Virgo Vs The Zodiac - A sci-fi/fantasy JRPG inspired by Paper Mario, Mario & Luigi, and Mother.

I wanted to make a little spotlight thread on this upcoming game because I adore it already. Feel free to watch the trailer first if you have a particularly uncommon fear of text and images being stationary.

This is a game I'm very happy I clumsily stumbled upon! It's an incredibly cute, charming, fun, and humorous adventure that takes a lot of nods from Mario RPGs (RPG, Paper Mario, Mario & Luigi) and Mother in many ways. It's quirky, has a dashing visual style, and a bizarre yet fun sense of humor that fits right at home with the likes of Earthbound, Undertale, and more.


The concept is very interesting, hearkening back to some old Disgaea levels of villainy without getting too LOL XD RANDOM or meme-festy. You set out to dethrone the other rulers and usher in an age long past. You battle through workers union strikes, face off with samurai security guards, and even sabotage saboteurs who may or may not have the same idea as you. It felt more Futurama / Mother levels of humor to me than Internet/Reddit. With a pixelart art style that looks rather fluid in motion, it has a distinct sense of nostalgia behind it that seems right at home in the GBA era.

Some features from the Steam Page

• Unforgiving timed-actions combat where all conflicts are lethal unless you protect yourself; precise timed attacks and blocks will bring an end to heresy.
  
• Counter-Turn system: Any attack can be countered by a variety of equippable counter skills.
  
• Spare enemies and make friends!
  
• No random encounters: Battles fought are plot-relevant.
  
• Non-self insert and overly villainous Main Character.
  
• Unlikely friends and foes such as Goats, Save Dinosaurs and a Cookie Companion.

• Choices matter, multiple endings.
  
• Rewards through exploration: As you delve into the most heretical star clusters of the galaxy, you'll find a vast amount of explorable areas brimming with interactive objects. Many choices that will impact the game can be brought up through world interaction and exploration.
  
• Interact with different Zodiacs outside of the main quest within the Zodiac Memories.
  
• Crafting and upgrading a multitude of items shareable between your party members, SHMUP minigames and you can also ride in Alpacas!

So, what's combat like?
This is where it gets even more inspiration from the games mentioned in the title. Virgo Vs The Zodiac has a Turn-Based with Prompt style battle system that is found in games like Mario & Luigi, Paper Mario, and so on. It also has an active defense system and encourages you to defend with shields and counter your opponent whenever possible. Combat so far has been very fun with its own unique twist on a style of JRPG combat thats seemed lost for quite some time. The level of escalation with the prompts can get rather bizarre. Check a few screens below!

Virgo is a full-fledged JRPG made by a small team of 6-people. From the fig campaign, they creators have stated they're aiming for a 20~hour experience, though that may have been expanded upon. I've played the May 18 demo of the game recently, which doesn't have all the fancy features of the screens above but sold me on the world, characters, music, theme, and concept of the game. Its coming along quite well and should be releasing in early December.


The pixel art is beautiful and flows well, the sense of humor knocks and comments on capitalism and bureaucracy, the battle system is a refreshing take on turn-based combat, and the story sounds to be deliciously villainous without reveling in evil.

It's a very cool game that I'm excited for. I wanted to share what I found with you guys and girls. Hopefully it catches someones eye as it did mine, as I think it'll be a wonderful little gem for RPG fans - especially those with a long history with the genre.

►Demo here!◄
https://moonana.itch.io/virgovsthezodiac
Note - its the May 2018 demo which has the old UI and is not reflective of the new upgrades and changes, but its a great proof of concept and gives you a feel for the game!

Give it a look, heretics!

PSqueak said:

Is this game...trying to shit talk undertale?!

I dunno why but the portrait art rubs me the wrong way, but the in game sprites look cute.

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I doubt it! The creator(s) love Undertale!

ILikeFeet said:

I'm surprised the OP doesn't have a link to the demo

https://moonana.itch.io/virgovsthezodiac

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Knew I forgot something. Added! I did have to note that it's an older demo though. Still, it's what sold me on the game.

Dogui said:

Looks tons of fun. Loved the artstyle tho i think the cute avatars doesn't mix that well with the ingame stuff.



V Wtf is this btw? haha

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He is the best.

Update!

To paraphrase Nana's giant post on here:

Due to moving from RPG Maker to GameMaker, they had to rebuild the entire game from scratch. They were intending to release on Dec 4th with early access builds as well, but seems that's no longer the case due to how much work is going into finishing the game on the new software. All the new footage we've seen (trailers, etc) have been the GameMaker version.

That brings us to the bad news: The release will be delayed, for all the reasons exposed before. At first we thought of keeping with the date announced in the Crowdfunding Campaign of December 4th and release the game in Early Access. However it all seemed unfair to the Beta Backers who donated first to get access to early builds of the game. Other than that, a save system of something like a RPG such as Virgo Vs The Zodiac wouldn't work well with the early access system of Steam. Just imagine your save messing up every time the game is updated. That would be just bad. xD Unfortunately I didn't know that back then when I announced the date, and I didn't know the amount of hassle I would go through to learn the engine while developing the game. I can only blame my naiveness, honestly. Other than that, December isn't a good time to release games because of the Steam Sale that makes it harder for new games to be noticed with so many games on sale.

With that being clarified, I can say now that the game would most likely be released in the first half of 2019, around Q2. I apologize deeply and am extremely sad, I was even avoiding saying this here and avoiding social medias in general due to anxiety attacks <_< I'm sorry for that as well! For anyone who said their birthday was in the same day as the game's release, I apologize immensely, and please send me a message and I'll send you a card of Sagittarius wishing you a happy birthday. It's the only thing I can do now, to be honest. S O R R Y =(

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deepFlaw said:

Mhmm, the last time people compared a game's humor/writing to Earthbound (which I admittedly still have not played), it was Golf Story, and I got pretty annoyed about those comparisons when I played it due to how mean the writing ended up being. So I'm going to be a bit wary of such comparisons without getting a better impression of what it's actually like.

I'll definitely keep an eye out for it though; I'm definitely liking what I'm seeing.

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Earthbound is kind of the poster child for quirky, bizarre, dry, weird, or straight up avant-garde humor in rpgs usually. You should give it a look at some point, as I imagine we'll see many indie rpgs taking inspiration from it in many ways (including writing.) Undertale was one of the biggest, though it was admittedly its own thing.

NEW.
TRAILER.

This is what was supposed to be shown on the Kinda Funny Game Showcase, but this (along with a ton of other games) got stiffed and had their trailers cut to 5~10 seconds at best. :((