If Void Monsters: Spring City Tales had allowed me to beat the game with thievery skills, it would be fairly easy to recommend. If my character’s maxed out planting ability somehow allowed her to avoid the Lufia-esque number of random battles, or at least made them easier to run away from, then it would again be easy to recommend. That’s all to say that there’s a lot of good to be found in this game, and I enjoyed much of my time with it. However, the random battles are agonizingly at odds with the numerous miscellaneous mechanics you can engage in to the point where it almost feels like two completely different games that have been duct taped together, and a game where you spend hours mating goats so that you can obtain higher-quality milk for your cheeses shouldn’t end with a generic jRPG end boss slapfight that has nothing to do with the skills you’ve spent so long improving.

Taking on the man

Void Monsters begins with the main character’s parents murdered and their land in heavy debt to “The Bank,” a shady group of financiers that just about everyone in the world owes something to. The main character then returns home to figure out what happened and try to claw her way out of debt through crafting, selling, thievery, or whatever else you choose to get good at. Personally, I focused heavily on thievery, so I named her THIEF (taken from Link’s Awakening after Link steals from the shop), only for the game to add an extraneous 7, making her 7THIEF. I wasn’t initially sure how this had happened, but eventually figured out that the starting classes are numbered and that number becomes their default name. Since the class that begins good at thievery-type skills is the seventh, her name began with a 7 that I had mistook as a “name starts here” symbol thanks to the font and failed to delete.

Personally, I came to like it despite it being rooted in some game weirdness, and the same can be said about a lot of things. The characters here don’t have much depth and mostly exist as your standard open-world quest dispensaries, but I couldn’t help but find it charming when the mailman casually remarked that he was worried about all of the mail 7THIEF was getting from the Thieves Den. There’s a smattering of typos and misplaced apostrophes to contend with, as well, but nothing that stood out as especially egregious. The writing in general, then, struck me as passable, if ultimately forgettable. It’s easy to get past that given how much else there is.

I genuinely love how the dark and foreboding areas sometimes have cheery background music. That’s not sarcasm. More games should do this.

Destroying the world for reduced interest

There’s some overlap in the jobs you can take on. For example, my interest in thievery required crafting a whole bunch of lockpicks because they break after use, which in turn required growing a certain kind of plant used to make them. That meant that a sizable portion of the early game consisted of running around the city, grabbing seeds from people’s houseplants during the day so that I was able to do the farming and crafting required to steal from them at night. Thievery happens exclusively at night (barring one or two quest bugs that let you steal during the day) and time is constantly passing as you wander around the city figuring things out. That ties into the debt mechanic, as your inherited debt of 62,000 gold accrues interest daily and the game ends in failure if the amount owed goes over 100,000 (after which The Bank takes your land). You can either avoid this by paying off bits of debt as you’re able to, or reducing the world’s prosperity by breaking into houses and stealing from chests. As the world becomes poorer, your interest payments are reduced, but this also apparently reduces the amount of money you can make selling things. That means that low prosperity is ideal for a thief, while someone focusing on crafting increasingly good items to sell might want a higher prosperity.

But it all leads to combat

As mentioned earlier, there’s no alternative to traditional turn-based combat. Outside the city areas, there are “passive” zones and “active” zones, with the former being areas where enemies can be seen as glowing blue wisps and the latter having blue enemy encounter wisps wandering around in addition to random encounters that hit you out of nowhere. While you receive experience for completing the sidequests that the mailman delivers each day, they often require leaving the city and dealing with random encounters anyway. The most frustrating part is how difficult running is—it being difficult to get away from enemies early on makes sense, but my end-game party full of legendary, one-of-a-kind void monsters would often fail to run away from much weaker enemies 2-3 times before it would finally take. It’s a huge waste of time, and it makes exploring truly painful. Of course, it’s also completely necessary because of how the end is structured. Whether you pay off your debt or follow a quest chain to get revenge, you’re going to end up fighting the bad guy, and beating him requires having strong monsters who are all at a high level. You’re not going to lockpick him to death or impress him enough with your goats that he calls off his evil plans. Having combat be the only part of the game that matters is disappointing.

Numerous things bugged out at points, which is expected given how many mechanics are packed in here, but still intermittently frustrating.

Bugs and issues

I could overlook a lot of the bugs I faced if the random encounters weren’t such a fun-killing problem, but the two things exacerbate each other. At one point I went through a bunch of random encounters to reach a spot to summon a new void monster party member (it works kind of like Pokemon in that you collect a bunch of them, but the difference is that you summon them with runes and more than one can be used at once), only for the ladder leading there to have stopped working. There also tends to be a lot of slowdown on top of an already slow walking speed, which can make it a chore to get through certain areas. Adding random stops to fight some weakling enemy it’s too difficult to run from on top of that ensured that I quickly stopped exploring outside the city when quests didn’t demand it. There are also softlocks you can run into, quests that are broken, and items like the highest-tier lockpicks that don’t show up in the menu despite you having a bunch of them.

The worst issue of all isn’t a bug, though. I went through a ton of sidequests in order to weaken the villain and ensure that no one stood in my way to him at the end of the game, so I used up all of my temporary stat-boosting items when I went to face him, only for the game to throw two boss re-fights at me out of nowhere because of some contrivance. By the time I reached him, everything had worn off and my party couldn’t beat him. I had to wander around and buy a bunch of replacement items, making sure to use them only after the re-fights in order to finish the game. What’s so egregious about this is that the monsters I fought were party members at the time. They were literally fighting themselves because someone thought that throwing two back-to-back boss fights at the very end was a great idea after explicitly telling the player that no one would stand between them and the villain. Not okay, game.

Cheery music and lots of effects

Void Monsters looks like an RPG Maker game, with all the slightly blurry, not-really-sprite art that entails. I’m pretty sure it is an RPG Maker game, in fact, which is a testament to how unique a lot of the visual elements are. There’s a screen border, a clock showing you the current time, a money counter, a list of tracked quests, and that’s to say nothing of the maps and pamphlets you can read. The most ubiquitous visual element, though, is one where stuff flies around the screen. Snowflakes, rose petals (I think), leaves, rain—all flying wildly around. When the day starts to end and most of the world is covered in a sunset effect, this can all combine into something quite striking. There’s also a fog of war effect that I’m less enthusiastic about. Basically, your view of the surrounding area is limited in dark areas. This honestly doesn’t do anything but occasionally make it difficult to see a couple chests when you’ve broken into a house. Then there’s the music, which is all over the place. The music that plays at your house is something I really grew to hate by the end, but there’s also some really great music here, and it’s used in interesting ways. For example, where most games would play something dark and/or mysterious in a dark cave-type area, sometimes Void Monsters plays something cheery instead. Weirdly enough, I found that this made the random encounters slightly less aggravating in those areas by giving the impression that they were friendlier places.

*A Steam review key for Void Monsters: Spring City Tales was provided for the purpose of this review

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