One Million Steps to Home

Intro

"One Million Steps to Home" was developed by Craze, Karsuman, and Silviera using RPG Maker VX Ace and was created for the Event Event event. An event that was held so people could create games based on previous events held on the site over the years. Albeit the time restrictions of past events didn't apply so if you wanted to make a game based around the theme of some of the old birthday events you didn't need to restrict yourself to a few hours to make your game. In the case of this game it was meant to partake in two different events those being the Game Name Game event and Seasons of RMN V event. The first event centers around building a game around a name contained within a list on the event page while the second one centered around building a game around all four of the seasons.

While I'll agree this project definitely meets the criteria of the first event. I'm not so sure it qualifies for the other one since everything appears to take place over the course of a few days at most. Nor does the game place any sort of emphasis on the time of year. In fact, the only reason the weather appears to change is because your going northward for the entire game. So of course the more temperate parts of the world eventually turn to ice and snow as you approach the pole. Though, I suppose my opinion on what qualifies or doesn't qualify for that event might be harsher than those that ran it.

Story
Summary

Supposedly the war is over and it's time for this group of soldiers to head home. Of course, the king is damnable liar and things have gone so pear shaped the only hope he has for salvation is for a group of soldiers to step up and become heroes and heroines in order to save the kingdom. So do you have what it takes to make it home when their are hordes of monsters and powerful demons standing in your way?

Greatest Strength/Weakness

On the plus side the party contains several rather sassy characters which does help lighten the mood a bit when you visit an inn in this game.



On the other hand the five playable characters in this game don't interact that much over the course of the game. As a result they feel like blank slates for the most part which makes this game a lot less engaging in my opinion which is a bit of problem since this game takes around three hours to beat. So it isn't like this is a super short game like "Creaking" that can be beaten in under ten minutes.

Gameplay

On the combat side of things "One Million Steps to Home" relies on the default combat system that comes with RPG Maker VX Ace. As such, I don't have a lot to say about the underlying mechanics since most people on this site are probably familiar with them, but for a quick overview this game features a turn-based combat system with special skills that either require MP or TP to cast. Outside of your special skills we have the standard attack, guard, item, and flee commands as well. Of course you earn TP in battle via landing hits, taking damage, guarding, or the consumption of certain items. In fact, the only real change up here is instead of the standard four person party we tend to get in these sorts of games we have a five-person party in this one.



As for combat balance it swings a bit over the course of the game in my opinion. As far as standard encounters go they tend to stay pretty difficult upon initial arrival in an area. Mainly because the price of new gear jumps pretty quickly in this game so you'll need to grind a bit every time you enter a new area in order to purchase new weapons and armor. You can skip over this near the end of the game for most characters as long as you've reached level 20. This is because you can utterly cheese the game's final boss using just Elena and her undertow skill that requires 100 TP to activate. Normally this wouldn't be a good move to rely on but you can purchase items in the last shop that restore 35 TP to the party. Combine this with the fact you can buff Elena's attack and critical hit rate and she can use this multi hit attack in order to do in excess of 6,000 points of damage if your lucky. So my advice for the final boss is basically to stock up on powerful group heals and TP restores and just go ham on him. In fact, some of the regular enemies are more annoying to deal with in this game since some enemies in this game are quite happy to spam moves that will sleep or confuse your entire party. And a lot of these monsters can pop up in groups of three or more of them at the same time.

Graphics and Sound

As far as I'm aware the game relies entirely on the RTP for these aspects. To be fair that is pretty typical for event projects considering a lot of them give developers only a week or two to toss something together. Albeit the event this game partook in gave developers a month to make something. Though if the game's description is anything to go by this was a last minute entry for the event. So there probably wasn't a lot of time for making custom assets.

Originally designed as a last-minute entry to RMN’s Event Event, . . .

I'm also pretty sure the mine dungeon uses a sample map since I've seen that same dungeon in multiple games.

Minor Bug

You can still move during the cut scene that plays when you arrive at the destroyed capital. Though, I'll admit this bug essentially works in the player's favor since you can use this to cut down on the amount of random encounters you'll have to deal with on your way to the final boss.

Conclusion

"One Million Steps to Home" is a bit of a mixed bag in my opinion. On one hand I'm a sucker for turn-based RPGs so I've got quite a soft spot for them. Unfortunately this game's overall enjoyment is lowered by a few nagging issues. These range from the game being a little too grindy for it's own good to the playable characters being so flat I've seen pancakes with more depth to them. On the other hand the game's combat is pretty good, but that isn't enough to save this game in my opinion. After all, there are a lot of turn-based RPGs out there with better characters as well as those that require less grinding to beat.