& Christmas & The Retro JRPG

Cthulhu Saves the World is a little RPG I bought on a whim off the Xbox 360 indie games store for only 240 Microsoft points which worked out as just £2. Despite its lower price the game really impressed me and had some great design ideas for a retro JRPG, its sequel Cthulhu Saves Christmas is due for an imminent release so now is the perfect time to look at how Cthulhu saved the retro JRPG.

One of my biggest pet peeves when I play a JRPG on a console is the use of save points, it is very frustrating when you have limited time to play a game you reach a save point and then have to decide whether to take the gamble as to if it will be minutes or hours before you reach the next one. Cthulhu makes save points optional you can go into the menu and save at any time (though save points still exist in it so you can restrict yourself to just saving at them if you prefer that for some reason). The save points still serve a purpose, they act as a restore point for your party, as well as the secondary effect of being useful as prompt to save in an area before they throw a boss fight at you.

This also helps with the problem of repetitive and boring regular enemy fights as often in other RPGs you have to severely hold back to reserve resources for bosses. Further to this the battles themselves are designed to discourage you from doing this, upon completion of a fight your party’s HP will be fully restored as well as some MP with the amount restored dependent on the number of turns taken, adding to this the enemies will progressively grow stronger as battles go on. Essentially it is in your best interest to finish battles quickly so you’ve got to be utilising the best skills and strategies for every battle.

There’s another frustrating issue with random battle systems in that they can get in the way of navigation; there is nothing worse than getting lost in a dungeon and while you to try to find your way out getting a disorientating random battle every few steps. In this game there are a fixed number of encounters within a dungeon, so if you did end up wandering round lost you’ll get a reprieve from battles allowing you to focus on navigation. On the flip side if you did want more fights to allow you level grind you can trigger a fight from the menu at any time, you could even set up yourself by a save point for healing and use it as a safety net for fighting enemies that you’ve been struggling with.

While not an element of game design there is one other positive thing with this game that I have to talk about. Following the Xbox 360 version I had bought they later released a Steam version that included a new alternate what if campaign, despite having paid so little for the game they added this as a free DLC for the Xbox 360 version. In a world where full priced retail games get stuffed full of micro transactions, that kind of generosity has to be praised.

Cthulhu Saves the World really was a great game that I highly recommend to people. With Zeboyd Games’ new sequel Cthulhu Saves Christmas due out people who say the festive period is crazy will finally be right.