Junkman
Apr 15 2005, 11:33 PM
Game: Final Park
Creator: KainX
Genre: Role-playing game
Description: Damienus is trying to acquire the magical crystals on Earth! Help the characters you play as stop this from happening.

Rating: 65%

Review: The RPG field is most likely the game genre of choice that have been the less exploited in the whole South Park Gaming community and that is due to quite a lot of reasons. It's an incredibly difficult field to tackle: there are so many details in RPGs that must be considered such as the storyline, the battles, the progression of characters and such. So far, there's been absolutely no game that has tried paying a proper tribute to the RPG genre: South Park RPG by Evan Johnson and ML Productions were RPG games by name only, the South Park Fantasy games were merely nothing but a series of unrelated fights and encounters drawn over cliché or dare I say, unexistant storylines and South Park and the Magic Master was more of an action game than a RPG, featuring little in the way of character interaction and plot development, considering that a game was a RPG if it featured mystical monsters, a villain wanting to take over the world and places such as castles and the likes.

Before Legions of South Park has shut down it's doors and departed to greener pastures forever, KainX had released what was going to be his final game with Final Park. A fitting title for a final game, and even with all of the flaws that come with it, it stands by now as being the most ambitious attempt at a RPG game so far, and while there are moments there and there that takes Final Park away from your average South Park game, it's still a rather flawed experiment for the most part.

One of the greatest drawbacks about the game is it's complete linearity. There's absolutely no control that you take over in the game, you're forced to play along with the storyline all the time. Speaking of which, the storyline is still over all of the other RPG games released through the SPG community thus far, even if for a great deal, it heavily draws upon the storyline of Squaresoft's Final Fantasy 4 (for you Americans, it's Final Fantasy 2). At least, it's somehow a relief that unlike every South Park game out there, some effort went into the storyline. After all, a RPG isn't a RPG without a storyline, right? The storyline has a certain interest level going through and is actually quite humorous at times, but there are somes times where the storyline trips over itself and just ends up making no sense at all, especially near the end. Basically, you play as Cecil (who was the main character in Final Fantasy 4) as he travels to various places around the world, stealing the magical crystals in order to hand them over to his king. However, trouble lurks ahead. An entity called Damienus and his henchman Cyrus, a deadly knight, are bent to steal them in order to rule over the world. However, the crystals end up being quite tricky, since one of them seems capable to change Cecil's apperance and twist his reality. After an encounter with Cyrus goes bad, Cecil wakes up and meets South Park gamers that want to save the world and to do so, go over the Microsoft corporation for no reason. This really was the huge wound that the storyline had: why construct a storyline, put characters in the foreground and the plot in order to fully ignore them later? For the creator's credit, the storyline around these parts was funny, even if it made absolutely no sense at all with the previous parts of the game. Still, the storyline was decent most of the time.

With the storyline now covered, let's look at the gameplay. As mentionned earlier above, this is where the game really hurts. Even though the game actually takes quite a while to beat, there's deceivingly very little gameplay in the game apart from moving your character from the right to left, occasionally pressing the Shift button to scroll through the dialogue. In the whole game, which is a little less than 1 hour long, you have 6 battles to go through. That's right. The amount of fighting scenes through the game is so small that it's scary. Luckly, the battle engine in Final Park is the closest thing that SPG has seen that ressembled an actual RPG battle engine. Enemies and characters take turns issuing commands such as fight, defend (and magic for some characters) until death of either party ensues. While the engine is actually pretty interesting, the battles that you go through are really basic and don't provide much of a challenge. There's sadly no proper final battle through the game (unless you think that 3 Microsoft employees are a great threat to mankind) and most of the great accomplishments of the game are handled through automatic cutscenes. Apart from the fighting scenes, there also are 2 levels in which you control a airship and defeat baddies using basic path movement schemes. I didn't really thought that those levels were much interesting or even needed for the game at all, they just somehow made the game feel like longer.

Graphically, the game is actually quite interesting. Most of the characters and enemies are basic-looking, but they are acceptable and some of them do look actually good. Backdrops are nothing special, but they do a good job, though. However, the game do reveal it's better graphical cards in the battle scenes, which actually sports out nice looking battle effects, especially with the magic attacks. Some of the invoked magic spells are special looking and even sport out that South Park humor which doesn't feel present in enough games. Sound-wise, the game's nothing to be much excited about, using the usual RPGish music cuts that have being heard in many games out there already. Sound effects are for the most part strict KNP fare.

This game is one hell of a heartbreaker. Final Park truly was one attempt to bring the SPG scene one step forward, starting to tinker with some new genres and attempting to do a bit out of the casual South Park game. In some aspects, such as the storyline, this was quite a brave attempt that has succeeded. The engine also is competent, delivering the better fight sequences seen in a South Park RPG yet, but with a game of such scope, there could have been a lot more focus on fights. Harder fights would have been nice, too. In some ways, even though that Final Park can be summed up as a RPG, the better way to describe the game would be "interactive movie". The reason why Final Park is lackluster is because it doesn't have the amount of gameplay to qualify as a game, you spend most of the time watching the game rather than to play it. That's somehow shameful, since this game had the potential to achieve many great things. Still, like it or not, this is the king of South Park RPGs. None of the other games made in that style were close to acheive what Final Park has done or tried to do. It's not a bad game, but it's definitely not a game that everyone will want to fully sit through due to all of the reasons I listed above.
End



Dec 27 2006, 07:36 AM
Game: Final Park
Creator: KainX
Genre: RPG
Description: Join our schizophrenic, dual-personality host as his life is shifted between two completely different storylines in this halfway-completed attempt at an RPG.

Rating: 50%

It is my firm belief that Final Park, as it stands, is not a complete game.

Oh, sure, it has a beginning, a middle, and an 'end'. There are some dialogue scenes and a few battles spread out over the course of the game. Characters appear and disappear, music shifts from frame to frame, and so on. It can, technically, be counted as 'complete'.

However, on the whole, what is presented here is a halfway attempt at a complete game.

One can note that the game obviously bears some noted similarities to Final Fantasy; first and foremost is the title. Directly thereafter is the meat of the game's 'plotline', which is more or less lifted straight from Final Fantasy IV. The original plotline was decent, so to have it spoofed in a South Park style isn't necessarily bad; the characters featured are handled rather nicely in the SP sense and retain abilities true to their game counterparts. However, the FF-esque storyline is rather brusquely cut off halway through; the plotline, for no apparent reason, shifts in focus to an invasion of Microsoft by a few of the older SP gamers. The ending attempts to merge these two completely disparate plotlines but pretty much fails. I'm guessing Kain likely decided to laze off on an actual attempt at plot at around the halfway point mentioned; as such, there is really only 'half' of a real story.

The Final Fantasy titles (and RPGs in general, even) often feature some form of limited exploration; you are free to enter and leave towns at the whim of the game and talk to NPCs, whether forced to by the game or not. There is little 'exploration' in the sense of the term. The town scenes (all two of them) present your title character in a forced side-perspective, speaking to select villagers before reaching the one NPC that triggers a frame shift. Although the FF games and, indeed, RPGs in general, often revolve around using a single NPC as such a trigger point, they at least offer the player the chance to waste their time before venturing forward. Kain may have simply wanted to focus on a direct feeding of the plot to the player, as opposed to a potential dilution with the addition of further NPCs and the like. However, it's just as likely that he got tired of his progress halfway through and simply made such scenes forced dialogue encounters, as they were.

The turn-based battles are perhaps the only feature in Final Park that received a good deal of Kain's attention and are essentially the only 'complete' portions of the title. Done in true FF style, characters are forced to wait on miniature colored bars to fill before either unleashing an attack (or, if available, use some form of magic). Depending upon the characters available, different types of magic may be available; some are capable of Summon spells while others use more basic offensive spells. The fact remains, however, that all of the battles are simple affairs; using magic is never required, as continually clicking 'Attack' can finish the battle just as quickly. The pretty spells are essentially useless, which is just as well; the characters with more notable magical attacks (such as the twins, featured later on) are only available for one battle and one battle alone. The fact that there is also no last battle of sorts weakens the already weak plot climax and adds credence to the theory that this game was abandoned before it was truly 'finished'.

The airship battles are simple matters and do not fit in with the rest of the game, curiously enough; they are simple 'move and shoot' matters with an enemy that bounces back and forth. It is my suspicion that Kain whipped these up in a moment as he was becoming tired with his creation, in order to fill some space and add something that would allow the player to progress without requiring much effort from the creator himself.

The graphics are simple affairs; fairly easy sprite edits, some in the flavor or FFIV, some not. Nothing special... but nothing terrible, either. The magical spells are fairly well-designed; the Summons, in particular, look perfect for a game of this type; dynamic backgrounds and well-detailed creatures make for a decent attempt at 'eyecandy'.

The music is decent, I suppose, though pretty much all of it was taken from other sources; thus, you've probably heard all of it from one title or another.

So, really, what we have here is an honest attempt at an RPG; the utilization of a FF plotline and the battle engine hint at what could've been had this been further fleshed out. As it is, it's simply a halfway-finished title, best played once and then ultimately forgotten.