Game EXP: Cthulhu Saves Christmas (NS)

Disclaimer: I received a free review copy of Cthulhu Saves Christmas developed by Zeboyd Games from Robert Boyd through his Twitter account for the Nintendo Switch.  The game was given and received without expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and a review posted publically.  All of the words in this article unless otherwise noted are my own and all of the screenshots are from my own playthrough of the game.

Before I started Cthulhu Saves Christmas, I had a very brief history with games from Zeboyd Games.  I played 4 1/2 hours of Breath of Death VII eight years ago (specifically December 25, 2012) and stopped after I came to the conclusion that I had not been leveling up correctly (or at least I had been in a way that made the game a lot more difficult) and I had quit altogether when I could not get past a boss battle after multiple attempts.  I was also not a big fan of the combat system used in BoDVII and Cthulhu Saves the World (where enemies increase in strength 10% every turn thereby making long battles a lot more difficult).  I have had Cthulhu Saves the World in my Steam library for probably just as long but as with about 65.47% of the games I have on that platform, I apparently never got around to playing it like I should have; probably from the bad taste that the boss battle BoDVII and the battle system had left in my mouth.  But I have been keeping track (a la following) Zeboyd Games founder Robert Boyd for a couple years on Twitter and when he offered up review codes for Cthulhu Saves Christmas, I felt compelled to take him up on the offer.  Thank goodness I did because I loved about 95.47% of the game, from the art direction to the combat, to the soundtrack, to the writing, to almost everything.

The thing about Cthulhu Saves Christmas is that like the other games by Zeboyd, the entire game is self-aware that this is a video game, with characters commenting on stereotypical RPG game mechanics such as fetch quests killing rats, gaining experience, and fans complaining about game length under 100 hours.  There is even the omniscient narrator who acts as an intermediary between the player and frequently interacts with the characters, another mechanic/characteristic frequently used in the aforementioned properties by Zeboyd.  Essentially, if you have already played Breath of Death VII or Cthulhu Saves the World, the formula is pretty similar from what I can tell, but the differences are what make Cthulhu Saves Christmas 100% worth playing.

In this story, Cthulhu wakes from his sleep in R'lyeh ready to destroy the world (as this is a prequel to Cthulhu Saves the World, which I did not realize going into the game; teach me not to read game descriptions) but has his powers taken away by an aptly placed Christmas present.  As he sets out to gain his power back, he meets Crystal, Santa's grand-daughter, Baba Yaga (who is currently in her teens maybe), and Belsnickle (a Castlevania-esque Belmont-type character who uses his whip on naughty children, kind of similar to Krampus using reeds or a switch on bad children).  Each new party member joins in after you have had a level to get used to the previous character, their abilities, and how best to use them in combat.  A nice touch rather than burdening the player with too much newness all at once.

The combat here thankfully has changed from previous Zeboyd games with the enemies no longer gaining strength after every turn, because I genuinely did not like that system.  It has also changed from the Dragon Quest first-person combat to the enemies still being in front of the party, but now the party is visible, closer to what you would see in Lufia 2: Rise of the Sinistrals.  Another change to combat that I did actually like also had to do with character customization of abilities and item inventory leading up to battles.  Some equipment can modify the abilities for that specific character so balancing the stat increases with the benefits of the gear is another great pull from typical RPGs.  Additionally, each character has four skills that they take with them into combat and three slots that are randomly chosen from their remaining unused skills.  Some skills are expended after they are used while others can be used multiple times by default, or by equipping specific pieces of equipment; this goes for both skills that you actively chose and the randomly chosen skills.  For the random skills, once you use your character's defense/recharge ability, the three random abilities are shuffled again.  For the items, these are once-a-battle use items, although again, there are some abilities that allow items to be used more than once or re-charged.  

That being said, I felt that there could have been a little better explaining or definition for some of the specialized abilities for some of the characters.  Like Cthulhu turning monsters insane (being one of his key character traits/abilities) is supposed to flip their weaknesses (ie weak against ice turns to weak against fire), which thankfully are displayed next to the monster's name.  To me, it looked like whenever a monster was insane, that only the first weakness changed, even when using the same attack again (as in I was hoping that it would then flip the second weakness).  And then being able to recognize what the weakness was based on the icon did not always seem clear, at least to me.  And then there was Baba Yaga's Chicken who had its own percentage bar that would max out at 200% and how to effectively use the Chicken I was never very clear on; there was even an ability that had the Chicken move next (or something to that effect) and at times nothing would happen.

This type of battle system definitely adds more complexity to each battle than just hitting the A button in a half-sleep-induced trance as you grind for levels; because that is something that I definitely have never done in any Final Fantasy game.  Although, the downside to this type of battle system got weary for me in the end-game as each battle was taking anywhere between 6-13 minutes and when the last two or three areas have 15 battles before the random encounters stop, that is between nearly one and three hours of battles.  At the end of the game, it felt a lot like padding to me in a game that does not need padding out and had already made a number of quips about games needing another 15 dungeons and 1,000 more hours to feel like a true JRPG.  Or maybe I was just not utilizing the right skills and abilities to dispatch enemies faster than I was?

Unlike Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World, there is no overworld to explore here, only the dungeon-like areas that you travel through on your way to the boss.  Between each dungeon, Cthulhu and company are located in a central HUB area called Christmas Land (The Christmasiest Place on Earth!) where you have Cthulhu interact with your party members and different characters to help forge new R'lyentionships, and explore locations in-town all to gather new equipment and items.  Each time you are in the HUB, you have five days, with an allowance of one activity per day, to select what you want to do in Christmas Land and what item you want to acquire, although at first you are only given the name of the item and on subsequent days do you learn its abilities.  The thing here is, when you first start in Christmas Land, you have the choice of six different activities, so you will be leaving one uncompleted.  Each subsequent time you come back to Christmas Land, there are more activities to do (along with the one you did not complete), but you still only have five days, so there will be increasingly more and more activities left to do the next time you come back.  Finishing unfinished jobs is something that I was unsure about because there will inevitably be some leftover after each visit.  For example, my first time in Christmas Land, I left the Mall activity incomplete so I did not pick up the Fencing Sword for Cthulhu and while in the next area I found a better sword than the one I had equipped which made me think that this sword was better than the Fencing Sword, so why would I want to waste a day doing an activity for a lesser weapon?  That was my assumption that I ended up not testing.

That was pretty much the format for the game.  You would spend five days in Christmas Land doing activities while (story-wise) Crystal was looking for information on where the next agent from the Christmas League of Evil (might be) holding Santa, then you would head into a new dungeon, fight monsters until you cleared the quota, collected treasure, raised levels and gained new abilities, then fought the boss and headed back to Christmas Land.  The dungeon layout was pretty straight forward as they were not maze-like (thinking about Final Fantasy IV and Chrono Trigger) although there were some semi-hidden areas where you would find treasure chests and it was only by the third dungeon (technically the second after reaching Christmas Land), that I figured that there was going to be at least one treasure chest per screen.  I also did focus on completing all of the quota battles partly because I felt that gaining experience/new abilities were key to surviving, but because it also made exploring the dungeons a lot easier if you did not have to worry about skipping a battle or if you were tracking where you were going to get to a treasure chest.  Once I did not have to worry about the battles popping up and just sprinting through the rest of the dungeon felt very freeing.  Plus, once you completed your battle quota, you were awarded bonus experience points.  

There was a brief point during the final dungeon that I felt that the game was going on longer than it needed, already taking into account how I felt about the length of the 15 battle quota.  What I thought was the final boss battle ended up not being that and so the game went on.  I guess it was kind of like how Frodo and Co. ended up having to tussle with Saruman in Bag End at the end of Return of the King; which is probably why the Scouring of the Shire was not included in any iteration of the movie accept being alluded to in Fellowship of the Ring.  In the end, this final chapter did not bother me when taking the entire game into context, and because again the game was self-aware at this recent development, but while I was in the thick of it, I had wanted the game to have already concluded.

And you know what?  Despite that similar sentiment to Cthulhu above, I did enjoy Cthulhu Saves Christmas in its entirety.  The developer Robert Boyd has said (he has Tweeted it I believe, but I cannot locate the Tweet so you'll have to trust me on this one) that he wanted to create a short and concise JRPG that would take you about six hours to complete and even though I ended up taking close to 10 hours (most because I felt the need to clear the battle quota in each dungeon), I had a lot of fun, even though there were some aspects I felt could use some touching up.  But on the whole, a very solid JRPG that I would recommend.  And now I am installing Cthulhu Saves the World, and you can bet that I will look for parts of the game that reference Christmas or the events that occurred in this game that was released nine years before the prequel.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Order of Stars Expire