Mai-HiME the RPG: Episode 2

Making an RPG is an arduous task. Before even opening RPG Maker, you may find yourself spending hours in a graphics program trying to make the perfect sprite, tileset, animation or battle graphic. Once that is complete, you have to load your game project and start making some area maps, all the while trying to ensure that they don’t look completely awful (map-making is an art, and I’m sad to say it’s one I seem to lack). After that comes event creation, in which it takes half a page of instructions just to get your party to walk across the map and talk to someone; with that in place, you can move onto battles, and the tedious task of deciding which monster to have, how strong they should be, what abilities everyone should have, and what items they should drop.

Finally, once you have slaved over your game for hours, the time comes to playtest it, at which point you discover that nothing works in the way you intended it to, and that you’ll have to spend another three hours tweaking everything so that it does. By the time everything is perfected, you’ll have spent the entire day at the computer, with about one minute’s worth of game to show for it.

Haruka gives Mai a grilling at the student council room, but Reito tries to calm things down. I only noticed on my second viewing how often Reito seems to talk about tea.

Mai meets her classmates.

I never really understood why Takumi thought wandering around a suspicious-looking forest would take him to Mai.

My plan for a ‘Takumi drops his pills’ event was abandoned due to lack of pillbox sprite.

Mai prepares to fight her first Orphan. I finally learned how to use ‘extract foreground objects’ in GIMP to save myself hours of work when extracting a single item from an image.

I don’t yet have a ‘Takumi downed’ sprite, but it’s something I may go back and add later.