Pinball and Role-Playing Games, Together at Last

Atlus

Rollers of the Realm is a brilliant idea: a mashup of pinball and RPG. And it almost works.

I’ve always wanted to enjoy videogame pinball a little more than I actually do. Pinball is fun. Playing pinball without having to spend quarters is more fun. But after I play a few games of videogame pinball, there’s nothing keeping me going, no meta-game. It’s like playing World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. over and over trying to get the highest score. Some people devote their lives to this sort of perfectionist tendency; I get bored and want to go play World 1-2.

Rollers of the Realm , released this week on Steam (reviewed), PlayStation 4, and PS Vita, solves this problem. (It runs into new ones along the way, but we’ll get to that.) The best actual physical pinball games have a fun metaphor overlaid on top of the ball-and-flippers mechanical parts. Being trapped in a carnival fun house, e.g. In the case of Rollers, you’re a rogue on a quest to fight evil villains and restore harmony to the kingdom, aided by a drunken knight, a wizened old crone, and generally the sort of people you’d find in an RPG party.

Instead of high scores, you rack up gold, experience and mana. The balls representing your characters have different attributes, which you can level up. The Knight’s ball is physically larger, but less agile (he responds less to tilting, that is). He can do massive damage to physical objects, so he can smash through a wooden wall (gaining access to new parts of the playfield) more handily than other characters. The Ranger has bows and arrows, so he can do damage to enemies even if you can’t quite knock the ball directly into them. Etc.

You progress through a variety of boards representing towns, sewers, dungeons, mines, crypts, and the like. These start simple but eventually have some more complicated designs, hiding keys and treasure chests that you have to access by performing specific skill shots. As you collect gold, you can buy new upgrades for each character that affect their damage output, effectiveness of their special attacks, and more.

In general, I had a lot of fun playing Rollers and would recommend it to anyone who begins salivating involuntarily at the phrase “pinball RPG.” The pinball mechanics are fun, chasing down treasure and navigating the clever boards adds another layer of depth, and progressing into more and more complicated levels is better on its face than just playing the same board over and over again.

Atlus

That said, it’s got some issues, particularly in the end game, where the ball goes off the rails (metaphorically speaking.)

If I ever used a special move, it was by accident. Your mana bar is used for two distinct purposes: Activating special moves like multiball or enhanced damage, and reviving downed characters. (When you drain a ball, that character is dead and you have to revive them.) Unless you are a pinball wizard of the kind told about in ancient song, you’re gonna lose balls. Having an extra ball in your pocket is so significantly more valuable than activating multiball that I simply didn’t even use one of the game’s more complex design features—except accidentally, because the A button is used for both shooting the ball off the plunger and activating the specials.

Getting extra levels is a grind. You can go back and replay other playfields for more gold and experience, but they don’t add any new challenges or bonuses—actually, if you’ve already opened the treasure chests, they’re empty now. So you just have to replay a less-rewarding version of the level, and you only get the rewards if you finish the whole thing. Gaining more experience and gold is a slow-going affair.

Going back and leveling up doesn’t really help with tricky challenges. Rollers starts out easy, but some of the levels get brutal. This isn’t bad per se, but some of the toughest ones come during a moment in the game where, for storyline reasons, it locks you away from being able to revisit old levels and grind. So just when you begin to think that you’d like to level up and maybe buy some more characters, you can’t.

The final stage of the game, I can’t even clear at this point. The last board seems set up deliberately to make the balls go down the drain as often as possible, and only one of your characters (again, for a storyline reason) can do any considerable damage against the final enemies. So if she goes down, it really doesn’t matter how powerful everyone else is. Again, I patiently went back and leveled up my crew, but raising them up just a single level was ridiculously grindy and had de minimis effect. Learning the ins and outs of the board was more important (but what I assume is the final board is locked behind two other challenges, so learning the final board is expensive, time-wise).

The description of the Monk character says that he is skilled in “Marital Arts.” I’m not sad this is in there, I’m sad they’ll probably patch it out after reading this.

Combining two disparate game genres is a difficult task, so it’s not shocking that Rollers of the Realm‘s pieces had to be jammed together a little imprecisely. But the idea is still solid, and the issues I bring up are only apparent if you’re already really into the game on some level.

I’d love to see a sequel that takes all this into account; pinball and RPG could be a match made in heaven but they might need to go to marriage counseling.