Saturday Morning RPG

Genre: Turn-Based RPG

Players: 1

.

Review:

Saturday Morning RPG is a Turn-Based RPG originally released in episodic format on iOS in 2012, and ported to Android devices and PC in 2013, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, and Xbox One in 2016, and Nintendo Switch in 2018, with the more recent releases of the game receiving all five of the game’s episodes in one release.

This game has players taking the role of Marty Michael Hall, a schoolkid who comes into possession of a magic notebook (which looks a lot like a Trapper Keeper) fighting a horde of silly enemies in a pastiche of numerous 80s in-references and gags. Within the first half hour of the game, you’ll see references to G.I. Joe, Back to the Future, Smurfs, Care Bears, Rainbow Brite, Transformers, Tron, The Wizard (complete with “it’s so bad” quote) and Michael Jackson (from a time before that last one carried some unfortunate connotations), and the game is very much built as both a nostalgia piece and a gag on that nostalgia.

This of course means that if you weren’t around during the 1980s, and more specifically if you didn’t grow up during that time period, much of this game’s parade of references will likely be lost on you. On the other hand, if you did grow up during the 1980s, you’ll likely find yourself smiling at each new little joke or reference the game makes, if not outright bursting out with a “oh yeahhhh, I remember that!”. Jokes and references aside, the story here is okay, albeit fairly silly. Mostly this game’s story is about the jokes and references.

The presentation here is a mixed bag. On the one hand, the combination of 2D pixel art characters and low-poly 3D backgrounds leaves something to be desired. I can’t help but wonder why this game didn’t just go full 2D if it was going to put so little effort into its 3D visuals. On the other hand, the soundtrack in this game is fantastic, with themes that evoke the heavily-synthesized electric guitar-heavy jams of the ‘80s, with Castle of the Gods and Legacy being particularly good, and No Risk No Glory being an epic recreation of exactly the sort of power ballad you’d expect to hear in every action film of the era.

When it comes to the gameplay, this game seems to take a lot of inspiration from Super Mario RPG. Combat has real-time reaction inputs to maximize your damage and minimize damage you take from enemies, players change their stats and loadout by swapping out stickers, and level-ups give players the simple choice of one of two stats to upgrade. Unfortunately, the game goes a little overboard with some of these elements – the need to wiggle the analog stick before each battle to “scratch” your stickers gets old very, very quickly, as does the need to constantly make use of every one of the real-time elements to stand a chance in battle with even the most standard enemies.

The challenge level here is one of the game’s worst qualities. Option menus give players the choice of multiple ways to adjust this difficulty, but none of them feel quite right – you can have it automatically adjust to the player’s level, which means virtually every battle will be a struggle for survival and leveling up won’t help at all, you can have it adjust automatically to “recommended”… although what this means exactly is unclear. Or you can have the game adjust automatically to a specific level, which seems like a recipe to ensure that you’ll either be facing enemies that are too tough at the start of an episode, or too wimpy at the end of one.

To some extent, I understand this game’s difficulty with giving the player a reasonable challenge level as it tries to do something clever by having the player use the same character in each of the game’s episodes, and even allowing them to play the episodes out of order. Of course, players opting to do this would find later episodes unbearably hard and earlier episodes an absolute cakewalk if the game maintained normal RPG progression. So instead you have this… extremely unpleasant compromise.

I applaud Saturday Morning RPG for taking risks and doing some original stuff with its gameplay, but I can’t help but feel like the game’s creators didn’t know when to stop with these various wacky elements, and seemingly tossed every idea they had into the game rather than choosing a few of the better ones and refining them. As a result, you have a game that’s wildly inventive, but suffers from terrible difficulty problems and “clever” mechanics that are made frustrating due to how frequently the player is forced to engage with them. All of this on top of a very 1980s-focused parody-based presentation that will be highly appealing to some players, and completely inexplicable to others. Still, there are enough good qualities here that some players are sure to be amused or even charmed by what this game has to offer… but just as many players are likely to find this repulsive.

tl;dr – Saturday Morning RPG is a Turn-Based RPG with a barrage of jokes and references to 1980s pop culture, and gameplay seemingly inspired by the Paper Mario series, and an absolutely outstanding 80s-esque soundtrack. It’s wildly creative, but often that creativity goes too far, resulting in tedious game mechanics shoved down players’ throats and severe problems with the game’s difficulty level. On top of that, players who didn’t live through the 80s won’t understand much of what’s going on in this game. The result is a game that has a lot of good qualities and a lot of bad qualities, and is just as likely to frustrate players as it is to thrill them.

Grade: C

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are MB, Andy Miller, Johannes, u/RamboFox, Exlene, Eli Goodman, Ilya Zverev, Stov, Connor Armstrong, and K.H. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}