Long Card Road Home: Saturday Morning RPG

Nostalgia. Nostalgia never changes.

It's Steam sale time and me here at this blog is am playing many games to try to churn out the last few cards to sell during the sale. And by play, I mean idling games like this one and this one that I got from bundles. Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm just not man enough to review visual novels.

Or play visual novels. I'm sorry. I'm just not strong enough. Not strong enough for this at all.

(I am totes buying that when it isn't that many cents. It just makes no sense to buy it now though.)

Anyway so unrelated to that I gave Saturday Morning RPG a try. The basic premise is its a "saturday morning cartoon" inspired RPG with a ton of QTEs in the combat system. I'm not sure if they still even show saturday morning cartoons, having not owned a TV or really watched much in the way of cartoons they'd show on saturday mornings (I really hope they don't show Rick and Morty to children, pls), but if they don't there was a point in time many whatever generation I am remember fondly when they would get a big box of disgusting carb laden cereal and then in a blissful sugar high watch advertising.

I mean saturday morning cartoons. Which were probably the first and purest convergence of media and product placement in history. I mean we all love Optimus Prime, but the dude was basically showing up to give us all 21 minutes of 'buy me! buy my friends! buy my enemies so you can hit them with my friends!' and having nostalgia for that is like looking back lustfully upon your real estate agent. But we can and we do, so here we are, with a RPG entirely centered around referencing that stuff.

a pun, I think

I don't think this game has even a hint of irony as Blood Dragon did, either. There is nothing all that meta, as best I can tell, about SM:RPG. It is really just supposed to be: here are references, do they amuse you? And it isn't especially aggressive or excited about them.

Well, I guess joining GIJOE, who are referred to as Private Johnson in game isn't exactly played straight.

ah hue hue hue hue heh


As I said, Saturday Morning RPG is, as the title suggests, loosely a RPG. The game does try to do a couple things very differently, some of it better, some of it worse. There is more user interaction in SMRPG, and the game doesn't have equipment.

ok I admit I laughed

Basically the story goes - You are gifted a binder with radical stickers on it during a nightmare of Cobra Commander Hood marrying a 14 year old girl, which you object to on legal and moral grounds as coercing a minor into marriage is on the grounds that you have a crush on her. The binder is given to you by The Wizard, which is a reference to an 80s movie, but he talks like the antagonist in the 80s movie, so ... It's sort of a confusing reference... Anyway the binder gives you skill slots and "sticker slots".

At the start of each battle you scratch the stickers by rocking your joystick, which gives you a variety of power ups, but you generally can hit most of them if you stick to the lower power stickers, so it is more just a set of equipment slots. You also have 5 skill slots, which you can equip at your leisure out of battle, that do a variety of specials. The system is pretty simple but it's not bad at all, though I do wish attacks were explained a little better in the equip screen. I don't believe there is really much else in terms of RPG elements - Well, you do level, but it's pretty limited stuff.

The binder is totally sweet though. I may even refer to it as radical.

Combat is made a bit different by different attacks having little minigames, as well as charging. The charging system drains MP to build up a bonus upon attacking (and some healing) that multiplies it out. So basically for your heavy attacks you charge up, then unleash them with a minigame and pray you don't miss since that drains the multiplier bar. You can't replenish your MP bar through any means other than being attacked, as best I can tell, and then you get bonuses for defending well. Basically timing your block will reduce damage and add bonus MP.

The block system is better than it sounds, since each attack has a somewhat different timing parameter, so you do better as you get more and more into the groove of each enemy. So basically you charge up, lay some fools out on their backs then pick off the scragglers with lower damage faster attacks. It's not a bad system at all.

But this kinda leads to the issue I have with most of the fights. Often, you're doing 3 on 1s and you spend a ton of the fight just getting wailed on by the enemy. You charge up, get attacked 3 times, go to use your attack, get attacked 3-6 more times, attack... There's a great deal of the combat just trying to time those blocks. The game isn't really difficult but it feels kinda dull to sit there doing a fight getting whomped on over and over. I don't know if you get more party members later on - feels like no - but the game could really have used it.

Also the charging and various mini games are some pretty intense button mashing, and it can get kinda hard on my old, old hands. The game probably shouldn't have missing in general, on that note, or missing shouldn't drain the multiplier bar. Mostly because lord does it suck to charge up again, take sixteen more hits, attack again...

Anyway so the game's story is basically a vehicle to drop as many 80s references as possible - I played up to episode 3, which is essentially about the Transformers except the Megatron stand in has a drug problem, which in and of itself is another 80s reference... I didn't mind the writing, and did laugh here or there. It's not great, but it isn't really my type of humor anyway, so maybe if you're into Family Guy but my age (30s) you'll find it works better for you? There are a couple jokes based on jokes about the 80s that are more recent, which I guess you'll get if you've used youtube.

a reference to a joke PSA from like 2002 or something

Inversely I didn't really mind the tone of the references to the game. They're just sort of there, that's the point, but it doesn't repeat them over and over. I probably missed a bunch of them, too, but like I said they're gentle. You open happy meals. There are transformers. You throw a basketball that lights people on fire, which I think is a very quiet NBA Jam reference. You go to the Jean Claude van Dam, which was built on the site of Jean and Claude driving their van off a cliff.

blink

Referential humor bothers lots of people, but it doesn't bother me so much as just not really work for me. A reference is not, in and of itself, fundamentally a joke. It is a metoo moment, in which the audience can go 'hey I get that!' and feel smart. That's seriously the point of references, which intellectuals were using to be jerk-offs like fifty years ago. Still, as I said, they're pretty gentle in the game. The mood of the game is sort of a deranged fever dream anyway, so the weirdly conflicting and clashing tone kinda just works with that feeling.


The game's art assets kinda divide down the line between what is sprite work and what is just canned 3dish terrain. The spritework is good, not great, but captures the early FF feeling I imagine they were going for pretty well. It conveys enough emotion and the animations look properly silly. The canned 3d stuff is awful, which is rather disconcerting in parts, but it's not a high budget game by any means. Still I think they could have gone for a fully sprite game, but maybe that was simply out of their budget.

The music is a little repetitive in parts but does seem to capture the spirit of the 80s well. I'm not entirely certain why, but it has been years since I've listened to much of anything from the 80s, but it does seem to manage. Sounds kinda 80s mixed with Final Fantasy. My only real complaint is unless you've got tracks as good as the music in Risk of Rain, you really need to just make them much longer to keep from hearing the looping.

Do you see her? Then no.

Anyway so I picked this game up in a bundle from ... eh, lemme see ... Groupees for $2.25 for the bundle. Can't complain, had a couple fun hours with it, but it does get a bit samey. I do think the game really could have used some party members. You'd think you'd drop a couple one-liners in combat, and the system would work really well if you had 3-4 party members to charge each other up or just switch things up a little. It could also use a bit more in terms of references to other styles of RPG - a little bit of like, first person style, or maybe some Phantasy Star references, would have built a bit more variety into the game. Still, as I said, the game is at its core a humor driven product with a sense of humor that doesn't really work for me, so maybe if it works for you, you'll dig the game more.