Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness
Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness is a fun game with a long winded title. The game offers a good Japanese-RPG style game mixed in with a point and click adventure and some Penny Arcade humor. I never read PA before getting this game and I still enjoyed it so let's just get it out of the way that you don't have to be a PA fan to like this game. That being said you do have to like J-RPGs at least a little.
While this is a J-RPG it is a very light J-RPG. There is very little grinding and it is fairly linear compared to other games in the genre. There are potions and special attacks for battle but the attacks are not complicated.
The battle system is in real time so you can't just sit there thinking about what attacks to perform. You have items that you can use, a regular attack, a few special attacks, some support characters and some blocks at your disposal. After battle your characters level up and learn new abilities as in any other RPG.
The faithfulness to the PA comic strip is very good. The humor is definitely intact. There are lots of nerdy/gamey jokes such as how you role a 20 sided die at the beginning of battle to see who goes first and that your weapon through the whole game is a rake. The graphics reproduce the comic's visual style pretty well although I still feel like there is something missing.
There is very little sound in the game. There is no voice acting and generally
the only thing accompanying you through the world is some quiet, repetitive music. This all makes sense though because the whole game is made to look like a comic strip.
Overall the game is very good. The story is silly and over the top but that's what makes it funny. $20 is a little pricey for a game that takes about 5-6 hours to finish and offers no real reason to play through again. That being said though the 5-6 hours are a blast and you should still check it out because it is a funny, solid RPG.
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