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RPG Time: The Legend of Wright (Switch) Review

by Mike Burgess - October 6, 2022, 12:51 pm EDT
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Is it RPG Time yet?

While the acronym is in the name, I wouldn't exactly call RPG Time: The Legend of Wright an RPG in the traditional sense. If anything it’s more like a point-and-click adventure game with some light role-playing elements. However, the way Legend of Wright portrays this adventure through a completely hand-drawn notebook is delightfully creative and full of memorable moments that make it feel like a grand adventure you can enjoy with the family.

You hear the dinging of a bell marking the end of the school day. Your friend Kenta comes up to you and asks now that the day is over, what do you want to do for the rest of the day? Kenta reveals The Legend of Wright, the RPG storybook he’s created, and hopes you’ll give it a go. With your only other option being playing sports, the choice was easy for me as someone with little hand-eye coordination. Kenta pulls out all the stops for this adventure he’s created. Each page of the adventure is a wonderfully hand-drawn scene that you can navigate and interact with. Some are linear paths you walk around; others can be giant mazes or turn-based battles where you’ll strike enemies with your powerful blade, which is actually just a pencil. Kenta pulls out an MP3 player that acts as the game's soundtrack. He has also created cardboard cut-outs of button prompts and even made an entire diorama of props that you can navigate and that act as your world map and pause menu.

Now that the adventure has begun, you take to the role of Wright, a hero in training in the midst of a princess being captured by the evil demon lord Dethgawd. Despite your initial efforts, Dethgawd takes the princess and you need to save her. While this story is absolutely one of the most repeated narrative arcs there’s ever been, Wright’s adventure ends up being quite a bizarre and imaginative one. For instance, the first chapter has you taking down a group of moles that love baseball and e-sports. It’s a bizarre combo but when you have an Inception-style gameplay sequence where you’re sucked into a video game that’s inside an RPG storybook that’s also a video game you’re playing, it really sets the tone for how absurd and silly the adventure is that Kenta is cooking up for you.

As wild as The Legend of Wright can get, I think the point-and-click adventure game aspects can hamper some of the fun moments that happen. There’s no spoken dialogue; it's all text bubbles that are overly abundant and can halt a lot of progress. After the first chapter, the game opens up more by allowing you to explore towns and move from different pages; however, sometimes it feels like you’re stopped in your tracks by text whenever you take five steps. This could be due to introducing some obvious mechanics, which in most cases are simple ones like how to interact with an NPC. It can also be a little mini-game that most of the time doesn't really have any benefit other than interacting with other characters. I do appreciate that when you get these dialogue bubbles you can see Kenta wearing a little headband with the face of the character he is portraying. But as you get deeper into the game, the constant pop-ups really started to grate on me, and RPG Time being only a six or seven-hour game, it was a bummer to feel like I was constantly being slowed down in certain parts of it.

What's unfortunate is that a lot of the RPG elements feel more in service to the story progression rather than gameplay. Most of the levels ups and weapons you acquire are tied to story moments, and you aren't really allocating stats. All the battles really feel more like a puzzle rather than a fight even when it comes to major boss encounters. The first boss you fight is a giant cyclops and all you need to do is attack his eye three times. However, once you strike the eye once, it realizes this and closes its eye. From there, Kenta just tells you to study the surroundings of the battlefield and figure out how to get his eye open to reveal his weak point and strike it. So the turn-based battles really just return to the point-and-click trope of finding the right thing to interact with, and if you don't, you fail. While there is some entertaining dialogue in some of these sequences, it really doesn't feel like an RPG at all and I just hoped with a game that has that acronym in its own name there would have been more stuff for me to engage with when it came to the gameplay side.

As this made-up storybook was created by a young child, I feel that RPG Time: The Legend of Wright is intended for a younger audience or as something a parent can use to introduce video games to their kids. There are even a few times where it recommends you play with an adult. But with the overly hand-holdy approach to some of the gameplay, I fear a lot of younger kids would quickly lose interest when there’s a lot of downtime due to control being taken away or a lot of dialogue. I still think the game has some fun moments that made me chuckle and features a lot of great hand-drawn art, but I find it hard to recommend this as the best option for the first game for a young child.

Summary

Pros
  • Attractive art style
  • Memorable moments
Cons
  • RPG elements are non-existent
  • Very hand-holdy

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Game Profile

Genre RPG
Developer
Players1

Worldwide Releases

na: RPG Time: The Legend of Wright
Release Aug 18, 2022
RatingEveryone 10+
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