The mean streets of New Koza are no place for weak souls. Men are killed in the streets every day and what isn’t run by the Yakuza is run by the Russian mafia. Also, there’s a hip-hop dance club run by two anime girls who are trying to uncover a deep state secret in the depths of the central tower, of which New Koza was built. Orangeblood is centered around our protagonist, Vanilla. Vanilla is a recently released prisoner given a job by the CIA to uncover those secrets. Once in New Koza, she meets up with Machiko, a DJ with big aspirations. Through the story, she manages to recruit two other girls, Jackie and Yazawa who help Vanilla on her quest to get to the bottom of the central tower and discover what secret lies within.
Orangeblood
Developer: Grayfax Software
Price: $19.99 USD
Platform: PC(Reviewed)
MonsterVine was supplied with a STEAM code for review.
Most of the people in New Koza don’t look like the main cast. Largely, NPCs that aren’t story NPCs look rather normal and humdrum in design. The juxtaposition of a group of anime girls running around in a sea of normal-looking people isn’t as bombastic as one would hope. While that does very little to take away from the art style, it’s one of the cracks in the game’s facade that draws you in to look deeper. The entire game has a set of filters you can swap through in the settings menu that changes the hues and color palate of Orangeblood. Going so far as to allow you to play in grayscale, Orangeblood’s variety of filters is an unusual setting for a game to offer.
Even more unusual when you consider the lack of a fullscreen option, resolution options, or even a lot of basic steam functionality that needs to be hacked in, in order to be used. While this is an RPG Maker game, one would expect some of that functionality to be built into the game, especially one with a full release.
As a turn-based JRPG it’s fairly standard in how combat plays out. Agility/speed effects when each character attacks and you can either use your gun to shoot/reload or a special ability. SP is gained when you either attack or are attacked. There were quite a few things that set it apart though, like Machiko starting every round with a boom box on her shoulders, blasting out a song that either healed the party or gave everyone an SP bump. Some of the combos you could build up were absolutely devastating, like Jackie’s ability to taunt, up her critical hit chance, then throw on a big dodge/counter buff. Unfortunately, the disparity in power between regular enemies and boss enemies usually resulted in those combos not paying off. Either the enemy would be killed/shocked/frozen before they could attack my team or, in the case of boss enemies, their attacks hit random team members and ignore taunt.
In fact, that was a consistent problem with the design of Orangeblood. I found the balance was pretty far off. I’d go into a boss fight and just trip over myself trying to win and die, come back at the same level, and completely dominate. Orangeblood RNGs hard. There’s even a dungeon towards the end where you’re fighting level 20 – 25 enemies and you go down a single floor and every enemy is level 30, and level-ups aren’t frequent enough to keep up with that. In fact, my highest level teammates were level 27 by the time I beat the game and had been fighting level 30 enemies for at least four levels. While frustrating, it’s not the most frustrating thing about Orangeblood.
Opting to use randomized loot boxes as the primary method of giving weapons and armor, you’ll gain a LOT of weapons over the course of the game, and many of them are useless. As you’d traverse dungeons in New Koza you’d find loot boxes that had to be opened with keys you’d get from killing enemies. Novel for JRPGs but it really wasn’t conducive to the type of gameplay experienced. Worst of all, the auto-equip function seemed to favor straight damage over any of the other stats. I’m not sure if this is intentional or not but the first few times I auto-equipped and found myself completely crippled in battle. Auto-equip sounds like a no-brainer in a game that gives you WAY too much gear. Luckily, there are sorting options on the menu, a feature that a lot of modern games don’t even have. Once I figured out what each weapon style did and how to determine its worth, the game went a lot smoother.
While the art style is fairly superb, a lack of resolution options means you’ll either be playing in a tiny window or stretching everything out to fullscreen. This is extremely disappointing, some of the styles in Orangeblood is very good and thematic but is lost in trying to make it big enough to appreciate. Orangeblood has a lot of little things that really stuck out to make sure it never achieved greatness. Which, truly, is the bane of a lot of smaller games. Resources need to be put in place somewhere and sometimes that results in lackluster efforts in other areas. Unfortunately, I think Orangeblood was trying to nail the style and music so hard that they put some of the gameplay and design on the back burner.
And it should be noted that the soundtrack is quite good as well as thematic. For the most part, the hip hop beats were highly enjoyable. There are a few locations I would intentionally go to if I knew I had to tab out of the game and do something else because it was great to have on in the background. Likewise, even the non-hip hop tracks were quite good. Walking into areas that weren’t necessarily on the theme would still have tracks that were not only enjoyable to listen to but also matched the settings themselves.
There is a seed of something great in Orangeblood. It may not be in the gameplay or story but it’s there in the art and music. Unfortunately, Orangeblood has some technical hurdles to get over in order to let this game shine. It should be noted that the developers, Grayfax Software and PLAYISM, are working on resolving these issues quickly. Since I’ve been playing and reviewing Orangeblood they’ve released several updates fixing and patching the game. Based on the steam page it looks like they’re updating every three to four days.
The Final Word
Orangeblood feels like a great game mired by small technical issues and has a short road to being an easy recommendation. With the developers still working on and releasing updates for the game regularly, Orangeblood could be a great pick-up for the turn-based JRPG gamer that’s looking for something off the beaten path.
MonsterVine Review Score: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
