Being a huge fan of the Shin Megami Tensei series, i got a huge smile on my face when I saw screens of Rhyme’s wonderful work in progress (with KreadEX and Karsuman doing the dev work), fracture over at RPGmaker.net. Even if you’re not a SMT fan (and why not?) the game is worth a look, especially if you just so happen to love old-school first person dungeon crawling in the Wizardry vein (but with a more modern twist).

In the tried and true MegaTen tradition, things are a bit cryptic in the beginning as your high school age party is introduced one by one as you walk though a series of brightly lit hallways, but once you get down to that first basement and the random battles begin, things get nice and hard for the unprepared. Try and rush too much through this one and you’ll be chewing on your keyboard, especially if you chose one of the harder difficulty settings.

Gameplay is all random battles and turn-based bliss and as usual, keeping an eye on your party’s health, leveling up appropriately and using the proper skills against your foes is crucial. The cool thing for me was it didn’t take me long to feel I was playing a SMT side story of sorts, as there are a lot of similarities here that are pretty well done so far.  Of course, you also get a few typos and grammar issues that will hopefully be ironed out before this gets released (par for the course it seems for these projects). I think some of the text glitching is intentional at the beginning, but I still caught a few misspellings and pesky punctuation issues here and there. Not to be a total jerk about it, but what can I say? I had too many good teachers when I was growing up.  I’m just trying to pass some of that on before English becomes even more of a sprawl of scrawl than it’s turned into over this past decade or so.

Visually, the art assets for the backgrounds are solid, while character portraits and (hopefully) monsters need to be polished up and/or replaced with new ones. One quirk about using any version of RPG Maker (or perhaps, one quirk I happen to have picked up because I play too many RPGM games) is the SAME monster types are often reused in game after game, which can get boring. I’d love to see the project get an asset boost at some point (but not any sprite-ripping from previous SMT games, as that would be a wee bit too obvious for my tastes. Granted, it’s a hell of a lot of work to whip up custom sprites for what’s looking to be an extensive bestiary (and do all that work for free!), but this would make a really good demo into an even better game in the end.

Other than that, I’m really liking what I’ve seen and played so far. The story (well, what’s revealed) is mysterious and makes you want to know what’s around that next corner (more RTP monsters!), the first-person gameplay is vastly refreshing over the usual Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest-styled battles common to these fan games and overall, fracture is looking like a keeper I’ll sink many more hours into once it’s completed. Did I mention it’s pretty long for a mere demo? No? Well it is! Go check it out and prepare to get hooked in for as long as your computer is turned on…