Cthulhu Saves the World

"Cthulhu Saves the World"is a bit of an homage to old school Final Fantasy-ish games. It's a 2D pixel-art style turn-based RPG. The story goes, Cthulhu awakens with aims to destroy all things, as he's Cthulhu and that's kind of his thing. Before he can get started on the destruction though, he is stripped of his powers, and the only way for him to reclaim them is to become a hero. Once he's a hero, he'll have his powers back and theeeeeen he can destroy the world.

He meets various characters along the way who will accompany him on his quest, who have various skills in magic and ass kickery. Your merry little band travels from town to town picking up quests to prove your hero status, fighting baddies along the way. The combat is not too easy but not too hard. There are certain boss battles that I had to try multiple times, so there was some sense of satisfaction in besting them.

I'm not going to lie, I got somewhat annoyed by the whole surprise battle thing. I much prefer Chrono Trigger style battles where you actually run into monsters that you see rather than just randomly being thrown into battle when walking throughout a dungeon. However, I did like that they implemented this system where you would only have to fight X number of battles for each location. If a dungeon has a max of 25 battles, once you have won 25 battles, no more random battles will occur in that dungeon, and you can explore it with impunity. The dungeons are kind of long, not that visually interesting, and therefore start dragging after a little while, so infinite battling would have driven me insane, me thinks.

Don't get me wrong, it's still quite enjoyable overall. The humorous writing was a big strong point of the game. I just wish there was more of it. I wish there were more NPCs to interact with, more cutscenes, more objects that can be interacted with, etc. One little extra nugget is a commentary option that populates question marks around the game world that you can click on to read developer notes on some behind the scenes things about that particular section of the game. They're interesting, but word of warning...if you've got the commentary on during your first playthrough, it often has some spoilers for what's coming up in that zone.

Overall, I enjoyed "Cthulhu Saves the World". I got it on Steam for like two dollars, and I got about 11 hours of entertainment out of it. Seems like a good deal to me.