care.
I didn’t “catch” them, I didn’t “train” them; whatever experience and gold I received from battling all of the other monsters seemed to have very little effect and it made for a very static experience. Yes, I would receive new abilities, but it did not feel like I had earned them or that it really changed the game that much. Almost every fighter I had was interchangeable, and that’s the worst thing you can really do in an RPG. I cared less for what monsters I had and more for whether or not they could attack multiple monsters at once, because the developers decided to throw as much as they could at the screen. It became more and more annoying to deal with the enemies and it just turned into how fast I could destroy them.
And while it may have seemed like a fun, tongue-busting-through-the-cheek aspect for them to include, I really did not appreciate Tycho’s occasional appearance and how the game forced him into my party as a sort of god character which was much better than any of my monsters. It made everything incredibly easy and just reminded me how much I missed having the real characters fighting and contributing to the action. I feel like I understood what they were doing, it definitely seems like some sort of demented power fantasy being ridiculed, but it also comes off as just a regular demented power fantasy. It felt like they crossed the line between parody and mimicry.
This is really where my disappointment with Rain-Slick 4 comes from; it just wasn’t funny. I’ve been reading Penny Arcade for over a decade and for a very long time I was entertained by what they said, in and outside the comic. Rain-Slick 3 made me giddy as a schoolgirl with all the classic references and off-the-wall humor. However, in recent years, Penny Arcade seems to be slipping, and this game is the biggest sign of that. I never even cracked a smile in this game, which hurt me as a fan.
In the third game, the creatures you encountered were great visual portmanteaus, puns in animal form, and reading the character descriptions was actually worth it. The humor derived from the bickering of the main characters was spot-on; the situations were ridiculous. There were a great deal of ideas flying back and forth and the chaos was definitely entertaining.
They seemed to have lost that with the fourth entry. The new enemies and monsters feel bland and uninspired; the flavor text was dry and purely descriptive. The new characters they introduced were boring and I literally wanted them to die and be replaced by someone better, but that never happened. I was saddled with characters I didn’t like, the characters I did like seemed to have lost everything I loved about them, and I really had no investment in the story anymore. I just felt like I was wandering around Hell for ten hours and I just wanted it to be done.
I wanted the game to be done just two hours into playing it. I wasn’t enjoying it, I wasn’t getting anything out of it. I was going through the retro RPG motions, but the nostalgia and the humor were not there. The heart was gone, and it really hurts me to say that.
Oh, and that battle theme was horrible. I turned the sound off after the first couple hours and never looked back.
In closing, Rain-Slick 4 is really just a mediocre game. If you’ve played the third game, you might enjoy seeing how the story ends, but even that felt like a cop-out to me. The old school RPG elements are kinda fun, but Zeboyd itself has better games in its back catalog. And if you’re looking for a funny game, I would highly suggest trying something else.
Because, as a fan, this was just sad.
