False Skies is an indie RPG which released in November 2022 produced by Feenicks on the Official Hamster Republic Role Playing Game Construction Engine. It's stylistically a throwback to the RPGs produced for the original game boy and game boy color, with several riffs of the Final Fantasy Legends games in particular. It's a sprawling, 40+ hour affair that seems to contain every idea its creator could imagine. Structurally, the game frequently shifts focus and doesn't hold fast to any single narrative. Mechanically, it is tremendously over-complicated and under-explained.
I enjoyed most of my time playing it and have some fondness for it. It has problems. It is too much video game.
Spoilers below:
Structure
False Skies is structurally divided into four regions. You start in the eastern continent, then go to the western continent, etc etc until you finally unlock free movement through all areas. On the face, it's all very traditional, but the plot and presentation painfully obscure this.
The game introduces itself as a game about exploring ruins. You form a party (after an introductory dungeon where your starter character is paired with an NPC) and delve into monster-filled ruins in search of treasure on behalf the explorer society that sponsors you. This conceit lasts all of two dungeons before it becomes about the interrelations of small countries and city-states as they respond to a mysterious strike force, the "Army of Garm." This lasts until you reestablish relations throughout the continent and chase off the villains. Then you teleport to a new continent where you're sort of investigating the enemy but also trying to warn the major local power of an upcoming attack but also doing research on the ruins you were exploring at the start. Later, you sneak into an underwater base where you drive off Garm's robo-dragon and reestablish global sea travel, and then... and then...
(Thankfully, the game has a "recall" option at save points to remind you of whatever-the-hell you're currently supposed to do.)
Even beyond plotting, it's very uneven. The first continent of the game is snappily paced and has a strong driving energy, but later parts drag. The middle of the game, which contains an extended side quest chain to acquire an airship, is particularly miserable even if some individual dungeons are enjoyable. (Don't get too attached to the airship.)
But then — the pacing and storyline picks up? The mysterious country of Garm is revealed to be a separate parallel world. Your band of explorers team up with the disaffected members of the Army of Garm to travel there in hopes of uncovering the hidden purpose behind the invasion. There's much more narrative drive, the storyline goes some very fun places, and it's all good stuff!
The explorers' world and Garm are only two of a series of parallel worlds. Every 2000 years or so, a new world "buds" from the most recent one, in the process draining ether (life energy) from all the previous. As such, the older worlds become more barren and unlivable. The aristocracy of Garm is only invading the player's world in anticipation of directing the formation of the predicted upcoming world, which they then hope to inhabit.
This later part of the game also has its digressions, but they feel more purposeful. When the plot gets interrupted by a mine collapse in a small town, it's both to show how the nobility of Garm have abandoned care of their old land (and people) in preparation for conquering the new, but also to show how the old world has beginning to physically decay. When Liss of the Army of Garm suddenly takes an interest in an abandoned temple to an ancient moon cult, it's to show that older cultures were more aware of multiple worlds and to suggest that the omnipresent teleportation technology has other, more sinister applications. (And that Garm's government is hiding both facts from its beleaguered citizens.)
It's good! I like it! But the final turn toward excellence reveals just how middling the middle is by contrast. There's a lot you could cut out between when you left the first continent and when you arrive on Garm and have a much stronger game.
Class System
In False Skies you construct a party out of eight possible classes (with one character as a possible ninth class). At higher levels you may (optionally) change a party members into a 2nd tier class, and later 3rd and 4th tier classes. Combinations of classes are extremely unbalanced toward each other. It is very easy to build an underpowered party and there's no way to respec aside from training up a new party member.
This is further exasperated by the game not telling you which classes have what skills until you can class change, and the game never tells you what those skills actually do. Multiple NPCs urge the player to change classes at the first available opportunity, which is often a bad idea. Many tier 1 classes pick up very strong skills at levels 20 or 25; changing class before you gain them can handicap your strength.
Because tier 1 classes have strong skills, the big benefit to changing class is getting higher stats. Most skills key off some multiple of one stat. Having high stats is therefore very impactful, as are effects that buff or debuff them. This also means you can screw yourself by changing to a class with different stat priorities. This makes it difficult to branch out into multiple competencies and further restricts what classes are viable. Final Fantasy 5, this is not.
Many classes do something gimmicky but ineffective. The Defender has a skill that attacks with their DEF value. This sounds self-synergistic but in practice compares poorly against a Fighter attacking with their ATK or a Mage or Gunner attacking with their SKL. A Recon can attack using an opponents SPD stat. This can be very strong, but only against certain enemies across the length of the game. The higher tier classes are full of weird and esoteric and fun skills that prove worse than straightforwardly attacking.
You can build a party with strong synergies in this system, but it's not obvious. I ultimately ended up finding an honest-to-god gamefaqs guide. (https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/371113-false-skies/faqs/80287)
Fights
I lucked into one of the stronger parties. When I saw that two starting classes were Mage and Sorcerer, I decided to get both to see how they differed. Mage has some of the strongest attack skills, which are costly in MP, while the Sorcerer has a "Blood Wine" skill that lets them restore the whole party's MP at the cost of HP. This combination let me bulldoze through most random encounters and several bosses, which was fortunate because:
The encounter rate is too damn high. This seems to be a consequence of how the game handles random encounters: there's a meter that fills up before your next fight, but it resets when you enter or exit a room or climb up or down stairs. As such, the meter need to be short enough to fill up once in each room or else it never would. This equate to 20 or 30 fights per dungeon, or even more in longer ones. Thankfully, the game has a Repel item and fights reward enough experience that even with their frequent use I never fell behind on the experience curve. That is a mercy a better designed game would not need.
It's a shame because the battles are quite good! The overabundance of skills that overcomplicates the player facing class system actually provide large amount of variety to random encounters. Some boss fights (and wandering-on-the-map midbosses) got quite tense. It's fun when you're not being over-saturated by it.
Weirdness
False Skies gives every indication of being a game designed during production. This explains both its troubles with pacing and plot, its over abundance of content (there's no opportunity to edit or cut if there's no final design), and it would also explain much of its weirdness: how a lot of concepts seemingly come and go throughout the game.
For example: if you choose to double back into previous areas during the early part of the game you will find many NPCs have new dialogue and some offer new quests. There is a remarkable amount of content here, from explorers discovering new passages in old dungeons, to naturalists looking for specific bestiary entries, to a whole separate dungeon with wildly out-of-depth monsters you can chance. Most of the tier 2 classes are hidden behind such quests, but there's also just neat stuff for the sake of having neat stuff.
The second continent also has optional dungeons, but there's less reward for backtracking. Later regions have hidden areas with bonus items, but few optional dungeons. Unlocking higher tiered classes becomes less a matter of accomplishing quests so much as simply finding the right NPC in the first place.
This trend also follows with story characters. The first continent is densely populated with dozens of named NPCs while the rest of the game has maybe a handful. (This is a welcome improvement, few people from the first continent really matter, but it still reflects a change in priority.) The Army of Garm get forgotten as characters for long stretches of the game. Lady Ceph and her underwater robot dragon, major antagonists, disappear from the story after your first and only engagement with them.
The game introduces and drops whole mechanics. Wandering minibosses, which routinely provide some of the more enjoyable fights, are absent from many dungeons. A few enemies suggest particular approaches, such as by having a weakness to attack items, but which you can't exploit because such things are too uncommon to plan for. One of the final dungeons of the game has a NPC guest character who join in your battles, a great mechanic unexplainably absent from early areas. (Presumably, guess characters hadn't been programed before then.)
The always shifting design focus of the game leads to problems, especially mechanically. Whole classes have skills with obscure effects. You can change class only in specific locations, which can make maintaining a build awkward if you get a key level up between such spots. There's a guild of "haven makers" that maintain save points. If you don't unlock the haven maker class and change one of your characters into one, you're going to have a hell of a time in the second world where the guild doesn't exist. Once you unlock the wider world map, tracking down higher tiered classes becomes a chore. (Use the guide.) There is so much stuff and so many ideas, and much of it is in competition with one another.
Unpleasantness
False Skies commits to a faux game boy RPG aesthetic, and it's faithfulness adds one final layer of obfuscation.
The level of visual detail is insufficient for the huge cast of NPCs. In particular, the Army of Garm and their superiors are all horned people drawn the exact same shade of purple. They're visually identical without their portraits, and their portraits aren't so distinct either. Item descriptions, including many key items, are (sometimes!) abbreviated through a faux character limit and often have "playful" descriptions in imitation of the translations of old RPGs. Important functionality can be hard to locate on the menu. E.g., some key items are are activated through the "key item" menu but others unlock functionality in the "settings" menu. The in game explanation for classes and skills is one such needlessly hidden function, and even once you locate it some information (such as Generalist, Hexer, and Elementalist skills) is further obscured.
(The game would strongly benefit from a detailed game manual. The gamefaq is mostly a sufficient substitute, but it shouldn't be necessary.)
Much of this would be cute and harmless if the game were more compact, as the actual Game Boy RPGs were. But False Skies is a huge game, and that size compounds every minor irritation and imbalance.
Still, still, despite the problems and maybe despite myself I enjoyed my time with False Skies. If nothing else, I appreciate seeing someone's imaginative, sprawling game realized — for better or worse — without any compromise or consideration. This is a game I might have envisioned making as a 10-year-old on long car rides after my game boy battery died, and it's wild to see it actually exist.
Somewhat unrelated, but it's been a good 20 years since I gave the Official Hamster Republic RPG Creation Engine any thought, and now I've played two games made with it in the span of some months. Is it a good engine now? When the did that happen?! Wasn't it originally programmed for MSDOS?!?!
And how come both games have an ending where the moon blossoms with life? The hell kind of coincidence is that?
