Linear Motion Battle System

Intro

I'll admit writing a lengthy review for "Linear Motion Battle System" would be pretty difficult in my opinion. This is because the tech demo contains less than one minutes worth of content. So I don't have that much I can comment on. To make matters worse this is a tech demo meant to show off the capabilities of RPG Maker 2000 so I really can't talk about the details on how AznChipmunk got this short tech demo for a Tales style battle system to even work. That being said I'll try my best to review this tech demo.

Story

In short the tech demo doesn't contain a story. We simply interact with a barrel in order to partake in the one battle contained within the tech demo.



As such I don't have anything else to say about the story.

Gameplay

I suppose this is the real bread and butter of this project. Instead of the usual turn-based combat system we get in most RPG Maker 2000 projects this game uses a whole bunch of scripting to allow the player to partake in a Tales style battle. Albeit our options for this battle are extremely limited. For starters we can press the z key in order to jump which negates damage from all attacks for some reason. I guess there isn't proper overlap of the hit boxes or some other technical issue. Though its hard to deny that it's a bit weird you don't get hurt when the enemies special slash skill passes through you just because your coming down from or started a jump.



Outside of being able to jump around like a grasshopper we can also perform a slash attack by pressing the shift key and a few slashes are more than enough to finish the one enemy in this tech demo.

On one hand I'll admit this combat system definitely feels unique and is a nice break from the standard combat system. I'm also guessing it hasn't been implemented for a larger project due to just how complicated the underlying scripts are. So while this tech demo is interesting. I'm guessing this combat system isn't particularly practical and will never see use in a larger project. Though I could see it being used in a visual novel that culminates with a one on one duel between the player and a rival character, but outside of that this system would probably become to much of a burden to deal with.

Graphics

Graphically the game is also a tad interesting as well since it uses a pseudo 3D look for the fights background. Add in some decent fight animations considering the limitations of RPG Maker 2000 and we have a tech demo that looks pretty good.

Sound

On the sound side of things we have a combination of RTP sound effects and music that was pulled from other games. At least I'm assuming they were pulled from another game since the battle music is listed in the music folder as lufiabattle.mid. Suffice to say it works rather well for it's purpose though I think you'd have to try to lose in order to hear the game over music. Sort of like you have to go out of your way to experience certain dialogue in "Advance Wars".


I was hoping to find the GBA version, but it's apparently been buried by the remake.

Conclusion

I suppose at the end of the day "Linear Motion Battle System" is an interesting tech demo that shows just how versatile RPG Maker 2000 could be in the right hands. At the same time this system is probably so technically complicated that it's useless for anyone outside of AznChipmunk, the developer. To make matters worse this system has become even less practical overtime since most people have moved onto newer and more powerful engines. There's also the fact that newer computers have a harder time running old RPG Maker games as well to consider. So this tech demo only becomes less and less relevant over time. Even so I still wish someone would implement this in an actual game. Even if that game is just a visual novel with an "epic" duel at the end of it. After all, I'm guessing the player doesn't have access to special skills in the tech demo due to how hard they would have been to implement.