Rainbow Moon Review

Hello again, I’m Nolan aka Totaltoad and tonight I’m pumped up to tell you about Rainbow Moon. Rainbow Moon is a tactical RPG by SideQuest Studios full of quirky quests and tons of birds eye beat-down fun . Even though I've known about Rainbow Moon’s existence since it’s PS3 release, I never got the chance to dive in till it’s brand new PS4 release. Kicked back with my feet up, I immediately noticed a nice feature. After a decision between Normal and Hard mode, you are given several play styles to choose from.

Depending on which style you choose, you can start out with tons of gear or nothing at all. Ofcourse I picked the option called “Adventuresome”, curious about the hidden benefit. It is rather nice that Rainbow Moon allows us to guide our experience in the game from the very start. In Rainbow Moon you play as Baldren, a warrior, who is ambushed by a wizard named Namoris during their annual duel and forced into a portal.

After awakening from dimensional teleportation, Baldren arrives in Rainbow Moon. Apparently Baldren’s arrival through the portal also unleashed countless monster across the lands, and its his job to take them out and find a way home. After a surprise name selection (I thought I was going to be forced to stick with Baldren) I began the hunt.

Gameplay:

In Rainbow Moon, the player moves his characters around the world from a birds eye perspective. Each step/battle action a player lowers the characters food meter, and there also is a very quick in-game clock. Enemies are all around the map. Some move on specific routes, others seem to guard spot or wander aimlessly. When the player’s character moves close enough to the monster certain stats are displayed: monster name, monster level, and amount of enemies in the battle. This really helped me later on when I began to come across harder enemies with higher levels. I could then focus on fighting smaller groups until I was strong enough to handle larger.

Once the player moves their character in contact with an enemy, an encounter battle begins. Battles take place on a square battle grid, usually with the player starting near one end and the enemies closer to the other. Players and monsters then take turns moving around the map and performing other functions. Taking a step, attacking, and using items all take up 1 turn, though as you level up you receive more “sub-turns” which allow you to perform more actions each turn. At the beginning of the game my character only had one “sub-turn” so it didn’t take me long to get surrounded.

Using turns to maneuver, attack, and use items the task is simple: KILL EVERYTHING! Since my character was so weak at the beginning, I had to find a way to not be surrounded quickly with enemies. I would lead monster to a corner where only 2 monsters could attack me at a time. This worked out even better than I thought. Every now and then, a monster would leave behind a sack of gold on the ground. Other monsters cannot move into that space until you move onto it and pick up the items! Once all monsters all vanquished, the player receives experience points, loot and another currency called pearls.

I found the battles to be very repetitive in the beginning hours of the game, but they grew more entertaining once I had more skills and characters to play with. It is important for me to mention Rainbow moon is definitely not a game where you can spam X repetitively and expect to win. Players must take time planing their moves on the board.

Design:

Throughout the game, players complete a series of quests. Many of these involved locating specific items or killing all the enemies in an area. While there is a main story quest line that the player must continue to unlock new areas, each area offers many side quests. I found side quests to be very profitable. I have received many items that give me permanent stat boosts and better gear through searching side quests areas. One quest I particularly liked was:

After retrieving his comic book I got a hilarious response:

By completing quests and killing monsters, the player characters receives XP and levels up. As usual, for each level various stats are increased. What makes Rainbow Moon unique is it’s pearl system. A character receives pearls for each monster it deals the final blow to. This became annoying, for every new character I received I had to tediously maneuver them in for the killing blow after whittling down an enemies health with other characters, until they weren’t under powered. Pearls are very useful as they can be used to customize each character, giving each more variety in skills.

Characters also have certain skills at their disposal that can be used in or out of battle. Skills like Magic Light can be cast to light up a dark dungeon instead of Torches. Another skill called Fruit Rain gives the player food to help fight the pesky food meter, but can only be cast every two hours on the in-game clock. Its details like this that make skills so awesome, but there’s a down side. Skills begin to level up only through usage and on top of that most of the damaging moves take many levels to see a significant increase in power. In game XP is not be applied to skills, and skills are not learned through leveling up your characters, but instead bought from a scroll vendor. I would have preferred that character specific skills were learned through leveling up, and universal skills bought from the vendor.

Presentation:

Rainbow Moon’s environments are lush with painted colors and comical figures.

Now most the enemies wont give you a fright, but they are smoothly designed. From bandits to skeleton knights, there seemed to be a moderate amount of different enemies, though I found myself grinding through battles of the same enemies in different combinations a lot. I was pleased to find all in battle skills had unique animations, some even changed the whole screen temporarily. Though walking around game world held not many animations at all. When a character equips a new piece of armor or weapon, it is shown equipped on the character, which is another nice feature I feel all RPGs should have by now. The music in Rainbow Moon feels well put, but most the songs were unremarkable (I didn’t find myself humming any battle songs during my restroom breaks like I usually do when I like a song).

Conclusion:

There are some really cool things about Rainbow Moon that continue to draw me back. The world map seems huge, and dungeons are designed so amazingly they loop back onto themselves (sometimes causing me to wander in circles). Plus game started me off with a few simple tutorials, and has continued to supply me with quick new tutorials as new mechanics come about. You may say “Yeah that is normal for most games”, but I’ve been playing this game for over 12 hours and have only unlocked 28/37 tutorials. With that in mind Rainbow Moon is an adventure I wont put down any time soon.

PLUS I GOTTA FIND OUT WHAT ARE THESE?!

Thank you for reading. Nolan — Totaltoad

Rainbow Moon gets a 6/10 (Limited Appeal)

This is my second video game review coming to you on The Cube, thank you Zack Hage and SideQuest Studios for providing me with the code and giving me this chance to share my opinion with everyone. Check out my random video game videos on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd8mNw3LXaEC1AA5nxiThoQ

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