Earthlock

Earthlock is an unpretentious RPG that fails to leave any sort of mark. Its story is basically non-existent, with paper-thin characters and a severe lack of tension and thematic purpose. Its dynamic combat system may be indeed dynamic and engaging, but it can’t save an otherwise forgettable title.

It’s a little difficult to write a plot summary for Earthlock because its narrative lacks focus mainly at the beginning. You could say that the protagonist is a young scavenger named Amon. He goes to find some medicine for his shark-faced uncle Benjo but finds a hogbunny named Gnart that makes him go somewhere else, where he finds someone else, and so on. When he finally returns to his uncle, Amon finds out that Benjo was abducted due to a precious stone they found searching the nearby ruins during the prologue.

One of the main problems is that, five hours in, the player still doesn’t know anything about the characters, which are not mysterious but bland. Someone says Amon is impulsive, and maybe they’re right. Who knows? The dialogues are utilitarian: characters are mostly silent, and when they finally decide to speak, they just say where they need to go or what they must do next: “We must go to the High Owl at the House of the Owl Tide, but I understand if you wish to see Benjo first,” a character says to Amon when they arrive at a big city. Party interaction usually boils down to either exposition or instructions.

Near the end, the player is not a single step closer to getting to know the characters, which all remain silent tropes. There’s the bookish coward type, the strong female warrior, the impulsive, immature boy, and so on. The game starts with Ive, a young female officer, as she defies her father’s orders to stay put while her colleagues go on a mission. Her troubled relationship with her father works as a microcosm of the game’s narrative problems: it’s presented and then utterly ignored. Development is a foreign concept to Earthlock: characters never go through any sort of narrative arc, while themes are a rare find in a game that has nothing to say. After going through a later dungeon – the usual sewer level – this is the party interaction at the end:

Ive: “Taika says this is it. This is where they took the core.“

Gnart: “Can we hurry up. The stench sits inside my nostrils now. I’ll need to smell Lysrose spice to get this stink off me.”

Amon: “Stop moaning, Gnart. Just think of it as a long-lasting fart.“

Gnart: “Ewww!“

Ive: “It was me. Sorry.“

A fart joke. That is it: after a whole dungeon, the characters only interact to come up with a fart joke. It’s evident that the game doesn’t care too much about its own characters: it’s not difficult to find a lack of polish concerning them everywhere in the game. Taika, Ive’s tiger-like pet, usually just growls in her dialogues, but if you are controlling Taika as the main avatar, she says the same thing as her other companions, suddenly making her a very eloquent animal. When arriving at the final area, the tiger says “Grrrrrr!”, and after complimented at the end, she says “Awooooooo!” But when getting near a docked airship, the tiger says “I wonder what happened to this MonoScout. Heard one got hit bad by lightning some moonruns ago” – the very same thing any other character says if they are the chosen avatar.

The villains, meanwhile, are random monsters that speak villainy things like “Silence! Insolent fools! Gobking will teach you! Warriors of the King, attack!” The main antagonist, for example, wants to awake an ancient dark power… just because. There is nothing in Earthlock’s narrative that is engaging or interesting: despite being an RPG, its story is just a poor pretext for the gameplay.

The game’s combat system works well enough, though. You control four characters with four skills, which can change alongside that character’s “stance” during battle. Amon, for example, has four melee skills in his default stance and four ranged ones in his optional stance. Changing stances takes a turn. Skills consume energy and just a bit is recovered after the end of each turn, if the character doesn’t use it to rest.

This means that battles can be quite dynamic, with stances allowing the player to adapt to the requirements of a specific battle during that actual battle – instead of what happens in Final Fantasy IX, for example, where you either prepare for a boss battle beforehand or die. The exception is some of the late boss encounters, in which Taika is not just recommended, but required to win, as she can cast the necessary elemental protection on other party members. If she’s underleveled, though, too bad. And to make matters worse, Taika’s necessary elemental skills are acquired by analyzing enemies – she’s basically a blue mage tiger – and, if the player gets to the later parts of the game without those skills, even an underleveled Taika is useless, and they will have a hard time progressing.

Character progression is a bit different in Earthlock. Characters get experience points and level up as usual, but skills and significant stat changes are unlocked by what the game call Talent Points, which, in turn, are acquired by leveling up or by bonding with other party members. Bonding means that you must put two characters to fight alongside in battle. Since the bond level only goes to level 5, the game encourages the player to keep changing the members of the party – and their position in the party – frequently so that they can gain talent points faster by bonding with new partners. Bonding, therefore, makes the prospect of an underleveled Taika less likely, but it’s still an irksome problem.

Speaking of problems, the side activities are terrible. Ranged attacks need ammo and this ammo is crafted with plants that you cultivate in your garden. So, to have enough ammo you have to waste time watering those plants and waiting for them to become ready for harvesting. By the end of the game, a player usually has ten to fifteen plants to keep watering and harvesting, making ranged attacks a cumbersome effort. Sidequests are basically fetch-quests and have no story tied to them, being the worst thing the genre has to offer. You can also buy treasure maps, but the rewards are irrelevant. You also rarely have the option to buy new equipment since most are acquired by crafting them from a rare recipe.

Presentation-wise, Earthlock is decent. The art style pops up by using bold, vibrant colors, although the scenery quickly grows repetitive: there’s the desert area, the swamp area, and the frozen area, with only two cities in the entire game. The absence of character portraits during cutscenes is also felt since they could have given some personality to Earthlock’s bland characters. Finally, the soundtrack, albeit repetitive, is much more memorable than anything else in the game.

Earthlock is an unremarkable game, with a terribly underwhelming story, but a decent combat system. It lays the groundwork for a promising RPG, but forgets to build anything on top of it.

November 08, 2019.