An Adventurer’s Tale is a hybrid of three genres including JRPG, Time Management, and lastly Visual novel. It puts us in the shoes of Garth, a noble turned adventurer that is seeking both glory and women to bed. Without a care in the world, he travels to the Kingdom of Gronia then immediately enters a city that is off limits for reasons unknown. That reason quickly becomes apparent as he encounters an old friend turned Lich King and has his memories wiped by its overwhelming power. As a seemingly last act of kindness, it lets Garth live and sets him back into the border regions of the kingdom.
It is then that we are let loose into the world without a tutorial and left to discover the game’s mechanics on our own. I really enjoyed the lack of hand-holding as it is not a complicated game by any means and won’t take long to figure out. Being tossed into the deep end like that helps make you feel like an adventurer as you meekly step into any of the several locations found in the hub-world, wondering if you are even powerful enough to be there, among other things. Chief among these things is that strange timer at the bottom left telling you that you have 30 days left. For what exactly? Who knows.
For a sense of direction, you can take up any of the Tavern’s randomly generated quests, up to ten active at a time, and head out to claim your reward. The rewards are quite meager however, with the quests themselves being simple collect a number of objects or defeat a certain amount of enemies type of ordeals. What you’ll really want to be doing is foraging a location for some loot and hoping you don’t get attacked, as Garth did not think to take any equipment with him as he strutted off for some glory. If you do get attacked, that is when the JRPG aspect of the title comes into play. Both you and the enemy take turns trying to murder the other, with running away being an especially viable option early on.
Up to three monsters can attack show up into a battle, making it a near sure bet that you will take some damage. Any damage you take will carry over for the rest of the day. That makes it so if you get into a brutal battle early on, you can either play it safe and waste a day resting or push your luck trying to make the most of the rest of it. Given you only have thirty days for some unknown ominous event to occur, time is not on your side. Also worth noting is that the monsters of the world get continually stronger as time progresses. Each of the locations have their own unique monsters and areas to explore. Traveling does not take any time, though performing actions such as exploring an area or searching for enemies does.
The title doesn’t tell you exactly how much time you have left in a day. It just gives you a vague idea such as saying that its afternoon or dusk. Actions such as foraging for loot will take up 1/20th of a day, exploring will take up 1/10th, and more significant events take up 1/5th or more. You will have to keep an approximation of how much time you think you have left, which once again is a rather nifty feature for a game about adventuring. As you explore the location, you will find areas of interest that will occasionally have small events or larger quests to pursue. Things such as finding a mummy asking you for some fish or taking down a large hidden criminal organization. They are far better than the random quests in the tavern.
When you receive a quest of that nature, make sure to pay close attention as to where they want you to go and what you need to do. Many times it will not give you another chance to refresh your memory. Such as a particular case in where you need to buy a girl’s freedom for either a bank note or 1 million gold pieces, which is an impossible amount. If you don’t pay attention, the guy you need to bribe will ask you if you’ve gotten what he wants yet, and will not repeat where that particular item is. It is pretty old school in that regard. That quest was a rather major one as well, having to do with one of the five girls that you can pursue.
All of the females can be had in the same playthrough as our character is not out for love after all. Discovering where they are typically requires you to accept a quest to go to a new town, then spend big chunks of a day to become available. Once they are available, you need to perform a bunch of menial tasks for them and will have two unique events after you reach certain milestones. It really is an overwhelming amount of pointless and devoid of any fun objectives such as gathering a certain amount of a random item or gathering even more random items. The girls in this universe are all compulsive hoarders it seems.
Personality wise, all of your possible love interests are unique, and each are entertaining in their own right. From a spoiled noble who loves to play mind games, to a distrustful master thief, our boy Garth has quite the selection. Garth himself is also a character of his own, and while kind of a pompous douche bag, does make interactions fun due to all of his narcissistic wit. Completing all of the girl’s side quests will net you with a sex scene. There is a free DLC that uncensors all of the content if you so please. Pursuing them is for the most part completely optional, they play no role in the story, and you will only miss out on a few battle skills.
Battle skills are learned via accomplishing tasks, trading something for them, or by bedding some of the girls. You then need to buy and equip them in the training guild. They range from stuff such as an explosion that damages all foes, healing magic, and striking an opponent three times in a single turn. There are a ton of them, but sadly, you don’t really have a need for them. After the initial hurdle of starting the game and foraging for any piece of armor or weapon to equip, it all becomes absurdly easy thereafter. The triple strike, in particular, is quite overpowered and even without using it, you will be one shotting most foes with a single hit. It offers no challenge, which you will quickly find gets dull. For extra overkill, you can hire up to two characters to join your party that will kill off any enemy that doesn’t succumb to a single strike from you. Even the final boss couldn’t get an attack off before dying.
Oh, if only that where this title’s only problem. From here on, this review will be getting rather negative, I’m afraid. One of the first immediate flaws you will notice is one of the most absurdly convoluted and counterintuitive UI I’ve seen in quite some time. Everything takes far too many clicks just for the sake of it, and it fails to convey any necessary information without having to waste time in menus. Want to see how much gold you have? Click party and go to the inventory, and only the inventory. Want to see what time it is? Click party and choose check time. Want to see how much health your character has in order to decide whether to rest or press on? Get fu… I mean, you can’t. There is no way to see that vital piece of info.
There is so much free space on the UI to give you all the info you require without needing to go into menus. Having the gold you possess, health, time of day, and more readily viewable would have gone a long way. Right-clicking doesn’t do anything either. It could have been used to have a separate screen pop up containing all that info. This would be vastly superior to individually looking each thing up. Shop menus and the battle UI are no better either. Those feel like it was intended for a smartphone and will drive you up a wall clicking through a list containing few items at a time while trying to buy something. Thankfully, due to how easy the title is, you don’t ever need to purchase anything. Let me guide you through what it takes to receive and turn in a mission from any girl. Leave the tavern, go to city on over-world, click ‘other cities’, click on a specific city, click girl’s name, click questing, leave city, go to tavern, then travel to specified location for pointless fetch quest. Then essentially do all of that in reverse to turn it in.
With how many ‘quests’ each of the girls have, you can see how this and various other annoyances with the UI can add up. The second biggest annoyance after the UI is the inventory system. You have a limited amount of room, and the gear you have equipped takes up four of those slots. With battle items such as smoke bombs, various sizes of both mana and health potions, as well as quest items, you will not have much room. And then comes the flood of dreaded junk items. There are so many items whose sole function is to be turned in for just a single quest you may never even do that will be clogging up your inventory. When you actually do that quest, they are back to being useless.
Your inventory will quickly fill up, and when it does, you can’t pick anything else up. It doesn’t give you the chance to delete anything, it just tells you that you can’t pick up the item, whatever it may be. To avoid feeling like you may have missed out on some good loot, you will frequently be going into the inventory menu to delete stuff. The simple addition of a function that allows you to decline picking up random items after a battle would go a long way. With the way there are a plethora of useless items, and our character’s tendency to pick up every little thing, you will find yourself spending an unnecessary amount of time micromanaging your inventory. You can’t even sell things in this game, your only choice is to delete stuff, so it is an entirely fruitless use of your time.
The story itself is nothing to write home about, though it is entertaining enough. It kind of falls flat when it tries to be serious, but when it comes to humor, it shines a lot brighter. Estimating the ratio of dialogue, I feel it is probably less than 3/4th of the entire experience, most of it will be gameplay. Its campaign lasted me around nine hours, and despite all of its flaws, I still wanted to finish it. To my surprise, not only does it introduce a free play mode after beating it, but you will also unlock a mode that changes things up significantly. Saying more than that would be going into spoiler territory, but in an odd twist, I actually enjoyed it more than the main campaign. It cuts out all of the bloat and focuses mostly on combat. You once again have a level 1 character, yet every skill and weapon is available to purchase from the get-go. Having the knowledge you do after playing the game, it is pretty satisfying getting overpowered this time around.
Unfortunately, that new hidden mode also introduced a small, yet annoying glitch. Whenever you fight the ‘boss’ in the volcano area, the game would randomly crash. It took me around seven tries to finally defeat it without the game having other plans. That was the only consistent glitch, but man is this title really unpolished right now. I’ve had a ton of other glitches appear during the primary campaign. Enemies will sometimes never attack when it is their turn, causing you to restart the entire title. Battle effects never play out, only code appears by the monster. And more relatively minor things. Expect to regularly be seeing the ‘An exception has occurred’ screen quite a bit during your adventures. It is in a shockingly bad state for a full release.
An Adventurer’s Tale is an ambitious little title with a cheap price tag for all it offers. There is a decent amount of monster variety, locations, and really well-drawn girls to chase after. It starts off with a bang, but due to the combination of unnecessary tedium brought on by the UI, needless inventory micromanagement, and extremely easy combat, it gets duller the further in you get. Not to mention how glitch-filled it currently is. It leaves me conflicted on what to think about. If it where in Early Access I’d say there was definitely potential, yet as a fully released product it is just too flawed to recommend in good conscious. The silver lining is that the developers are very actively taking into account community suggestions, so while I currently do not recommend An Adventurer’s Tale, it is well worth keeping an eye on or considering adding it to your wishlist and checking up on its progress in the future.
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