My first look at the competition and my first review. Every little thing that looks polished makes me wince, because I remember what is missing from my game. Will it make me too hard or too lenient on "Stock Trader Hiyo"? Am I overthinking it? And how do I come back from this introduction? Maybe with...
Story
Hiyo is a stock trader and a monster, but not metaphorically. He is a talking chicken, so you may need to loosen your definition of monster a little.
He informs us at the beginning that "heroes" keep stealing items, so there is a monster economy crisis. After being rejected by the subtly named "I Love Money Corp" Hiyo calls his old teacher who tells him to become a stock broker. Once there he gets his introduction into supply and demand by a ghost and a goblin. Further on you meet other talking animals and monsters who offer their services in
Hiyo seems to have the attention span of a hummingbird on speed and the social graces of someone who tells you you're going to be best friends after their second drink.
Mechanics
Offering to skip the introduction and tutorials is a quick and easy way to make me like a game, so point for you, Hiyo. But you want to do it, since Hiyo has a special inventory system. You open your inventory with Escape, select an item and then interact with something in the world.
The game is pretty front loaded, lots of explanations about macroeconomics, casinos etc. before you get into shouting distance of buying something. On the plus side, every person has something to say and while I am not keen on reading it all, I certainly appreciate the effort.
Gathering information is done at the companies' hubs with multiple buildings and trips there take some of your starting capital. There you talk to people and relevant information will yield clues that show up in your inventory.
Sometimes your actions are not rewarded or not immediately. I had an angel picked up from a traffic jam (and this combination might also tell you, whether you enjoy the game's sensibilities), but neither the questgiver nor anyone with him was willing to talk to me afterwards.
After my fact finding mission I went back to buy stocks. There is a dialogue menu, you can buy, sell, and ask for the price of a company's stocks. After that... Well, am I suppose to wait in real time? Travel to make things change? Had I made a good purchase? A bad one? Should I have used my clue in some way?
Then I figured out to go to the talking cat that offered to spread rumours for me and told her one of the things I had learned. That changed the stock prices and I made a nice profit.
Presentation
I didn't recognise Hiyo as a monster at first glance, he is a fluffy little chick. In fact most characters are overqualified in the cuteness department for the monster job. But the colourful aesthetic works in combination with the cheery music.
The slightly isometric top-down view looks like typical RPG-maker fare, as do the text boxes who give you the information with lots of little chirps.
I appreciate the attempts to keep the messages and dialogues short, since I don't like reading on the screen a lot. Still, some of the jokes had me impatiently abusing the space bar to get to the next relevant bit of information.
The rumourmongering is nice, just a black screen with unseen people whispering the dirty secrets I had told them to each other.
There is no way to adjust sound or window size that was readily apparent to me.
The game itself runs solidly and I encountered no bugs.On the whole...
If you want an economy introduction by a fluffy pink rabbit... you have weird preferences, but you will also find what you need here.
But "Stock Trader Hiyo" is just not my cup of tea. Maybe I had the wrong expectation, but it plays more like a cross between adventure and RPG. Walk around, talk to people, use item on people.
I really like the concept, use rumours and information to manipulate prices and cash in. But there is so much idle walking between the juicy bits and so much emphasis on dialogue that I think it is just not the right engine for the game.
But the thing is pretty and colourful and very robust. Maybe you are the kind of person who likes to walk around several distinct areas and talk to lots of characters. Maybe what rubbed me the wrong way is something you will readily forgive. If so, give it a try, you could certainly do worse.
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Link: http://contest.gamedevfort.com/submission/130#.Vc3dEPntlBc
Dev: Sapiboong
Time Played: 30 minutes
Got My Vote? No, partly because of patience-testing frontloading, partly because of my biases about the walking-talking-RPG-genre.
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