RPG Time: The Legend of Wright is easily one of the most unique-looking games I have ever played. Primarily the work of a single developer at Deskworks, RPG Time has received an exclusive console release on Xbox and is published by Aniplex. RPG Time is an adventure game presented as a homemade adventure RPG. The artwork is what will draw people to the game, but the gameplay is always the most important aspect of whether or not I can recommend a game, so read on to find out how it stacks up to the creative, one-of-a-kind art style.
All of the gameplay in RPG Time: The Legend of Wright takes place on a desk. The type of wooden desk that you might find in a school almost anywhere in the world, covered in pencil-etched doodles. The entire game is narrated by a young boy who has created an RPG game within a notebook. The game features a simple premise of a hero, Wright, who needs to rescue a Princess friend from an evil villain, Dethgawd. Later it expands a bit, and it turns out Wright must stop Dethgawd or else the world will be destroyed. The narrator game master has different paper masks for each character and he swaps back and forth between each one as he reads their lines. At first, I found this kind of cute, but overall I felt as if the narrator really slowed down the pace of the game. He has a remark for everything, over-explaining too many things, and tosses in little quips at every chance. Some players will probably like all of this dialogue, but I found the constant barrage of text to be distracting.
The gamebook is presented in a black and white hand-drawn art style and it is gorgeous. As you play you will slowly work your way through the notebook, and the book pages will turn in 3D as you progress – I really liked this detail. Each page is very unique and the game makes use of multiple types of gameplay. A few of the pages are just focused on the story, these had some of the best art in the game and it was always wonderfully animated. On the rest of the pages, you will be controlling the titular hero, Wright. Sometimes it’s in a side view, sometimes top-down Zelda-style, and other times it’s more of a birds-eye view. This allows the developer to really showcase his art, and like I keep saying, it’s fantastic.
Outside of the gamebook, the art style is in 3D. The game master has a vast assortment of extra props that all appear to be made out of household items or supplies you might find at school. I like how everyday objects are used to create props for the game, such as a pencil with a paper hilt, that you use to strike (draw on) enemies during fight sequences or the small tape measure that is Wright’s health bar. Many different arts and crafts styles are used in the 3D art, such as construction paper cutouts, or bead art (for Wright’s status bar). Overall it is extremely unique and charming, but the color choices and the low-poly assets felt a bit jarring, especially in comparison to the clean and crisp 2D art in the gamebook.
The gameplay has a fair amount of variety, especially at the beginning of the game. You start the story in a cave that you must work your way through. The narrator/game master has the power to erase and draw in new obstacles for Wright to overcome, which I thought was a unique feature that fits in well with the pen and paper theme. The whole game is scripted, however, so everything that is added and everything you discover will always be the same on subsequent playthroughs, although there is some choice involved in how to approach certain impediments. As I said, the creativity is on full display at the beginning of the game, which sees you working your way through a cave, where you find a shovel sword, which allows you to dig out the cavities of a giant monster that tries to halt your progress. After helping him with his dental problems he is happy to let you proceed. Next, you get to play a baseball mini-game where you have to hit the ball with a timed swing of your shovel. A little later, after commandeering a tank, you will play a mini-game where you will drive the tank towards the horizon shooting and dodging things.
There really is a lot of variety in the game design within RPG Time. You’ll be surprised at the diverse selection of mini-games woven into the gameplay. Two examples are the shoot-em-up section near the end of the game and the pinball mini-game where each ball is a representation of Wright and his four friends. One other element that I liked is the hidden object-style gameplay where you could look for a mini ninja (Mininja) hidden on most pages. You don’t get anything for finding them, unfortunately, but I still continued to pause the game and find them each time the bottom of the page indicated one was there.
Despite this variety, there are a number of things holding it back. One of the main things is just how slow everything feels. Wright walks incredibly slow, I really don’t see why a button couldn’t have been used to speed up his walking speed, especially since only one face button is used for a rotating assortment of actions. The game might have an RPG theme, but it is purely an adventure game, which means that many of the puzzles have a single solution. Most of the time the solution makes sense and is somewhat obvious, but other times I felt like there could have been another viable solution. Many of these puzzles are in the form of battles where you have to attack the weak spot of an enemy by swiping your pencil sword. If you don’t know where to hit them then the enemy will slowly whittle away at your health and you’ll die. When you die the pages flip ahead, and you get to a page where you have to tap B multiple times to make Wright get back up. This page also gives you the option to look at a hint for the page where you died, which is a nice feature, but pausing the gameplay and having to mash a button every time you die gets old extremely fast. There are sections of the game where it’s essentially a one-hit kill and you’re sent over to the continue page, to mash the button again. I think an easy solution for this would be to limit the number of times you were sent to that page to one for each page of the gamebook. The second half of the adventure really started to drag on. I think this started with the huge maze you have to work your way through in the haunted forest chapter. Visually the maze is very impressive, but gameplay-wise it felt like a chore, and a lot of the other gameplay elements did as well, in part because of the speed of the game, which is too slow for my liking, and also because of the constant narration from the game master.
Conclusion
The art style alone might be worth giving RPG Time: The Legend of Wright a look especially if you are a fan of adventure-style games. There were definitely some high points such as the mini-game where you catch fish using a musical piano bridge that plays the tune of London Bridge Is Falling Down as you catch the fish. Overall, however, the pace and the shallow gameplay made me wish there was a way to get some of my time back from RPG Time: The Legend of Wright.
Become a Patron!This game was reviewed based on Xbox One review code, using an Xbox One console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.Want to keep up to date with the latest Xt reviews, Xt opinions and Xt content? Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.