Necro Story Review

Premise

You are a necromancer, ironically yourself now raised from the dead, and trying to figure out what happened to the rest of humanity while you were uh... sleeping. You'll embark on a journey with Vivi, the ghost, and an army of monsters you capture and make fight for you after capturing their souls.

There's a character customization screen; you can see my results up above, and you can also specialize in a school of magic, though I honestly didn't feel like it mattered that much. You'll still have access to all schools, so I think it mostly impacts what you start with. The character has no canonical name (mine is oddly named InfoCynic), so I refer to "the necromancer" in this review.

Gameplay

Play generally involves traveling across the overworld to the next dungeon; there's a few minimal optional areas you can explore, and some hidden chests in out-of-the-way locations. Chests generally have "Trinkets" which are standard JRPG accessories, plus magic or speed or endurance, and each member of your party except the necromancer can equip 2.

Combat

Your party starts early with just the necromancer and Vivi, and you'll be thrown into combat. Combat takes place on an 18-tile grid, with your party occupying up to 9 and the enemies having the other 9, though it's very rare for them to fill all the space. Despite what seems like it might be setting up for a TRPG, this is very much an action, real-time RPG, though not in the form that "ARPG" generally channels with button-mashing combos and perfect blocks and what-not. Instead, everyone is stationary, and you control only the necromancer, aiming a spell at the enemy you choose (this is easier to see in video; check links below) using the left joystick, then firing with R2. Select between pre-equipped spells with L1/R1; each spell has a cooldown before it can be cast again and of course, costs a certain amount of MP.

As you defeat enemies, you need to quickly line up your attack line and try to absorb their soul, which charges up your special ability -- once this is charged, instead of just absorbing their soul, you can capture it, effectively recruiting the monster to your team. You can field up to 5 other team members (Vivi and/or monsters), and any blank spots can be filled during battle by summons such as Zombies or Skeletons.

Battle is fact-paced and frenetic, I found myself constantly trying to juggle switching to a spell off cooldown, watching enemy health to figure out who to target or prepare to absorb a soul, or determine if I needed to use a healing spell. There's absolutely no slowing down during combat -- no items to use, no menuing, just aim, fire, switch spells, absorb souls.

Early-game combat: https://youtu.be/6hK_urtzvoE

Mid-game combat: https://youtu.be/bkXIL_z3GV0

Exploration and Leveling

Between battles, you can manage your party's trinkets, change the Necromancer's staff (his only piece of equipment), or apply your stat and skill points at level up (Necromancer only; monsters apply stat points and gain spells automatically). You'll slowly learn new spells every few levels and can distribute points between Strength (mostly useless), Endurance (defense + HP), Magic (offense), Willpower (MP + MP regen). As you get to later levels, you'll earn more points per level up, and you'll also get spell skill points you can spend on skill trees for every single spell -- make your poison spell last longer or spread to adjacent enemies, make your summoned Zombies have more HP, give your life steal spell a 10% chance of dealing 500% damage, etc.

As you explore the world, you may run into the game's (mostly) optional puzzles: you'll see a small diagram with a curved line on it snaking around different points. The idea is to convey that you should find stationary objects like rocks, trees, or pillars that line up with the positions in the diagram, and walk around them in a particular path.

This particular puzzle stumped me for over 3 minutes because I just could not seem to get what it wanted. In the end, I found a YouTube video of another player who had done it. Most were easy enough to solve, but at least two I did have to look up this way.

The first video is my 3-minute struggle, if you just want to experience the pain with me; the second is the answer. See if you can figure it out after watching the 3-minute video.

https://youtu.be/it2APkdUxfE

https://youtu.be/uvgV7m6qvqQ

Art and Sound

You can see from the screenshot above that the 2D art style is quite distinctive. This style carries all the way through to combat, to overworld, to dungeons, to menus. It's not the cleanest and it does make some text a little difficult to read, but that could also just be my old eyes.

On the sound front, there's nothing especially positive or negative. There's a decent score and convincing sound effects as you go through the world. You can break pots (truly, what RPG would be complete without) and spells have their own sound effects. Each spell also has a name that you might get slightly sick of hearing, as the necromancer calls it out when you cast it.

Writing

I don't normally dedicate a whole section to writing, but it would be criminal to review this game and not take a little extra time to call out the amazing writing. I won't spoil anything, but it's clear the writer(s) are long-time fans of RPGs, and poke gentle fun at tropes. At one point Vivi hands you a map, and of course you expect it'll be a standard RPG map where you can see key locations and your location and ... it looks more like your 5-year-old's crayon drawing. Pressed about it, she asks if you wanted a MAGIC map that could always tell you exactly where you are. (She doesn't produce such a map even if you say you do. There is no map in this game.)

In other interaction, you encounter some small rocks. Being an entirely 2D game, you have no jump. So small rocks could be an insurmountable obstacle:

There's not a deep or complex plot here, but I looked forward to every new plot scene just to see what new humor was waiting for me.

Criticisms and Final Thoughts

Necro Story has a lot of potential and seemingly a huge amount of variety; by the end I had 60 monsters in my roster, but I could only field 5, and inactive monsters gain no experience, so you either stick with the same team for the majority of the game, or you can replace a lagging member with someone captured from the current area, which will generally be of an appropriate level. However, you can and should teach your monsters additional abilities by equipping gems instead of trinkets, which means that a well-developed party has very little incentive to trade anyone out.

Likewise, while you can freely change equipped spells between battle, there's not a lot of motivation to do so, because you will have spent a lot of skill points in your favorite spells. You can reset for a small amount of an in-game currency which is only otherwise spent for healing between battles, but it would get tedious to switch often as you'd have to reset everything and then spend all the points again. Over a single play, I earned enough skill points to almost max out 4 skills and make significant progress on a 5th.

The result of these designs is that by mid-game, I was settled on the same party I would use for the rest of the game and likewise, the spells. Combat became a matter of seeing if I needed to start off with healing right away (between-combat healing was limited), or throw out a summon which had a long cooldown, or start right off with my high damage-over-time Poison. It wasn't very deep, but most fights were short enough it wasn't a huge problem.

Finally, the biggest detractor from my otherwise enjoyable experience was the baffling decision to gate the true/happy ending behind not using a retry during any battle. I had used one early on while I was still getting the hang of the combat and the balance between offense and healing. Nothing in that scene had indicated that there would be consequences for taking the retry; I assumed it was just a standard quality of life design choice. Now, there is a valid narrative reason for this, so again, hats off to the writing here. Perhaps the intent is to motivate you to play again and maybe even experiment with a different team or spells, but I don't think the game quite warrants that.

Forewarned, you may be able to avoid the pitfall, but for myself, I'll be looking up the true ending on YouTube, if I can find it. I give this a very solid 3 and a bump to 4 if you're a fan of sarcastic writing and RPGs in general.

A review copy of the game was provided.