MFGG - Mario Fan Games Galaxy

Review Information

Game Reviewed	Yoshi RPG: Secret Legends, by DJ Yoshiman
Review Author	Vitiman
Created	May 9 2016, 9:58 PM

General Commentary and Game Overview

In the early days of fangaming, making a full blown RPG was nigh unheard of. Sure, there were things like RPG Maker (well, there ARE things like RPG Maker, I don't think it really went anywhere), but to make a relatively well thought out RPG engine in something as buggy and kliktchy as The Games Factory? You'd have to be out of your godforsaken mind!

But of course, DJ Yoshiman (or as he was known as back in the day, just "Yoshiman") was crazy enough to attempt it - and boy... did it ever pay off!

I'm just kidding it didn't at all.

Pros	Surprisingly complex RPG stuff going on here The story is almost sorta kinda original Yoshi is always a good character to use
Cons	Buggy, garbage engine Cringey, almost hilariously awful voice acting Cryptic nonsense that plagues many an "experimental" fangame of the day

Impressions

Gameplay 2 / 10	Oh Yoshiman, you weren't the greatest fangame maker of your era, but you quickly matured by the middle of the decade and went on to make... well, nothing. S'far as I know, your first real big fangame thing was WiTT, and that was released in like what? 2011? 2012? Somewhere in that ballpark - prior to that, you had many a project to tease, be it Super Paper Mario World or Mario Theata which was in collaboration with Mario Gamer, that sorta thing. Alas, you succumbed to the fate of many an eccentric talent and kinda got carried away with the ideas. But that's beside the point, what I'm trying to say here is that Yoshiman sure seems to have a lot of mediocrity under his belt, and it's all from around this timeframe. One could excuse it all as just being a dorky preteen making dumb fangames with his friends, and... well, yeah, that's exactly what I'm doing - don't try to twist this as me having a problem with the good DJ and what he's done for MFGG as well as him as a person, because I don't! I'm just pointing out that like any of us, DJ Yoshiman sorta had to grow into his various talents and nobody can put together greatness overnight. With that out of the day, this game is... decidedly not even close to greatness. For starters, it took me a while to figure out what I was supposed to do when I started playing it. Pressing Enter took me to a red and black screen with a clock counter in the bottom right corner... okay, not sure what that's for but yeah. It was actually kinda cool, even though it's objectively entirely pointless to anything (although maybe it was supposed to have a greater purpose in the final product; I should have clarified form the beginning, this is a scrapped demo). FINALLY, I figured out that hitting Z in front of the mailbox got the game going - why Z of all keys? I knew the mailbox did something because it was the only thing in this big ol' lone field of hills so you know, put two and two together and you figure "might as well hit every key until a thing happens". That's also how I figured out Enter did what it did. So you get the letter from the other Yoshis and it's this... really awful, poorly drawn Yoshi holding it up, like I mean it's really badly proportioned - but I'll get to that down below in the Graphics section. Anywho, now Yoshi is in this town but before this happens you have to wait an excruciating long time watching this night time sequence for when the humans time travel from the distant future to Yoshi Island Land Place (yes this is the actual plot, minus the name of the Yoshi's homeland, that's just me embellishing, eheheh). ANYWAYS, after all that is said and done, you finally gain control again and you presumably have to talk to them. So they state some things and I accidentally skipped some of it (a blessing in disguise, see the Sound section for more on that) and then I talked to the creeped out Yoshi and I got confused again. Okay; now what? The camera's frozen in place and there isn't anything else that's interact-able - soooo I was right about to give up for good. UNTIL I wandered off screen in the bottom right-ish and somehow triggered an event that led me to what I believe is the next part of the game: the wild yonder! It's a big open plain with lots of goombas. Me being an idiot, I figured I could jump on them or something but that just triggered a battle - a very poorly programmed, buggy battle. It's not entirely clear what defends, even though it's obvious you can going by the A and D letters in the top left corner (the A lights up when it's your turn to attack and all you have to do is hit Shift - not as easy with defending yourself, unfortunately). So the battle ended and I won fairly easily. All is good, right? I went back to the overworld annnnd... game crashed. I just moved a little bit and the whole thing crashed. Not worth it. Ain't gonna re-do all that. Time to talk about the game's aesthetics!
Graphics 3 / 10	Mediocre. You can't really describe the graphics with anything but "mediocre". Lots of clashy graphics, it's all over the place even. The people sprites are directly from an old graphics library, I recognized that pretty quickly (how do I know that? I used to have the exact same graphics library, although I forgot who made it - I can't recall if it was Clickteam themselves or someone else). The hills look very familiar, I recall them in another isometric Clickteam fangame... unfortunately, I can't seem to find it on MFGG so it'll forever be a mystery as to where they came from. Or maybe this game was the game that originated them? Judging by the absolutely garbage Yoshi drawing when you read the letter - not too likely. The title screen is a complete and utter eyesore, for the record. Just... just saying.
Sound 1 / 10	Music's run of the mill... for the most part (there's this one song that I swear Yoshiman just recorded using an old computer mic from his speakers and is playing it back as a lo-fi wav file). That's not really why this score is so much lower than the other two, oooohhhh no... it's the VOICES. The voice acting in this game is atrocious. As an aspiring voice actor, it really pains me when I say that the inflection, the tone, really everything about it is so weakishly amateurish that it almost hurts. And hey, look, I'm not saying this wasn't completely unexpected - Yoshiman made this game when he was a dumb kid, in an era when amateur voice recordings were pretty much all anyone could do... but nonetheless, I'm judging it on its own merits and its own merits alone, no backstory, nothing else - annnnd on its own, it's horrible. I cringed through some of that voice acting, I won't lie. It was that bad.
Replay 1 / 10	An unfinished RPG? You've gotta be crazy... nobody in their right mind would play through it again, especially since it randomly crashed on me when I was just getting started with the actual game! Forget it, man. Go play something else.

Final Words

I came in expecting pretty much exactly what I got out of it: a weird, buggy attempted RPG made in The Games Factory that is more frustrating than it is fun. The voice acting is the worst part, interestingly enough! Avoid.

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