So I Replayed Hylics…

There’s something about the RPG Maker engine that attracts some incredibly talented weirdos. And I mean that in the best way possible.

Here’s my elevator pitch for Hylics:

That really quiet kid who sat in the back of your homeroom made an old school Final Fantasy game.

Hylics will quickly attract many a gamer simply by its looks. Featuring tons of colors, bizarre character designs, interesting first-person animations for combat, and most notably- it’s claymation art style. Couple those things with an equally unique soundtrack composed mostly of laid back acoustic tracks, and you’ve got something incomparable to other games.

Hylics straddles the line between a video game and an “experience”. Even the description of Steam reads: “Hylics is a recreational program with light JRPG elements.” It’s trying to warn you that if you’re expecting a traditional JRPG in terms of narrative, lore, and character dynamics- you’re out of luck.

You won’t really understand much of Hylics. The game gives us one simple goal; find Gibby in the Lunar Fortress and destroy him. That’s all we really get in terms of plot. But is that really any different than the first Final Fantasy or Dragon Quests? At least in those games you get additional information from NPCs. In Hylics, that’s not the case; most NPCs spew out an assortment of randomly generated dialogue, something I’m not a huge fan of. You’ll read tons of abstract sentences like “The ocean is a behavior.” Of course, I understand that this is only meant to boost that bizarre haze that Hylics so confidently puts its players through.

The amount of effort to physically build each character in the game is astounding and fun to behold.

Much like with Planet of Lana, one of Hylics’ strongest attributes is its short runtime (2.5-4 hours). If Hylics was asking its player to be in this colorful confusion for 10-15 hours, it could be exhausting. Hylics 2 is much longer, but it’s also much beefier in terms of gameplay and polish.

That’s not to say the original isn’t pretty polished. In fact, it has some fun progression ideas I would like to see in more RPGs. When you defeat an enemy, you get their “meat”. You can take this meat back to a meat grinder to increase your maximum health. As far as I know, there’s no way to respawn dead enemies and endlessly grind meat. This incentivizes you not to run away from enemies and to take them down while you can.

After finished Hylics for my second time, I can safely say I really like it. It can refreshing to play something like this especially since most games keep choosing the same handful of settings: Fantasy, Sci-fi, Modern, Post-apocalyptic. I remember only getting about 2-3 hours into Hylics 2, so I’m very excited to give that a full playthrough soon.

If you’re a JRPG fan tired of the same tropes, or a gamer who wants to experience something they haven’t before- try Hylics!