Itch Quest I
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Last modified 2012-07-18 20:34:11
Itch Quest is a very early (1997) Megazeux JRPG by Big_D and Kosherpig. It was written for Megazeux 2.51, and the limits really show here. It's barely functional and full of graphical glitches. You play as a character named Itch, who I'm assuming is an anthromorphic dog, and you're on a mission to find Mecha Man. Mecha Man is only mentioned here, though. He must have been in an Itch Quest game that was never made.
The menus are bizarre, non-intuitive and slow to work with. Just cycling through options seems to take about a second per option, and there's some sort of bizarre system where you need to un-equip your player before you can equip new weapons/armor. This is possibly to save space on variable usage given there was a limit of 50 back then, but it really coulda been handled in a less clunky way... also, there are TONS of bizarre misspellings all over the place, which are characteristic of Big D and Kosherpig's games.
The battles are just as slow, and are probably the glitchiest part of the game. The screen doesn't update until after a turn is over, and this results in weirdness like enemies from the last battle being visible in a current battle, and the enemy selection cursor staying on screen after a turn's over. Oh, and the most powerful weapon, the long sword, doesn't seem to work against most enemy types. And you can't even buy it without editing the game, because of a typo in a shop object's code in the second town.
The first map area is at least beatable. You go on a mission to find the king's cat and grind for money/experience points. It's boring, but also pretty adequate for a 1997 Megazeux game.
Then you go to the second map area and the enemies get absurdly overpowered. Each battle would take several minutes, and battles occur sometimes within 5 steps on the map. It's unplayable at this point, and unless you edited the weapon shop robot in the second town you stand no chance. Fortunately you can run from every encounter with a 100% success rate. If you survive through the single dungeon battle on the second map, you win the game.
The music selection is pretty good for the most part. Big D almost consistently used tracks by the module author Basehead... but also a few songs from Final Fantasy. But this *was* 1997 and having module version of FF songs seemed awesome back then. Graphics are mostly adequate, and the cutscene graphics occasionally look really good (like Kosherpig's drawing of Itch). What merits the graphics had are kinda negated by all the glitches though...
I can only recommend this if you're curious to see what the earliest attempts at Megazeux JRPGs looked like. And even so, Kosherpig's Mechzone is subjectively much better than this one.
Oh, there are a few boards with content only accessible from the editor as well. I like to note that in these reviews whenever I find it. Nothing special this time, but hey! It's kinda cool, at least from the perspective of someone who was around in 1997.
The menus are bizarre, non-intuitive and slow to work with. Just cycling through options seems to take about a second per option, and there's some sort of bizarre system where you need to un-equip your player before you can equip new weapons/armor. This is possibly to save space on variable usage given there was a limit of 50 back then, but it really coulda been handled in a less clunky way... also, there are TONS of bizarre misspellings all over the place, which are characteristic of Big D and Kosherpig's games.
The battles are just as slow, and are probably the glitchiest part of the game. The screen doesn't update until after a turn is over, and this results in weirdness like enemies from the last battle being visible in a current battle, and the enemy selection cursor staying on screen after a turn's over. Oh, and the most powerful weapon, the long sword, doesn't seem to work against most enemy types. And you can't even buy it without editing the game, because of a typo in a shop object's code in the second town.
The first map area is at least beatable. You go on a mission to find the king's cat and grind for money/experience points. It's boring, but also pretty adequate for a 1997 Megazeux game.
Then you go to the second map area and the enemies get absurdly overpowered. Each battle would take several minutes, and battles occur sometimes within 5 steps on the map. It's unplayable at this point, and unless you edited the weapon shop robot in the second town you stand no chance. Fortunately you can run from every encounter with a 100% success rate. If you survive through the single dungeon battle on the second map, you win the game.
The music selection is pretty good for the most part. Big D almost consistently used tracks by the module author Basehead... but also a few songs from Final Fantasy. But this *was* 1997 and having module version of FF songs seemed awesome back then. Graphics are mostly adequate, and the cutscene graphics occasionally look really good (like Kosherpig's drawing of Itch). What merits the graphics had are kinda negated by all the glitches though...
I can only recommend this if you're curious to see what the earliest attempts at Megazeux JRPGs looked like. And even so, Kosherpig's Mechzone is subjectively much better than this one.
Oh, there are a few boards with content only accessible from the editor as well. I like to note that in these reviews whenever I find it. Nothing special this time, but hey! It's kinda cool, at least from the perspective of someone who was around in 1997.