There be giant killer-baby monsters in this game.
INTRO:
The first Spirit Engine was an attempt at creating a side-scrolling RPG adventure, but many issues, most of which are technical, dogged it. Its creator, Mark Pay, having learned many lessons from the first game and having had access to later versions of Multimedia Fusion, has created a much better game that is a spiritual successor to the first one.
Spirit Engine 2 has much deeper combat than its predecessor, as well as much better story-writing and –editing. Indeed, it might be a surprise to anyone that this game is mostly done by a single person, albeit one who has had much experience with the tools to make it with. Add to the game stirring music, and Spirit Engine 2 would be quite the experience that a player would find difficult to forget.
PREMISE:
Interestingly, Mark Pay has decided to wipe the narrative slate clean with Spirit Engine 2. It is no longer set in a world where high fantasy meets the Dark Age meets dystopian setting. Instead, Spirit Engine 2 is set in a less complicated world, albeit one that is no less troubled.
The world that the game is set in is inhabited by humans, but they are generally supervised by obviously alien creatures that are known as the Rakari. The humans appear to live in an era that is similar to the age of gunpowder, and therefore armed conflict among the humans is pretty much to be expected. That is, except when the Rakari openly discourages it, and they can be very persuasive with their vast psychic capabilities.
Anyway, currently, the most apparent conflict seen in the game is the simmering tensions between long-time enemies, the nations of Yaegara and Lereftain. It is into this background that the main characters are inserted, yet they would uncover plots and mysteries that go much further back into the past than just this would-be war.
M AIN CHARACTERS:
One of the main draws of Spirit Engine 2 is the peculiar diversity in its available roster of player characters. Following the tradition set by its predecessor (and the whims of Mark Pay), the characters are grouped into categories according to their general personalities: the Wise, the Cynic and the Naïve.
The player must pick one from each category; this is the only freedom of permutation that is allowed to the player. This is mainly because Mark Pay has written a script that accommodates only this rigid combination. That is not to say that there would not be variations in the story; each unique character brings his/her own flavours – and personal troubles – to the story.
Moreover, certain combinations of characters may result in amusing side-plots. The most common are romances, but there are more interesting ones such as characters of the same profession comparing their techniques.
PROFESSIONS:
Other than the limitation on personality types, the player can pick any mix of character professions. The professions are a quite markedly different from those seen in the previous game.
To start with, there is the familiarly named “Priest”, but this profession is more like a fantastical Oriental battle monk than a man of clergy. The Priest fights with a staff, and has a fantastical shield called “chi” that blocks damage from Piercing and Concussive attacks (more on these later).
More importantly, the Priest has a bunch of spells that buff allies, heal them, de-buff enemies or directly hurt enemies. These are nothing new, but the convenience of having a virtually ever-present shield that protects an otherwise support-oriented character is refreshing.
Curiously, the Priest is incapable of healing himself, even though he can heal others. This can seem a problematic limitation at times, though perhaps it is understandable from a viewpoint of gameplay balance.
Then, there is the glass cannon: the (perhaps not-well-named) Musketeer. The Musketeer has very limited health, but has a higher potential damage output than other professions. Moreover, the Musketeer has some potentially useful skills, such as one that sets up a barrier that melee-oriented enemies cannot pass.
Finally, there is the tank of the three. The Knight, with his heavy armor, is intended to be the meatshield of the party. He also has many offensive skills, some of which might be amusingly outrageous, such as a skill that creates an earthquake.
The game does inform the player that he/she is best off using a balanced party, but unlike its predecessor, this is not a necessity. Indeed, a party of single-themed characters can still be effective, provided that the player keeps their weaknesses in mind. For example, a party of only Musketeers can produce a tremendous damage output, but has little staying power.
MOVING ABOUT:
A key problem in the previous game was that characters plod about slowly, with the convenience of skipping a section only provided when the player has moved from one end to the other. In the sequel, all of the characters can either walk about or sprint heartily, which is handy if the player has cleared an area. However, the convenience of skipping a section is not present in the sequel, which is an oddity.
Like in the previous game, the player has not much choice when it comes to a party of enemies in the way: to get past them, he/she has to have his/her party fight them. This can lead to some tedium, but thanks to the slightly improved region map system in Spirit Engine 2, the player can pick which locale to go to if he/she had been there already.
At certain points within a locale, usually right at the start upon moving into it the first time around, in-game cutscenes are triggered. For other occurrences, there is usually something up ahead that would tip the player off. However, at other times, cutscenes can occur with no warning, which can seem a bit irksome at times. Still, they are not entirely unwelcome, thanks to the splendid story-writing.
COMBAT:
Most of the gameplay in Spirit Engine 2 concerns combat. This is much like its predecessor. This can seem a bit shallow, but there is a lot of sophistication to be had from the game, especially when it is compared to the dissatisfying simplicity of the first game.
In Spirit Engine 2, each party member has an “energy” bar that determines how frequently they can take actions; all actions require the use of skills. This energy bar starts empty, but fills up over time; not one character appears to be an advantage or disadvantage when it comes to this matter, by the way.
Once a character’s bar has reached a threshold, which is visually indicated, he/she can perform an action. Alternatively, the player can have him/her holding back to build up more of the bar, eventually going into the state of “Overdrive”, which grants many bonuses to the next action that he/she would take. Chief amongst these bonuses are increases to damage and the ability to ignore most of the target’s defences, if he/she is to take offensive action.
Time spent longer in Overdrive makes the next action even more powerful, though there is a ceiling limit. (The ceiling limit is very generous though.) There does not appear to be any other way to deplete the energy bar of a character other than he/she taking an action; being knocked out only stalls a character’s energy bar. Therefore, holding a character back to build up Overdrive is an entertaining risk-versus-reward experience.
If there is any complaint to be had with the real-time system of Energy bars, it is that there may be lost potential in making it more complex, e.g. having different skills use different amounts of energy. Still, the simplicity has perhaps made the game more accessible than it would have been otherwise.
One of the most important aspects of combat is the ranks of combatants. The system for ranks is simpler than it sounds: a party is generally split into the front rank, which faces the enemy directly, the middle rank and the rear rank, which is the furthest away from the other side. In the case of the enemy, they may have more middle ranks.
Anyway, the characters in the front ranks are the ones that would take the most hits. This is because combatants that perform melee attacks always hit the ones in front first. That will not prevent the characters in the middle and rear ranks from being attacked of course, especially when some of the combatants can perform ranged attacks that bypass the ranks.
The player can control who is in the front rank in his/her party by clicking on the desired character. This character will swap places with the one at front rank. However, the player does not seem to have any refined control over who is in the middle or rear rank, other than to swap them around until their ranks are satisfactorily ordered.
The most interesting mechanism in combat is that combatants that have been brought down do not stay down indefinitely. A timer appears below any participant that has fallen, and once this timer is up, he/she/it returns into action complete with his/her repertoire of moves, albeit with significantly reduced hit points.
Therefore, the fight only ends when an entire side has been incapacitated. This can be frustrating if the player is facing a mixture of weak and tough enemies, and even worse if they can regenerate health. On the other hand, as long as one member of the player’s party can stay up while the others take a nap, the player is not out of the game yet.
Yet, this mechanism seems to work against another. This other mechanism concerns a percentage multiplier that is applied to the damage that any participant receives. By default, it is a normal 100%, but as a participant takes more and more hits, the multiplier becomes higher, thus making each subsequent attack more painful. The multiplier does degrade over time.
This mechanism rewards the player for scoring successive hits on a target, as well as punishes the player for resorting to one party member as a meat-shield too much. It is useful when the player wants to minimize the participation of critical enemies, such as those that heal or buff other enemies, but otherwise its utility is reduced by the mechanism of automated revivals.
REMARK ON MELEE ATTACKS:
Melee attacks may be more straight-forward compared to other kinds of attacks, but they have a nuance that is not so easy to notice.
Combatants can perform melee attacks from any rank. When they do this, they surge forth, past the ranks in front of them. Consequently, they become vulnerable to any incoming attacks, such as incoming melee attacks, ironically.
Therefore, with enough timing and guile, the player can kill enemies that have retreated to the rear but later surge forward to perform a melee attack. After all, most of them are not smart enough to remain where they are. (The only exceptions are enemies that can heal themselves, which can be an unpleasant surprise.)
REMARK ON QUEUES & PAUSING:
There is a tool to queue up actions – which the game calls “skill-chaining” - but most players would eventually realize that queuing actions is quite a waste of time. This is because the actions of enemies in the game are quite unpredictable, following no particular pattern. If the player insists on using queues anyway, his/her party may well waste their time on ineffective attacks.
The pause button is a lot more convenient though. For an example of how useful it can be, the player can use this to time attacks to work against enemies that are using melee rushes. Oddly enough, there is no default hotkey for pausing; the player has to set this himself/herself.
ENEMIES:
The enemies that the player faces are astonishingly varied, and not just in appearance. The game starts the player off with some jelly-like jungle creatures (likely homage to the slimes and such that other RPGs often throw in the way of the player). These have no special abilities and are just there as practice.
However, the player would notice that they – and enemies that the player would fight later – do have self-preservation in mind. Weakened enemies will retreat to the rear ranks to protect themselves from incoming attacks, while those with the most amount of hitpoints remaining will move up to the front.
Interestingly, the first party of enemies that the player faces when entering any locale for the first time is usually the weakest. This probably has been deliberate and is likely intended to ease the player into learning to fight the local enemies.
This is just as well, because the types of enemies that the player faces only increase in complexity and challenge. Indeed, by the halfway point of the game, the player may be facing enemies that are dauntingly troublesome, such as enemies that come back from death very quickly or even shift their sets of attacks and vulnerabilities upon being hit.
Killing enemies and winning fights are the main way of obtaining the experience necessary to have the player characters “level up”. However, to discourage the player from tarrying around in a place for too long and farming its inhabitants incessantly, the experience gained becomes less and less as the level difference between the party and the enemies widen.
DAMAGE & ARMOR TYPES:
Speaking of vulnerabilities, these play into the system of armor and damage types that the game has to reward (or punish) the player’s decisions in making attacks.
This system mostly affects the enemies in the game, because they have armor ratings that are substantial enough for it to matter.
As for the types, there are four: Concussive, Ethereal, Piercing and Magickal. Functionally, all four kinds of damage are practically the same. The player only does mixing and matching of damage types to armor to make combat as efficient as possible.
There is a fifth type, but this one is so special and rare because it practically bypasses any defence and is only associated with certain special equipment.
SKILL SYSTEM:
Like most other RPGs, Spirit Engine 2 has a system that allows the player to develop the player characters’ combat prowess. This system shows the skills that the player characters have learned, and how far the player has progressed in developing them.
Members of any profession will eventually learn mostly the same set of skills, but different characters do start out with different skills and learn the rest in different ways. Certain skills will also never be available to certain characters. For example, Ionae the Cynic Musketeer does not get Explosive Shot.
Spirit Engine 2 resorts to the proven (but perhaps old) system of earning experience through combat in order to obtain “levels”. Each level obtained grants at least one skill point to be spent on any one of a character’s skills.
The abovementioned designs are nothing new during the game’s time. However, what is perhaps refreshing is that each victorious fight does not merely grant the usual experience points and money, but also what the game refers to as “refund” points”.
Every two fights or so, the player gains one refund point for each character. This point can be spent to recover one skill point from any skill that a character has. This regained point can then be invested elsewhere.
This allows the player to re-tool the party for specific enemies, which is something that the player would likely do because there is tremendous variety in the enemies, as mentioned earlier. More importantly, this feature gives an incentive to farm enemies in a locale before moving onto the next one. The game also provides a narrative justification for this, albeit indirectly.
To prevent the player from spamming too many points into a skill in order to gain an excessive advantage against certain enemies, the player is prevented from raising a skill to a rank that is higher than a quarter of the party’s level. There is also a hard limit of 30 for the rank of any skill – if the player is determined enough to reach triple-digit party levels. Furthermore, there are diminishing rewards as a player invests points into skills.
Certain skills may also have other restrictions that are mentioned in the manual. These were introduced during the development of the game to mitigate certain winning strategies that could be applied to just about every fight.
REMARK ON DODGE:
Although the first Spirit Engine had gameplay issues, it does not appear to have a significant element of luck in its gameplay. For better or worse, Spirit Engine 2 has one.
Granted, minor elements of luck can be seen in how some parties of enemies and monsters are formed, but they are not entirely random. What does have randomness though, is the dodge mechanic.
Of course, one can argue that dodging is a percentage-based mechanic so it is not entirely random, but having any chance of dodging an attack does not matter much when the game simply gives unfavourable rolls on its RNGs, either to the player characters or enemies with the ability to dodge.
The vagaries of luck can be seen when the player encounters enemies that can dodge attacks. It can be aggravating when the game hands them successful roll after roll, causing a fight with them to stretch longer than the player would like.
INVENTORY, MONEY & GEAR:
Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of Spirit Engine 2 is its very limited system of equipment and looting.
Firstly, the party’s storage capacity is rather limited. The party can at best carry a little over a dozen loose items. Of course, one can argue that they are just three human-sized persons, but the player can choose to carry a dozen pieces of heavy armour or a dozen rings; the difference does not matter.
Secondly, there is an odd limitation in the stock that vendors can carry. Vendors can at best carry only up to nine items. The player can only sell items to a vendor if he/she has space left in the nine slots of his/her stock. This is a very stifling limitation.
Next, there are items that have very interesting automated abilities, but they are so rare and compete with gear with more significant statistics. This problem was also in the previous game.
So far, there are only two discernible improvements that the sequel has over its predecessor. The first is a much more convenient user interface for inventory management. The player can also choose to drop objects on the ground to free up some space when managing inventory. Of course, such designs are nothing new in video games.
The second is that money is now a limited commodity, where in the previous game the player can resort to farming monsters for money. In Spirit Engine 2, the player can only receive money in fixed amounts from certain chests, selling unwanted loot to vendors or completing certain quests. The player must make purchase choices very carefully.
The game could have benefited from some randomization in the loot that the player can get, but as of the latest build of the game, all items that the player would find in the game are fixed.
SAVING GAMES:
Perhaps in an act of stubbornness that goes against user-friendliness, Spirit Engine 2 requires that the player approach statues in order to make a game-save.
If there is any improvement that can be seen over the previous game’s saving system, it is that saved games in Spirit Engine 2 are more stable to reload and that there are several more slots. The display of the list of saved games also appear to carry more information.
Also, the documentation for the game (which will be described further later) does mention how and where the game stores saved-game files. The player would have to manually make back-ups, however, which can be a hassle.
CHARACTER DESIGNS:
Some of the most memorable parts of Spirit Engine 2 are the character designs. Although peculiar characters are nothing new in video games at the time, their inclusion in Spirit Engine 2 does make it stand out more as a game that is almost completely conceived by its one creator.
Each player character has his/her own journal, which the player can read. Their journal entries are as different as their individual personalities; reading them may increase the player’s appreciation for their character designs. However, the journal entries do not add much value to the gameplay; it may tell the player where he/she needs to go next, but the game’s progression is so linear that the player would not need many reminders.
Amusingly, the emotional state of the characters may affect the gameplay. Being sentient people, the individual characters may experience different emotions along different points of the story, which in turn grant them bonuses and/or penalties to their combat capabilities.
The changes in their emotional states are actually pre-scripted events though. They depend on the personality archetype of the characters, so multiple playthroughs would reveal this limitation.
Each of the player characters brings his/her emotional baggage into the story, which has a few points where said baggage becomes a significant plot point. There can be some entertainment from having multiple playthroughs, if only to just see how this character would approach said situations.
The other characters are colourful enough to at least make the first playthrough quite enjoyable, though their appeal may be diminished in the next playthroughs. There may be some special reaction from some NPCs towards certain player characters – Mrs. Winters (the Wise Musketeer) getting particularly more reactions from NPCs than the others – but these tend to be few compared to the “default” lines that the player would get.
WRITING:
As mentioned earlier, the story of the game is mainly written around the core theme of the party being a motley crew of personalities. This means that the player who made multiple playthroughs of the game may see the same lines over and over at certain points in the story.
Therefore, every subsequent playthrough may reduce the entertainment to be had from the otherwise well-written lines. There are special scenarios and lines to be had from different permutations of characters, as mentioned earlier, but these can seem far and few in between.
For players that are playing the game the first time around, they may be surprised by the amount of thought that went into the conception of the story, especially considering that the author is also the programmer and artist for the game.
There are some familiar tropes, such as ancient secrets that are best left forgotten, but Spirit Engine 2 does mix them together in refreshing ways. For example, the aforementioned ancient secrets are not some typical arcane object of doom-laden magic by a mysterious race of “old ones”, but remnants of a human civilization that is more often seen in futuristic sci-fi stories.
Another mix-up of tropes that the player would appreciate is the game’s take on the setting of alien domination. The Rakari, which are the alien overseers of the humans, prefer to leave the humans to their own devices, but step in when the humans go on the brink. The reasons behind this policy would turn out to be not the usual inclinations of supremacy or greed, but rather guilt. This would not be elaborated for fear of spoilers, of course.
Indeed, with such great writing, Spirit Engine 2 would leave a great impression on players that have just finished their first playthrough.
DOCUMENTATION:
For an indie game that is mainly made by a single person, there is a surprising amount of official documentation for the game. There is an in-depth, HTML-driven manual for the game, which may please old-school players who had not taken kindly to the trend of checking fan-contributed forums and Wikis.
Some of the most important documentation is the explanation of the calculations for certain statistics. An example is the series of calculation for damage that is dealt by an attack that successfully lands. This allows the meticulous player to come up with more efficient tactics for certain enemies.
However, there may be some problems with the presentation of the manual. On certain browsers, a bit of the text may be jumbled up, making them difficult to read.
For uninitiated players, there are tutorials in the first chapter of the game. They teach the basics of the gameplay, which is convenient. They do not teach everything of course.
GRAPHICAL DESIGNS:
Spirit Engine 2 is mainly designed for play on older computers. Whether this is a limitation of the tools that Mark Pay had to work with or something else is not entirely clear. Regardless, Spirit Engine 2’s graphical technology would be hardly impressive to players that have seen games that utilize state-of-the-art graphics, even during its time (2008).
This can be seen in its limited screen ratio of 4:3, and its default windowed mode that creates a rather small screen for the game. Fortunately, the text in the game is comfortably sized to fit into the screen and be still readable.
That is not to say that there are no visual goodies for players with stronger machines. These include increases in the number of on-screen sprites and background objects, as well as various visual effects for them.
There are some frivolous designs though. One of them is screen shake, which apparently causes the screen to shake when particularly high damage attacks occur. Fortunately, for players that consider them unnecessary, they can be turned off.
The player may notice that there is a lot of space on-screen that is reserved for the ground beneath characters. This follows a design policy from the first Spirit Engine. This space is actually used for icons and other visual indicators that are associated with combat. Most of them are clear to read and easy to use, despite the small screen.
In the previous game, sprites share many animations, especially the sprites of the player characters. They still do in Spirit Engine 2, specifically for animations of attacks. However, their other animations are generally unique to each individual character, which makes it easier to differentiate between them. For example, upon victory in a fight, the Naïve Knight has a beaming smile, whereas the Cynic Knight raises a clenched fist in the air.
One clear improvement that Spirit Engine 2 has over its predecessor is its inclusion of bust-like (i.e. heads and shoulders) portraits of characters for use in dialogues. This is not a substitute for the lack of voice-overs, but they do express the personality of the characters, especially secondary characters.
However, an observant player may notice that there is a template of sorts for the expressions of the player characters. For example, all Wise characters appear to have a template of the facial expression for being annoyed, e.g. they have a frown on their faces, their right eyebrows are raised and their eyes veer to the right. This can seem a bit lazy, but such expressions are otherwise still functional in getting the point of the characters’ emotions across.
Some of the artwork may also suggest that some gameplay ideas had been shelved. For example, late into the game, the player may encounter a peculiar crab-like creature that lacks any chitin armor on its rear; its exposed back suggests that there may have been plans for diversifying the hit locations on enemies.
Despite all of its minor flaws, the artwork for the game would seem striking to most players, especially those that have played the first game. There is a delightfully balanced mixture of sci-fi, steampunk and medieval fantasy that happens to be much more convincingly natural than that seen in the first game.
SOUND DESIGNS:
Spirit Engine 2 does not have much in the way of voice-overs beyond certain stock utterances such as grunts and groans for use in combat, though the lines that characters deliver are well-written enough to be worth knowing.
There are sound effects for combat, which are mostly there for functional purposes. The player may have to turn down the volume of the music to be able to hear them though.
Speaking of music, it is the best aspect of the game’s sound designs. The talented Josh Whelchel, who worked on the first Spirit Engine game, returns to work on the sequel. His skill has considerably grown since then, and this shows in the surprisingly stirring tracks of partly synthesized orchestra for the game.
Furthermore, there are many tracks for Spirit Engine 2, more so than most other indie games. Moreover, most of them sound remarkably different from each other. One could suspect that Josh Whelchel has used pieces that he has composed in the past, but even if he had, they are mostly fitting with the themes, settings and scenarios that are seen in the game.
(The only exception is perhaps “Clay 13 Saves The Day!!”, which can seem outrageously cheesy.)
SUMMARY:
If Spirit Engine 2 is to be compared with its predecessor, it is a vast improvement, in terms of presentation, story-writing and sophistication of combat. Its technology, namely Multimedia Fusion, may have held it and Mark Pay back, but even if it did, Mark Pay has done a great job working with its limitations.
POST-SCRIPT:
Spirit Engine 2 is now currently freeware. Considering its gameplay and the experience that it offers too, Spirit Engine 2 may be very worthwhile to play.