Webcomics Review: Adventurers!

Today we'll look at another webcomic that I read. This too is also video game related, but this one is actually hand drawned! Wow.

This is a comic about stereotypical video game RPG characters. The main two characters consists of a fighter who buys into all of the cliches and a wizard who poins out how dumb they all are.


Adventurers! by Mark Shallow




The Good

At one poin in the quest, a non-playable character tells the group that they have to collect all the elemental whatevers, but instead of the usual four elements, the npc hands over a periodic chart. Great gag.

The main villian is obsessed with lasers. There's one comic where he screams at a henchman that dares suggests a weapon without those.

The very obvious traitorous Spybot who the group just sorta accepts.

There were a couple jokes that made fun of one of my biggest pet peeve in RPGs, the EEEEEvil church. One comic showed the hero's reaction after hearing about a church and it was priceless given how horrible they're portrayed in games like Xenogears.

Evil pants.

It's hard to believe you can get a great gag from the phrase 'HA! Gorilla, right there!' but there you go.



The Bad


I wasn't a big fan of all the Eternion story line comics. I realized that the artist can't make the same joke after joke before burning out and needed something on-going, but I always wanted to skip these and go to the next RPG joke. I did like the final battle with the head Eternion guy, though.

Occasionally Mark arranges the speech bubbles in odd ways that will lead you to read the wrong bubble first. In multi-panel comics, sometimes you'll go left-to-right when you should go up-to-down or vice versa.




The Ugly

While rereading these, I had forgotten how poor the early comics looked compared to the latter set. They're not awful, but you can notice a huge difference between the early ones and the later ones.



The Rest

I once read some section where he mentioned his favorite RPGs. I think it was something like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI, and... Chrono Cross? What the hell!? His comic is great, but I question his taste in games.

I read a couple comics of Anti-Hero for Hire, the follow up comic by Mark. It's about some guy in the future who does hero-y stuff in an anti-hero way, I think. I couldn't get into it, probably because it wasn't video game related. Oh well. Maybe one day I'll revisit it, since it's been a long time since the comic started.



Summary

Again, if you don't care for video game RPGs, you won't care for this comic. (At least this one was hand-drawn.) Otherwise, great stuff.