KEMCO Made a Lot of RPGs...and I'm the Maniac Who Played Most of Them

[Beowulf]

This thread is brought to you by the KEMCO RPG Celebratory Bundle, which is offering 50 of their games on XBox for $200. ($4/game is actually pretty reasonable for PC versions. Their regular price on Steam is in the $15-20 range, and nobody should pay that. It's about half the regular price of the Android versions.)

The thing is, those 50 games aren't even their entire catalogue! I played some 46 of their games between 2014 and 2020, and I made myself a log spreadsheet (because me) that had 77 games by four main developers. I wrote reviews for the vast majority of the games I played (even the dozen that I didn't finish), and because one (1) person suggested they'd like to read them, you'll all get to enjoy them.

 

[Beowulf]

End of Aspiration
Played in 2014. Published by WorldWideSoftware.

The Mohawk-wearing Mafia are apparently searching for Atomijems, but Eril, the Azure Sorceress, is hot on their trail. She uses an Accelerator to fight, but it will destroy her body over time. She’s stealing from the Mafia to support the orphanage where she grew up, which is under threat from the greedy landowner Amrod. Meanwhile, a young trader named Yute—who has daddy issues—is traveling the world, trading goods and exercising his chronic hero syndrome by rescuing girls from monsters. Of course they meet up, and end up fighting the Mafia together, hunting down details of the mysterious Boss who has a plan for the powerful Golems the Mafia has uncovered in ruins of ancient civilizations.

This makes no bones about being a bog-standard jrpg that looks like it was built with RPGMaker. Turn-based battles, standard leveling, virtual touchpad controls, standard fantasy tropes and trappings. You can buy points in-game and use them to unlock stat-up items and bonus dungeons, but they apparently aren’t necessary to complete the game. I get the impress this is pretty standard for the shovelware rpgs that KEMCO (and others) put out on Android.

That said, it’s not bad. Not great, certainly forgettable, but middle-of-the-road for playability. The dungeons and the combats run fast and smooth, there are evolving battle options, there’s some variety to the monsters and events, levels come quickly and easily. The dungeons are generally space-filling paths, with switches, damage tiles and the occasional hidden passage being the only puzzle elements. But the random encounters rate is reasonable and very few of the dungeons feel like they outstay their welcome.

There’s a detailed wiki that hosts the game’s walkthrough and details.

The Familiar Spirits (read: limit breaks) are what break the game’s difficulty, which would spike pretty high in the early-to-mid game, otherwise. They provide hit-all physical and magical attacks, buffs and healing long before those are otherwise available; and the HP and MP healing they provide mean you virtually never need to dip into your item stash. After that, “Dance of Confusion” is the most useful skill in the game, bar none. It hits the entire enemy party with a physical attack and causes confusion fairly reliably. It’s cheap enough to use in random battles (and you can just use familiar spirit to restore MP anyway), and most bosses aren’t immune to it.

Status effects in general are useful/irritating, because they’re often effective. Poison lasts after battle (when even KO doesn’t). Confusion carries a high risk of hitting your allies unless you defend every turn. The final dungeon features enemies that can hit your whole party with status attacks, and hoo-boy, that’s no fun.

And the plot is lackluster, feeling both a little big for its britches (given that the game lasts about 6 hours without the pay-to-play content) and a little under-developed. Several characters have subplots that are only vaguely touched on and hastily resolved in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it dialogue. You can tell this didn’t get an editor’s guiding hand, though I didn’t spot any typos, at least.

(Though I will complain that, if you’ve got a fantasy world and need a gang name, don’t call them “the Mafia”. That’s a real thing with real connotations attached to the word, and it broke my suspension of disbelief so hard. They clearly are not Italian or trying to use any stereotypes of Mafioso, real or imagined. It’s not so hard, you can make up one goddamn name. Call them the Makuzus or the Melmacs or Team fucking Rocket.)

Overall: It’s free. It’s satisfying in a “monsters get beaten and numbers go up” sort of way. It’s not bad, but it’s nothing special.

 

[Beowulf]

Eclipse of Illusion
KEMCO Humble Bundle #1. Played in 2015. Published by WorldWideSoftware.

While the KEMCO games tend to be middling shovelware jrpgs, I had a hard time resisting 7 of them for $6, which means I’ll never want for jrpgs on my tablet again. This was the first one I played, chosen mostly at random.

This is shockingly well-designed, actually. Smooth action with decent controls; a class system that apes FF5 and FFT but works just fine and includes such niceties as a “best equipment” button; multiple difficulty modes; a turn-order bar in battles and a useful auto-battle button; and a really good automap.

The big gimmick is that your characters get “summoned armor” which they can activate in combat, similar to the gears in the first Xenosaga game—it doesn’t change the scale of the battle or any of the mechanics, but it means that instead of your sword or bow, you can pepper the zombie bears with missiles instead. And while I used the armor mostly to toast bosses, the difficulty curve is such that you can use your armor for random battles and/or fight bosses on foot, if you’d like.

The Humble Bundle version of this got rid of the paid-unlockables; instead you get the points for unlockables by completing achievements and as random drops in battle. These allow you to get two bonus dungeons (that scale to whatever level you do them at) and a bonus character; or access to endgame accessories early on.

The game takes about 10 hours to do everything, which feels pretty much right for what it is. (Honestly, I don’t think most games, but particularly portable rpgs, need to fill the amount of time they do.) Levels and new powers come fast and easily, and the game never stops you and forces you to grind or find a particular class setup to get through an area. (One bit of advice: Get the druid’s “Observe” skill on someone as soon as you get it; it’s how you learn this game’s enemy skills, which include several nice buffs and most of the status ailment spells.)

And the story? Eh, it’s okay. It’s forgettable, with the usual bits of question of identity and power of friendship. And a bit with a town that was destroyed when someone in summoned armor went out of control, which was totally cribbed from Xenogears, but lacks any of the gravitas or emotional impact of that game.

Overall: It’s a pleasant but forgettable little portable jrpg experience. The jrpg equivalent of a trashy paperback romance novel, if you will.

 

[Beowulf]

Aeon Avenger
KEMCO Humble Bundle #2. Played in 2015. Published by WorldWideSoftware.

A secretive bloodline of time-travelers. A wicked man in black who controls monsters. Gods who are mysteriously absent. And as formulaic a game as one could find.

This is another standard KEMCO shovelware jrpg. This one stood out to me because it involves time travel, and I love a good time travel story (even though, as I suspected, this one wasn’t so great).

There’s a brief prologue with your time traveler Rean; followed by jumping to Lake, your real main character, a slacker who lives with him family in a small podunk village and has no real ambitions. Then a mysterious man in black marches an army of monsters in, kills everybody, and burns the town. Lake vows revenge, of course, and that vow makes up the majority of his character. At this point, you travel through a succession of mostly-linear dungeons in a sequence of fetch quests, always running just behind the man in black, collecting party members and killing roadblock bosses. Eventually, you discover the identity of the man in black* and kill a god.

The interface is a little rougher and a little clunkier than <i>Eclipse of Illusion</i>, though it still has a decently smooth battle system and nice mini-map.

This was clearly translated into English (presumably from Japanese) and the translation isn’t the greatest. There are place names that are stupidly literal (“The box of light and sun” is an area where you randomly rest after a battle), many literal item names (“Potion of total magical healing”), and some clunky descriptions and dialogue (“Lake became POISON”). This smacks of a game that was rushed out but could have been far better.

Special skills are done in a materia-style manner, granted by “bits” that attach to slots in your weapons. Any character can use any weapon, but each has a preference for a certain type, and enemies are weak or strong against each weapon type, so you sometimes want to have characters using non-preferred weapons so as to hit weak points. (There don’t seem to be any elemental attacks or weaknesses, though.)

Unfortunately, the innovations end there. Each “dungeon” area features two new monsters in half a dozen different formations, followed by an out-of-nowhere boss. (There’s only one major antagonist, and you spend 90% of the game just hearing about the destruction he’s causing in the background.) For that matter, bosses get hit-all attacks long before you get hit-all healing, and every one of them is just a boatload of HP and an endurance match.

The time-travel aspect is also underused, but I expected that. It reminds me of <i>Final Fantasy Legend 3</i>, in that you can pass back and forth and there are a few minor plot points involving things taking “the slow path,” but in general you just go to each era and do your thing there, without much need to return to earlier ones. (The fact that the eras are millennia apart, so the world has changed significantly and the only recurring characters are other time-travelers, impacts this as well.) There are basically no sidequests, the character customization is limited because bit slots max out at 9-12 (depending on the weapon) and many bits use 2-3 slots, and the battles get tedious.

* It’s Lake from an alternate timeline. The god of time pulled him out of time before he met the rest of the party and learned the power of friendship, and that version of him was consumed with anger and thirst for vengeance. Lake defeats himself in a pocket of space-time—offstage!—and reunites the party to defeat the god of time. I actually liked this twist because it did figure into the setup of the game and was foreshadowed in a bunch of places, so kudos to that.

Overall: Meh. It had a few interesting ideas and, at 9 hours of gameplay, didn’t really wear out its welcome; but the battles got boring and the plot was very one-note. It was mediocre; not good, but not terrible, either.

 

[Octopus Prime]

I was just poking through the list of KEMCO RPGs in the eShop and while none of them have titles that remain in the mind the moment I stop looking at them, there were a few that made me go “Oh, that looks… pretty neat, actually”

 

[Torzelbaum]

I wrote reviews for the vast majority of the games I played (even the dozen that I didn't finish), and because one (1) person suggested they'd like to read them, you'll all get to enjoy them.

I trust Octo's judgment.

 

[Octopus Prime]

Me too!

 

[Mogri]

How is it that I haven't even heard of any of these?

 

[Octopus Prime]

Kemco produces them at a ludicrous rate and they all look pretty interchangeable

 

[RT-55J]

Not all heroes wear capes.

(...though I guess you're wearing a cape so, uh, yeah.)

Looking forward to the rest of this thread.

 

[Beowulf]

Eve of the Genesis
KEMCO Humble Bundle #3. Played in 2016. Published by WorldWideSoftware.

Thousands of years ago, mankind was ruled by an empire of machines. With the help of the elves, they defeated their oppressors and banished the machine to the land of darkness. Now, Effat and his friend Harty discover that the machines have returned.

More grinding at the outset (and in general) than the other KEMCO games: The very first dungeon has zombies that always inflict poison, and antidotes are in short supply. The overall difficulty level is definitely higher—other KEMCO games have required little or no grinding; this required a decent amount. I was regularly arriving at towns without enough cash to buy the newest upgraded equipment and skills, and not being able to tackle the next dungeon without them.

They made an effort to have a few dungeon gimmicks: Caves and similar places are dark unless you light the candles you find along the way; switches to press to open doors; that sort of thing. The problem is, there aren’t actually that many different locations and the length of the game is artificially padded by the grinding.

Also of note, the battle speed is slow (even when set to “fast”) and random enemies have too many hit points.

But I think the real kicker for me was that you need gems to upgrade your skills, which are in limited supply—and you can’t actually see any of the skill trees. So you end up blind guessing for what it makes sense to upgrade. You can use store-bought gems to change hit-one into hit-all attacks and vice-versa, but that’s just another money sink when you’re already cash-strapped constantly.

Combine that with the fact that the plot is a trope-y retread of better games about monster machines coming back for humanity (cough Wild ARMS cough), and I can’t say this is worth my time.

Overall: I actually started this, got bored with it, and played all of Symphony of the Origin before finishing my review. I didn’t want to go back because I wasn’t actually enjoying it. It effectively cost me a buck—I’m not finishing it.

 

[Beowulf]

Symphony of the Origin
KEMCO Humble Bundle #4. Played in 2016. Published by WorldWideSoftware.

When the Evils of the Earth-depths emerge and wage war against the humans, elves and dwarves of the surface lands, a weapon is needed to turn the tide. That weapon turns out to be an ancient golem, re-awakened by an obvious jrpg protagonist unlikely hero and turned toward noble ends.

It’s an attempt at jrpg buddy comedy, starring a bitter solider whose parents were killed by the “Evils of the Earth-depths” and an amnesiac golem uncertain about his opinions of humanity. The dialogue is trying to be funnier than it is—I’m not sure if it’s bad translation or bad writing to begin with—but it’s a well-done game. Over the course of seven hours of gameplay, it manages to keep the plot fairly focused and without insane levels of escalation, and actually build in enough characterization that you can accept the characters’ relationship at the end.

Controls are great, logical and offer a lot of options. Graphics are lovely for the genre. The mini-map is very nice, and it shows monsters but not treasure chests, which preserves some need to explore. Dungeon design isn’t amazing, but there are at least some mazes and multi-level structures rather than just straight lines.

There’s no MP, just a stamina gauge that also functions as the ATB bar and seems to reduce more when you use some skills. There’s a “limit” bar that seems to be shared by the party and fills as you attack and can be used on special attacks. Presumably related to this, the auto-battle uses all of your attacks, not just plain fighting.

Each person has three equipment slots that technically make up their weapon. The main part is upgradeable, contains skills that you can learn by battling, and determines attack power. The other two parts add special abilities to your attacks, such as inflicting poison or stealing items.

Each fight you win nets a SOP, which can be traded for “prizes” (that I suspect would be in-app purchases in a different version of the game) including high-end potions, helpful equipment, bonus scenes and bonus dungeons. I didn’t go out of my way to grind, just fighting everything in my way, and I was drowning in SOP by the latter half of the game, having unlocked all of the special events and locations and also a few handy items. I ended up trading a bunch of them for money to buy more upgrades.

Especially if you take advantage of the SOP bonuses (and there’s no reason not to), the game is very easy. The majority of non-boss battles can be won on Auto without worrying about using any consumables; in-battle healing is effectively unlimited; and the cap for levels and weapon strengthening is significantly higher than you need to beat the final boss or bonus bosses. If you really want to get into strategy, there’s a three-person combo that reduces the enemy’s stamina in addition to doing massive damage: Hit a boss with that when they begin charging a mega-attack, and they probably won’t get another turn. Especially if you layer on the buffs and debuffs before that. Also, if the random battles in the last couple of dungeons annoy you, you can buy a “Death Arrow”, which adds instant death to your elven archer’s attacks…and she’ll have two of the very-few hit-all attacks at that point.

Hargana, the dark elf, seems to have some amount of gender confusion—I’m not sure if the characters are making fun of her for seeming masculine or what (the translation isn’t great) but it doesn’t sit right with me. Like many of the Evils, she’s presented in a sympathetic light later on, but she’s the one thing in the plot that gave me real pause.

Overall: This game showed up on several lists as being one of KEMCO’s best games, so I bumped it to the top of my list. I think that’s an accurate assessment: It’s an easy game, but you’ve got a lot of customizability and flexibility for your party and despite the bad translation, the story manages to be fun. A revised / properly localized script would have made this genuinely noteworthy.

 

[Beowulf]

Kemco produces them at a ludicrous rate and they all look pretty interchangeable

So, I hadn't updated my spreadsheet with new games since May 2020, because I generally lost interest in playing the new ones (and that was around the time I got into emulator handhelds and these two facts are not unrelated). I just went through the Play Store and updated the sheet: There are 17 new games since then: 11 by EXE-Create, 5 by Hit-Point, 1 by Rideon. And that brings KEMCO's total output to 94 games.

 

[Violentvixen]

The very first dungeon has zombies that always inflict poison, and antidotes are in short supply.

Oh hell no

 

[Yimothy]

Another great thread, Beowulf. I’ve seen a lot of these games around, but never played any. Finding out that they’re like six hours long has greatly increased the appeal.

 

[Octopus Prime]

Yeah that should be the main bullet point

 

[Beowulf]

Fortuna Magus
KEMCO Humble Bundle #5. Played in 2016. Published by WorldWideSoftware.

The story opens with three children and their father, the hunter Kalius, who disappeared one day. Ten years later, Amane and Tia still live together, but Lill left to search for Kalius. When bandits attack, a wandering swordsman named Rett comes to their rescue—and he turns out to be a “magus”, hunted by the authorities. What happened to Kalius, and what are the magi, really?

Another fairly standard KEMCO classic jrpg, with another different bunch of quirks. This game has three difficulty levels (Whoo! Easy mode!), random encounters, eventually a five-character party and relatively MP-expensive skills and spells. The battle screen is much more interested in showing you the turn order than in giving information about your characters, which is odd, as you don’t get many abilities that can actually alter that turn order.

The magic/skill system is frustratingly opaque, as it’s similar to the SaGa series system where you randomly “spark” new abilities. Apparently, once you reach a certain level, using a skill or spell in battle can trigger learning a new one. Nothing indicates when this should be possible or what you’ll learn. Also, there are “elemental levels” you can raise with limited items that apparently play a role in sparking new spells. How? Who knows! Basically, whenever I unloaded all of my skills in a boss battle, I’d gain a bunch of new ones.

After battles, you receive “FMP” in addition to the usual XP and gold, and they can be used in a special menu store to buy overpowered equipment. (It’s particularly amusing how the Humble Bundle versions of these games got around the original’s in-app purchases.) If you really want to break the game, buy a Time Compass and an Area Badge from the FMP store, and put them both on a dual-wielding Amane. That’ll destroy pretty much any random battle.

The dungeons are often “nothing” areas—three small screens with a few chests on each, then a healing spot and a boss.

Amusingly, the game has two endings, but there’s an extra dungeon in the “bad” ending. It seems like you’re expected to find that first, and then go get the “true” ending via a clear game save. After beating that, there’s an arena you can fight bonus battles in. (Which, in practice, seem to be just whittling down giant mounds of hit points.) Even with a few sidequests (some of which are irritatingly hard to find, despite the small game world) and both endings, the game only clocks in around five hours, which is short even for a KEMCO game.

All of that said, the plot was okay. The final (real) boss is revealed to be both the cause of the magi’s appearance and the reason for Kalius’ disappearance, which ties it up nicely. Everybody gets a motivation and at least some development, and nothing escalates into absurdity. It’s a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Fridge logic notes that they hit the sibling incest button twice: Amane and Tia are adopted siblings and clearly end up together. Mitoshiro and Oliviet also screamed “totally lesbians” to me, but they’re revealed to secretly have been sisters. I don’t think this would impact anyone’s marginal enjoyment of the game, but it’s something I noticed.

Overall: This isn’t bad, and the plot and translation are actually halfway decent, but the dungeons are tiny and short and the skill system is obtuse. I’d call it middle of the pack for KEMCO games.

 

[Beowulf]

Silver Nornir
KEMCO Humble Bundle #6. Played in 2016. Published by WorldWideSoftware.

The Peacekeeper leads a band of heroes against Azatoth, lord of chaos…and gets his ass kicked. The Keeper of Time drags him out, and only the two of them and the Goddess survive the destruction of the world. The Goddess grants the Peacekeeper the ability to consume souls to prolong his life, so he can live until the world regenerates. The story then picks up millennia later, with Ein (the prince of Altria and probably the reincarnation of the Peacekeeper), Elena (his tutor and the immortal keeper of time), and Lynn (their magic-using cute ogre friend). In this, the 3rd Age, history repeats.

Clearly made by the same developer as Fortuna Magus, it has the same interface, similar graphics, the same tiny dungeons (at least initially), and same minimap. The combat system is a bit more tactical, as you can change your party makeup (there are eventually enough characters that you can swap them out) and there are three rows you can place characters in. That, and the action order in battle is actually useful, since you can easily buff or debuff speed (which is very useful in boss battles) and you can use SP attacks (limit breaks) as interrupt actions.

The magic system is Materia Lite: Equipping magical gems alters your stats and gives access to new spells as those gems level up. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that equipping more than one of a type of gem stacks their levels, so you can max any give element at 30. Dual-element gems that have no associated stat decreases are available at Gold Town, but you won’t be able to afford them until late in the game.

The in-app purchase “SNP” shop isn’t quite as accessible in the Humble Bundle version of this game, in that you don’t seem able to easily acquire any SNP points. You only get them for getting an S-Rank in a battle, and to do that you basically need to get lucky and score a lot of critical hits. (Hitting enemy weaknesses also apparently improves your rank, but I couldn’t manage better than an A-Rank doing just that.) It costs 20 SNP for most of the good accessories and 30 SNP for the bonus grinding areas. I had 24 when I finished the game.

It’s very heavy on the unwinnable battles early on—and in the mid-game, too. Which meant that my first Game Over from a tough boss caught me off guard, as I just expected it was another unwinnable battle when the boss opened with an attack that killed half my party. Nope, I just needed to grind some more. Thankfully, most bosses required only a change in strategy (careful buffing, better healing) to get past.

The dungeons get better as the game goes on: The desert is enormous when compared against anything in FM. The Winding Forest introduces teleporters (though there are only a few branching paths) and a “step on all the squares” puzzle. The Ancient Temple has some switches and a block-pushing puzzle. Later caves include mine-cart mazes. The Cave of Darkness has a spot-the-imposter trivia bit and a lilypad-hopping maze. The volcano dungeon seems oddly incomplete, in that you’re warned you’ll need Ice Crystals to navigate it (and you do), but then you find them in chests all over the volcano itself. (That sounds like a sidequest they forgot to include.) None of these are great, but they get a lot of credit for trying.

The game is much longer (12+ hours) and more involved than FM with a larger cast of characters and a deeper plot. Each character gets an arc, and it feels like there’s sufficient buildup to the point where you fight a world-destroying entity, given that at that point you have a motley crew of immortals and heroes that has come into their powers and gotten over their traumas.

After the “disc 1 final dungeon,” your main party disappears and you end up gathering a new party of mostly-former-villains. That latter half of the game also has several obvious-padding dungeons where the goddess just appears randomly and goes, “Oh, before you continue the plot, go to this random place and kill these monsters.” It’s pretty clear that they were running short of plot twists but needed the game to stretch from that point. The dungeons are often re-hashes of previous themes and the bosses are palette-swaps.

If you feel the need to grind before the endgame: There’s the Brook Mine where blue rabbits spawn; they give massive money rewards and can generally be taken down with one hit-all skill. (The hit-all skills make random battles trivial in the latter half of the game, so long as you’ve got enough Wind gems on the character so they go first.)

After you beat the final boss, the clear game file allows you to purchase gems that go up to level 30 (including the all-color Gem of Truth) and strengthen your final weapons with Orihalcum, which is in preparation for the EXTRA DUNGEON, where the random battles are three times as strong as in the final dungeon, and the bosses are nastier than the embodiment of chaos itself.

Overall: This was remarkably solid, much better than I think I expected it had any right to be. The battle system is solid with enough variety and customizability to be interesting; the plot is only moderately formulaic and holds together nicely. Worth the couple of bucks for any old-school jrpg fan.

 

[Beowulf]

Legend of Ixtona
KEMCO Humble Bundle #7. Played in 2016. Published by WorldWideSoftware.

The country of Ixtona is at peace following a long war…or would be if Prince Erbax hadn’t just killed the king in a frankly absurd coup. The other prince, Kyle, is put in charge of a frontier settlement to get him out of the way. With the help of his beastman fencing coach and a random mermaid who falls in love with him at first sight, can he win back his kingdom?

Shockingly, this isn’t a cookie-cutter jrpg! It’s an isometric tactical rpg!

And it runs upsettingly slowly on my Galaxy Tab 4.

The controls are good, touchpad-based but smooth and not too bogged down with excess button-presses. The systems look interesting: Character classes are on a limited tree but have numerous options. There is an IAP point shop and you earn points after every battle, which makes it useful. There’s a social aspect where you can upload your character and download other peoples’ to use instead of generic mooks in your party. There’s even variable difficulty levels that determine how much damage you deal and take.

While the party banter seems a bit silly—the rivalry between the beastman and the mermaid gets goofy really quickly, for one—it looks like there’s at least an attempt at character development and story.

But none of this changes the fact that the game just drags during battles. Which might even be acceptable in a console game where I’d be sitting down to play for an hour, but really grates on me for a tablet game I want to pick up and play for ten minutes at a time.

Overall: This just ran too slowly for me to enjoy playing it; I’ll keep the file and try again if/when I upgrade my tablet. It has potential otherwise. This was also the last game of this bundle, and all told I got 46+ hours of gaming for my $6, which is an excellent deal.

 

[Beowulf]

Alphadia
The Second KEMCO Humble Bundle #1. Played in 2016. Published by EXE-Create.

The evil Schwarzschild Empire is pushing the world towards war. When that war spills into a podunk town (in the form of a beautiful princess pursued by mooks), our intrepid unlikely heroes—a boy and his adopted sister and brother—race her to safety in the arms of the resistance.

This feels “primitive” in a bunch of ways. The graphics are more “big and blocky” than most of the other games. There’s obviously supposed to be a lot of grinding, as enemies give far too little gold to buy weapons and armor as they become available—but all that grinding raises your levels enough that the enemies aren’t a big worry, regardless. The final purchasable equipment comes strangely early, and there’s a LOT of dungeon with only one more upgrade (the ultimate weapons) after that.

The minimap is only for the world map, and there is no dungeon escape or teleport magic, which means getting lost in the (often fairly large but repetitive) dungeons is a realistic concern. The towers often give a place you can jump down and out, if you remember where that is by the end of it.

The magic system is dependent on element levels, which function as a class system: Gaining levels in an element unlocks skills and stat boosts related to it. Each character has a set element, and then you can equip rings that give them access to a second. The active abilities of each element require the rings, but the passive bonuses and access to the special “combo” abilities remain if you swap rings.

I wish they hadn’t been so intent on squeezing the word “energi” into the name of every item in the game. I couldn’t remember what any of the items were and kept having to look and check which were healing, which recovered MP, and which were the items that upgrade rings.

The autobattle is good (it is just normal attacks and puts the battle on fast-forward), which is important because 95% of the battles in this game can be won on autobattle. (And you heal on level-up, so even stopping to recover isn’t really a thing.) Even many of the bosses, once you have your buffs and debuffs cast, are just an attack-fest. I actually ignored the elemental magic I was constantly learning (except for buffs, debuffs and very occasional healing) because it wasn’t worth the time to figure out elemental weaknesses when I could just smash everything.

The elemental shrines strangely lack encounters; they’re just each a small dungeon with a boss. This seems an odd oversight for an important later-game fetch quest. Also, as the dungeons in this game start big and get progressively bigger and more maze-like, even without encounters you’ll spend a lot of time wandering around. A popular motif is towers with multiple stairs and plenty of pit traps, which delay you further.

I was irritated by a certain unnecessary linearity: The elemental shrines must be done in a specific order; as must the quests for the ultimate weapons. There is no logical reason for this and the difficulty curve would have still worked fine even if you can choose your own order.

The only particularly challenging dungeons are the optional ones that hold the legendary weapons (the only non-store weapon upgrades); and if you do them, the final dungeon is a breeze. There’s an insanely powerful optional bonus boss, which is nice, given that at least two forms (of three) of the final boss can also be won on autobattle.

Random thought: “Ash” is a blue-haired boy revealed to be a long-lost artificial human. The resemblance to Rudy Roughknight from Wild ARMS is significant.

I give them a lot of credit that the game doesn’t end happily: Shion is absorbed by Maxim, and her spirit is freed to go to the afterlife when Maxim is sealed away, but Ash can’t actually save her. After in the epilogue, energi is disappearing from the world, so Ash is wasting away and the other constructs (including Enah) are soon to follow.

Overall: The battles are easy but there are lots of them; the dungeons are big and might require mapping (or a walkthrough); the plot is derivative but not bad. At 12+ hours of gameplay, it paid for the bundle by itself.

 

[Beowulf]

Illusion of L'Phalcia
The Second KEMCO Humble Bundle #2. Played in 2016. Published by EXE-Create.

Ryser and Cougar are Seekers, searching for magical map pieces that will lead them to the legendary Sword of Amal, which was created by the sage Elpis but sealed away. It’s said that the sword can grant the holder any wish—which means that many others seek it, as well.

Though this is a KEMCO game, it’s mechanically a step above most of the previous ones I’ve played, featuring rotating 3D graphics in battle and voice-acted cutscenes (only in Japanese, but still).

There’s a gem-equip system for magic types and various boosts, but character-specific special abilities are locked-in. There are only two types of magic (black and white, plus “mix” spells you get from leveling both) and it’s to your advantage to designate members of your party as either mages or non-mages so you can free up their gem slots as necessary.

A neat gimmick is that you’ll sometimes run into “Giga” enemies as random encounters—single large versions of a common enemy with inflated stats. The rewards for beating them often aren’t great, though, so I opted to run for them in later dungeons.

The sidequests are standard stuff—go beat a bonus boss, fight ten of this monster, retrieve this macguffin, etc. The rewards for them are stat-up items that you can also buy in the IAP store.

The Alten Ruins are the first time I saw any kind of real puzzle in a dungeon, and that was just a couple of block-pushing puzzles. Generally, there’s either a switch to open doors or a cutscene puzzle that the characters solve without your involvement.

The IAP store isn’t particularly powerful, nor is it terribly accessible. You only get points by beating special map enemies, and by the point that you can take down the first few, you get locked into several dungeons and can’t backtrack for a while. And after that, the rewards for beating the map monsters are far better than the IAP purchases you can make: The level 42 and 48 map monsters (near Port Rosage) have massively overpowered weapons for your party; I found them beatable after escaping from the Alten Ruins. (You need to kill each one two or three times to get all of the items they drop.) The level 56 and 60 map monsters (near Alten Ruins and Gardenia Castle) have another, even more powerful set that I used to steamroller the final dungeon. In the post-game, three high-level monsters than hold ultimate weapons (and useless armor—great stats but it causes the Death Countdown status) that appear on the map.

Just south of Pesche Town, there’s a patch of desert in the mountains that you can reach with the bird, where only metal enemies (that, in classic Dragon Quest model, give massive XP) spawn. Combined with the boots that cause an encounter with every step and the weapons (and one skill) that can hurt metal enemies, and you can grind up levels very easily. This made the last few map monsters possible and the post-game final boss very easy.

Characters are a bit one-note, though there’s at least a presentation of growth. Usual stuff—the villain goes mad with power, the power of friendship saves the day, etc etc. I do find it neat that the original legend of the Sword of Amal says it grants wishes, and in the end, all of the characters who searched for it got theirs. Ryser gets dumped in a treasure room full of gold (though he opts not to collect it); Cougar eats food all over the world and in the swankiest places; Tiana becomes a good queen and makes her people happy; Caldina remembers her friend’s last words. (Even Ferio gets to help Tiana’s wishes come true…if you beat the game a second time for the ending where he survives.)

That’s right: If you beat MacGregor you get an ending to the game, but then if you fight him again in a clear game file, it releases an even bigger bad to be the true final boss. The post-game is mostly a retread of dungeons you’ll already been to and a few bonus bosses, but it does unlock extra sidequests and map monsters if you were enjoying that part.

Overall: I’m not going to claim this was a work of staggering brilliance, but it had some decent challenges and a nice flow to the battle system, and a good leveling curve. It’s a shovelware rpg with a stock plot, but I had fun with it.

 

[Beowulf]

Asdivine Hearts
The Second KEMCO Humble Bundle #3. Played in 2016. Published by EXE-Create.

Zack and Stella are living in an orphanage and generally getting along fine, but the world of Asdivine isn’t about to stay quiet: The two deities that rule it have just gotten into a major tiff and now they live in interesting times.

It’s fairly standard jrpg excitement, if generally goofy: The entire plot hinges on the Light Deity accidentally trapping herself in the body of a wildcat. Who then shouts “MEOWZERS!” a lot. And has additional plot device/cutscene powers in addition to being on the same combat level as the rest of your party.

Despite the fact that the majority of your team is female (everyone except the main character, if you note that the Light Deity is female despite occupying the body of a male cat), it plays more as “a boy and his harem” than as anything progressive.

The mid-game twist hinges on the fact that Asdivine is the “central” world to a network of parallel worlds, main of them very different from the core. The middle third of the game and a chunk of the post-game take place in one of the alternate worlds and features the doubles of many cast members. This actually works very nicely.

The battle system is pretty standard, with an assortment of special abilities. A lot of them are very similar to Illusion of L'Phalcia, including the gem-equip system for magic and the potential for “giga” or “mini” versions of random enemies to show up. The fact that a rapidly-regenerating pool of skill points fuels your skills (rather than sharing the standard MP that fuels your spells) is a nice touch that makes skills more useful in random battles and more strategic in boss battles.

The bonus currency is only available from boulders that randomly spawn in battles and occasionally drop a few “AHP” when destroyed. Which means it really isn’t useful; I never had enough to purchase anything with it.

There’s a sizable “post-game” segment. After you beat the Shadow Deity, there’s an option to save a clear game file and fight the battle again, only this time the plot continues. And it continues into a bunch of fetch-quest filler and a battle against an even bigger big bad. (And a ton of bonus bosses and random challenges.) That started to drag on me, as it’s clear they were out of ideas but needed to fill up more hours of content. The final-final boss handed me my ass because I hadn’t done enough sidequests and postgame grinding (despite having gained nearly 30 levels since beating the first final boss), and I declared myself finished.

Overall: A lot of the reviews think this is one of KEMCO’s strongest games; and from a system perspective I can’t really disagree. There are a lot of battle options, variety of encounters, decent dungeon design (though it could use a minimap), and a very good difficulty curve (at least until the postgame). But even though the world-building was interesting, the plot and characters were so “harem anime” that it made me uncomfortable.

 

[RT-55J]

I wish I had any commentary on these reviews besides "keep 'em coming."

 

[Beowulf]

I wish I had any commentary on these reviews besides "keep 'em coming."

Eh, that's still good enough for me. I'm hoping eventually we'll hit one that somebody else has played and has opinions about. Or that I'll reach the end of my list and someone will be like, "Wait, you missed Asdivine Megachicken" or something and jump in.

 

[Beowulf]

Revenant Saga
The Second KEMCO Humble Bundle #4. Played in 2016. Published by EXE-Create.

All around the world, revenants--demons inhabiting human corpses—are causing mayhem. Albert’s parents died of a plague; and then his best friend’s parents caught the plague as well. The mysterious scientist Dr. Moreau claims that he has a cure, if Albert will volunteer for his experiments. Unfortunately, the plague is a front and Dr. Moreau was actually creating the revenants the whole time. When Albert wakes up with a demon named Magnus in his soul, he decides try using his newfound powers for good.

The story starts off trying to be Wild ARMS 2 but mellows into "the power of friendship conquers all, even a demon bound into your soul". Several darker twists the story could have taken are avoided, and it stays remarkably light-hearted given the subject matter.

(Also, credit to them that the title is totally appropriate. This is, in fact, a saga about revenants.)

The equipment system is totally breakable and feels like a hodgepodge of different systems. You find new weapons that have various properties and you can upgrade in every town; but you can also use various "ore" items to upgrade your weapons from the menu at any time. So the theory is that you find a weapon with a special ability set that you like, and just upgrade that rather than replacing it. But that means you end up with an inventory full of weapons you never use. I ended up with two characters using hit-all weapons, one using a weapon that healed the whole party when it hit, and one dealing game-breakingly massive damage.

To whit, the Megaton Scythe (3x damage in exchange for a speed penalty), combined with a Berserk Gem (mega stat increases but auto-rage) turns Julie into a killing machine who eventually was dealing ten times more damage than my other characters. Throw a few strength boosters on top of that, and she can wipe out bosses in a few hits.

The Humble Bundle version of this gives you a couple of free accessories via the in-app store, and then you can earn RSP as random drops from enemies. (I had about 140 points by the end of the game, never having spent any.) I suppose you could grind them and get the experience or gold doublers early on, but it’s never necessary. Even without turning Julie into a killing machine, the game isn’t that hard. There’s also a gimmick when you can earn trophies for dealing lots of damage or taking lots of steps, and characters in various towns will give you rare accessories as rewards for doing so.

The "transformation" battle system is kinda poorly implemented, because the big downside to transforming (which increases your stats and gives you access to more skills) is that you can't heal. (There's also the "synchro gauge" which fills randomly and increases your attack power but also increases chances of you just randomly attacking instead of acting as directed; I basically ignored this mechanic because I spent so much of my time just attacking and so little transformed.) There are all-party healing spells that can only be used when transformed…which means that the user can never actually benefit from them.

There's no minimap, but you can zoom out in dungeons, which is a reasonable tradeoff. There are also several really annoying arrow-floor puzzles, but they all come after you can acquire the accessory that makes you immune to those floors. The dungeons are not particularly puzzle-heavy, but they’re decently designed.

There’s a post-game chapter accessible after you beat the final boss, that consists of an epilogue and one more final dungeon. There aren’t any new stories or NPCs, it’s literally just a second final-er dungeon. Which isn’t so bad, actually, as it means the events of both the “normal end” and the “true end” are both “true” in the game world.

Overall: For all my complaints, I rather liked this one. It didn't outstay its welcome; it tried a bunch of inventive things and some of them worked; and I had a lot of fun snapping it in half.

 

[Beowulf]

Fanatic Earth
The Second KEMCO Humble Bundle #5. Played in 2016. Published by EXE-Create.

In a world where an alien bacteria known as the "Achratoth" nearly wiped out mankind, Xilleon City was created using a particle shield to protect many of the remaining inhabitants. Join forces with a brash amnesiac hero, a detective in the local police force, an android, and a young girl with a mysterious past as "defenders of justice" and take on Cyphatek, the largest corporation in Xilleon City, to expose their corruption!

Despite having weaker graphics and a somewhat clunkier system than other KEMCO games I’ve played recently, this one has a sci-fi buddy-cop plot that actually feels a bit different from the rest of the games, and I give them a lot of credit for that. Yes, you still end up doing a lot of fetch-questing, but they managed to make it feel more like a sci-fi mystery than a generic fantasy epic, which really helps it stand out.

The dungeon designer relied awfully heavily on identical elevators that only go one or two places. Which is annoying, but not terrible, as the dungeon design is otherwise not bad—there are dead ends and looping corridors; and they’re very good about giving you a quick exit route at the end of each dungeon.

The sprite collection was apparently very limited—there are a number of named NPCs that use generic sprites; every hidden object in the game and most of the cutscene special effects are all done with the same “sparkle” (and everything that happens in a cutscene is the same red flashing screen); several boss monsters are represented with a generic “slime” sprite despite appearing as dragons in battle; etc.

My complaint about the control scheme is that most games actually allow you a hybrid between touch controls and a virtual keypad: You have a keypad except when you are offered buttons, which you can push. This locks you into the keypad if you choose that mode, and you need to maneuver menus and yes/no prompts with it.

IAP points seem to flow in invisibly as you fight battles, and you get enough over the course of the game to collect a few interesting special items. I give them credit that they got creative with the accessories and tried to encourage strange strategies with them. The “Regret Core” triples your damage output, but halves your HP and SP every turn, for instance.

While the plot isn’t bad, the science is terrible, oh my god. The shield over the city is apparently to keep out alien bacteria, but people freely go outside the dome without protective gear and re-enter at will. The plot hinges on the creation of androids, “naturoids” (androids with human brains in them; sure, I’m with you here), and “neo-naturoids” (humans with android brains which are somehow better? Hunh?). At one point, a character is dying from poison gas. Another character who is immune to the gas is told she can share her antibodies by swapping spit with the dying character. (But kisses are precious, oh the angst, blah blah blah.) But apparently this process not only instantly cures him, but completely transfers her immunity so she immediately starts dying from the gas (which they’ve long left the presence of). WHAT.

Oh, and the translators apparently got a bit cheeky with the pop culture references. References to Bernie Madoff or Monica Lewinisky feel a bit jarring, even in a relatively near-future setting.

Like several other KEMCO games, after you beat the game, you can re-open your clear save for a bonus chapter and an alternate ending. I’d had my fill and decided the “normal end” was sufficient for my liking.

Overall: I can’t really claim that this is particularly stand-out as a game, but it gets a lot of credit for having a plot I haven’t seen before. You’d think that there’d be more sci-fi buddy cop rpg stories, actually.

 

[Violentvixen]

I wish I had any commentary on these reviews besides "keep 'em coming."

 

[JBear]

The entire plot hinges on the Light Deity accidentally trapping herself in the body of a wildcat. Who then shouts “MEOWZERS!” a lot.

Take-my-money.jpg

 

[Lokii]

Also a fun little detail she hangs on the text box.

Hang in there baby!

 

[RT-55J]

good kitty