Crimson Shroud

No matter how I think about Yasumi Matsuno’s Crimson Shroud, I have to conclude that it’s a big case of wasted potential. The game was intended to be a small, indie-style, low budget RPG produced alongside four others by various big name game designers (“Guild01″ is the name of this project). Matsuno decided to make a short RPG that plays around with tabletop concepts. Those concepts include miniature-style character models for all heroes and enemies in the game, dice rolling, and decisions affecting the course of the game. Unfortunately, the decisions (Do I parry an arrow or lean to the side and dodge it?) only happen a couple of times near the very beginning and then never come up again.

The visual style of the game is much more effective. Playing as game pieces really put a smile on my face, and I love the way the pieces don’t have movements but instead rock around as if they’re being played with by hand. It was a unique idea that should have been expanded on in a bigger game. In fact, you can tell Matsuno probably intended for Crimson Shroud to be much larger from the outset but decided to produce it as his Guild01 project instead. Matsuno’s typical storytelling is present: he writes big, epic narratives that can often spread across nations and put the characters second to that. Because Crimson Shroud is about a four hour game, he’s out of his element and the results are a little flimsy. One of the characters who appears in every scene, Flint, is underdeveloped but seems like he should have been a big player in the story. The characters’ back-stories are hit upon but never fully explored. They have a sense of camaraderie, but Matsuno doesn't normally write party banter, and the small scale of the game makes the plot suffer for it. Crimson Shroud should have felt more focused than it does, or it could have even run with the silliness of using game pieces and had a funny plot ala Disgaea.

Since the story was disappointing in the end, I wish I could say the gameplay held up. While the game’s concept is amazing and fun, unfortunately, it’s also half-baked. There are some strong ideas: using dice to control random effects is a neat way to visualize the process, especially since you can add extra dice to raise your odds. However, I found myself almost never doing this because the effects didn't tend to matter enough to justify wasting dice. I really only spent dice raising the accuracy of inaccurate skills, which worked out pretty well. Crimson Shroud has no leveling system, so all customization comes from equipment and skills. The game throws you a ton of skills, but since the game is so short it feels like a lot of them are useless padding. For instance, barely any enemies in the game use Magic, but you can learn quite a few spells that try to stave off spells. If the game had been longer and introduced more enemy types, this system would feel necessary, but instead I felt like I spent a long time growing my characters only to never actually use them. There is also a crafting system, which I am getting more tired of in every single game I play that has one. It feels extra unnecessary here, as there are no enemies that justify attaching a spell to a piece of gear. The game does have a New Game+ that offers harder versions of enemies, but honestly, if they’re the same enemies with better stats, I don’t see the point in bothering.

I do have to whine about one part of the game in particular: there’s a key you have to find that you can only get as a random drop from an enemy that randomly spawns when killing some skeletons in a specific order. It took me 2.5 of the 5 hours I spent on Crimson Shroud getting this key to drop, and I had to look it up on a message board to find it. Fortunately, that’s the worst part of the game.

It may sound like I absolutely hated Crimson Shroud, but that’s not true. I just had high expectations that were initially teased but never satisfied, and if the game were better it could have been one of my favorites. The game is passable for its length (and I think worth the price on the eshop), but it’s a textbook example of a game that’s too short for its own good (the reverse case is more typical). You can’t dangle all those nachos in front of me and then deny me all the cheesy ones, Matsuno. Next time you have a bold idea for a game, please follow through with it.