Here at Operation Rainfall, we like to inform our readers of the latest in niche and Japanese games, including some hidden gems you may not have heard about yet. In this tradition, our own Josh Speer has been doing a fantastic job with his Crowdfunding Spotlight series, which I’ll be contributing to with this piece. Today, I’d like to shine the spotlight on a new game in development by CooCooSqueaky, a promising looking turn-based RPG game calles Tears of Avia.
What makes Tears of Avia stand out is the gorgeous art of its character designs, which are illustrated by Pinax, who has worked on the manga for Aldnoah.Zero and Culture Japan. It also features a story that changes depending on who the player brings with them into their party. The characters you take along with you will react differently to each other, as well as prompt the player into taking sidequests, rather than the traditional method of taking jobs from NPCs. Your party can get along just fine, or grow distrustful and resentful of each other, depending on what decisions the player makes in the story. This also adds to its replay value, so you may get a different experience in each run. In short, this is a skill-based Western-styled RPG with an anime look that emphasizes story and character development, putting interpersonal relationships and a branching storyline at the forefront of the experience. It also has the kind of over-the-top attack animations we’re used to seeing from Japanese RPGs, so you get the best of both worlds.
Tears of Avia also wants you to play around with and try on different character builds. Like the old Dungeons & Dragons games, you can have your characters specialize into performing specific duties, such as playing a support or direct damage role, debuffing or healing as needed. Every class has a unique skill they can make use of, and clever players can really exploit that to their advantage with a proper battle strategy. In addition to this, there are weapon skills which you get simply by equipping them onto your characters. In total, you can have 5 skills from choosing branching character traits, and 3 from your weapon, so you can define exactly what you want your characters to do.
At the time of this writing, Tears of Avia has raised over $36,000 on its way to its $105,612 goal, with 14 days left on the campaign. As always, if you wish to contribute, be aware of the risks and challenges that are involved with backing a project like this. For their part, I think the development team has done a good job of explaining and outlining the costs involved in making a game like this, but I will leave it to you guys to decide for yourselves whether this is something you’d like to support.
For more information, and details about backer tiers and stretch goals, you can visit Tears of Avia’s Kickstarter campaign site.
