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

Beowulf

Beowulf

Son of The Answer Man
(He/Him)
Fernz Gate
KEMCO November Sale 2023 #1. Played in 2024. Published by EXE-Create.

Life sucks in Fernland, a previously-peaceful crossroads of dimensions. An evil overlord has seemingly killed the local goddess and is now killing people or turning them into monsters and getting more powerful as he conquers. And Alex has just been mysteriously transported here from our world, but he overcomes his fears and joins the battle against the overlord.

A KEMCO/EXE-Create game that feels (and looks) very similar to <i>Miden Tower</i> but pulls in system pieces we've seen in lots of places. (And honestly, this is another game where there are too many damn systems.) To start, there’s no MP, and instead all abilities are on cooldown timers. HP refills after battles; the limit break meters are the only thing that persists battle to battle. The big change to the battle system from other games is adding "buddies," so you only have three active party members at a time but can have three more "sub members" who use your items for you and bolster attacks. (One is always your fourth human party member; the other two are monsters you get from rings you find in chests and as random drops.) Your human characters learn magic by fighting with elemental rings equipped. Each character has a unique limit break attack and a set of personal non-elemental skills. There are combined skills you can learn by having the character and their buddy use certain spells on the same turn, and shared special abilities you learn from NPCs during sidequests.

Battles randomly feature giant enemies (extra powerful), metal enemies (high defense and flee easily but give lots of XP) and bomb enemies (explode after several turns, potentially giving a game over). There are also random encounters with stone blocks and jars you can open with special items for prizes. There are “curio” spots at the beginning and end of dungeons that you can use to change the encounter rate and summon monsters instantly. Dungeons aren’t really big on puzzles (there are a few sliding-ice and directional arrow bits, and a couple of switches to pull, but nothing particularly challenging) though they’re pretty good with the overall design and about not making them identical straight lines.

The IAP "gems" drop every couple of battles, but you get 1,000 for buying the full version of the game, and that seems to be sufficient to unlock a selection of the various gated features. You’ll need to buy more if you want to use the good version of the lotto system for weapons and accessories (as opposed to the crappy weapons lotto, played with random-drop tickets). There’s a crafting system for combining the overabundance of weapons. There's a "secret house" area where you can grow seeds in real time, send your excess monster buddies on errands, and put the monsters on “stands” for small battle bonuses.

The quest log is excellent, including all the details of side quests that you get from from crabby townspeople. (You revisit the dungeons a LOT to do the sidequests, but the “curios” that turn on and off encounters and let you call them at will make it a lot more pleasant.) Maidame Curie (who appears in numerous games) and her Maids are running the arena (where you can also win and use Maid Coins to trade for other bonus items). I’ll admit that I’ve never understood the maid fetish that somebody at EXE-Create apparently has, but here it seems to be more of a nod to the series than any kid of crude joke, so that’s fine.

Oh, and characters have “ability levels” you can increase by making the right choices during cutscenes, which allow them to unlock doors/solve puzzles/hop over stones/climb weak ladders and get some bonus items periodically. Just in case you needed yet another system.

Spending your gems on the key for the Forbbiden Lab is very much worth it, because completing that extra dungeon gets you the “Maid Head” buddy, which is impressively overpowered. Combining the Flash Flood skill with it can wipe out bosses in a single hit.

Side note: This was technically on sale in December, but it was easier to group it with the other late-2023 sale games in my queue. The important point was that it only cost me a buck.

The characters aren’t quite as interesting as the ones in Miden Tower, but I give them credit that the main cast and a lot of the side characters have actual motivations and there are a lot of cute side bits.

The big twist is that all of the main characters (and the other “outworlders”) are all dead, and Fernland is an in-between space for souls that have regrets about dying. The overlord stole their memories of their deaths to make them more willing to fight and generate mana he could steal. (And all of the regular Fernlanders are just constructs of the Goddess, there to serve and shepherd the outworlders to their next destinations.) This actually makes the bits about how no one actually needs to eat and no one seems to age make more sense. Oh, and the fluffy “anima” companion was secretly the weakened Goddess the whole time, so she’s been a part of your party for most of the game.

When you beat the overlord, you get the basic ending where the characters move on to the afterlife. Then you can save a clear file and there’s a postgame segment with some bonus dungeons and a few more sidequests. And you can grind well past what’s necessary to beat the regular game if you want to brave the extra arena fights and challenge areas (I didn’t even reach level 100 to beat the true final boss, and there’s a level 900 bonus dungeon!), but that seems unnecessary to me. Beating the overlord the second time gets you the true ending, where you can choose to move on, stay in Fernland, or return to life. I chose to let the characters return to the living with their new resolve.

Overall: While this is overly-packed with systems and stuff, the game itself is pretty breezy and the plot kept my attention. Upper-tier KEMCO game, recommended to fans of Miden Tower specifically.
 
Beowulf

Beowulf

Son of The Answer Man
(He/Him)
Liege Dragon
KEMCO August Sale 2023 #4. Played in 2024. Published by EXE-Create.

1,000 years ago, Abigore the evil dragon blocked out the sun, so three heroes summoned Oberon the good dragon and returned light to the world. Then they founded three kingdoms and the dragons went to sleep. Now, Abigore has returned and set his monsters forth, and a mysterious white-haired boy was found in the mountains without his memory. Taking the name Yuran, meaning “friend of dragons,” he becomes our protagonist.

The first thing you notice is the quality of the translation...or lack thereof. Now, I shouldn’t be too picky because I’ve definitely seen much, much worse in my time (especially from KEMCO!), but in the second scene the king of Blaze is very concerned with losing his “suzerainty” over the other two kingdoms, and that set the level of quality for me.

Unlike most EXE-Create games, this doesn’t have difficulty levels. Also, it didn’t give any free IAP currency when I bought it. (You get LDP from winning battles, but it’s like 1 point every five battles. So you’ll get a few free consumables or extra weapon slots by the endgame if you don’t buy anything.) This has a shockingly long start-to-slime time, with almost half an hour of play before the first battle.

In a cute innovation, most enemies are represented by clusters of monsters, and hitting them knocks off a certain number roughly proportional to their HP lost.

You get elemental stones as you defeat monsters, and can use them to unlock spells (one at a time, in any order you choose) for your characters. There’s clearly intended to be some flexibility in whether characters are mages or not, as all four characters can wear any armor but the robe armor improves your Int at the cost of lower defense. You can learn the most powerful magic very early if you save up for it, but you definitely don’t need it and you can’t afford the MP costs anyway. There are also elemental combo skills you get by learning their prerequisites, skills you learn from sidequests, and physical skills your characters get from leveling.

There are two trophy sets: One gets you items and bonus skills for accomplishments; pretty standard. The other is the “Monpletes” list, which lets you get bonuses for killing a certain number of each monster, so long as you use the “Researcher” skill on that monster first. This functionally puts in a “beat 5 of X monster” quest for every enemy in the game, but you don’t have to go back and forth to towns to get them. That’s not too bad, even if it means you need to use Researcher on every monster the first time you meet it. There are also standard sidequests in towns with fetch quests and bonus bosses, and some of them give you event items that weaken the plot bosses. (Complaint #2: There’s an early quest to collect “green film” from a monster in the first dungeon. That monster, as far as I can tell, never drops that item and you can’t steal it. Actually, the stealing skills never worked for me on anything.)

There’s also a weapon upgrading system (that’s limited and less breakable than some others—you can’t easily stack your built-up best weapon onto the next level up) and a weapon lotto that you can use LDP or Tickers to get weapons from. Enemies drop a lot of weapons, too. The system “tops out” earlier than in other games I’ve seen it—you can only put two skills and a +99 bonus on any one weapon.

The big twist (as you’d guess from the start) is that Yuran is Oberon the holy dragon. The holy dragon who was guiding you the whole time was actually the evil dragon, who was directing you to finish unsealing it. (The mysterious man chasing you is the younger Prince of a rival nation, who freed the evil dragon out of jealousy and lust for power.) The three other party members are all representatives of the three nations and descendants of the original heroes.

The interesting plot point is that “Silky,” who presents as a girl, reveals about four hours in that she’s a boy. And the rest of the party is cool with it and consider this a trust-building event. My original reading of this was as a lousy translation of the idea that she’s a trans girl. A little wonky, but an attempt at inclusiveness, maybe? But then there’s a very awkward scene with a lecherous vampire who tries to hit on Silky and is distressed to learn she’s male, which leans into some unpleasant tropes. And at the end it’s revealed that Silky is actually the elder Prince of one of the other countries, who ran off to be a traveling bard. I think the idea is that they’re a crossdresser, but still identify as male? I mean, the party and pretty much all the NPCs are presented as supportive of whatever is going on here, so that’s good. But I don’t think they’re getting representation points for it.

I only bothered to get the “Normal Ending”, because (Complaint #3) honestly this goes on too long for what it has—I was ready to go fight the evil dragon three dungeons and four hours before the game actually let me. In that, Sleipner (Silky’s brother, the younger prince who started this mess) sacrifices himself to seal the evil dragon and Yuran/Oberon goes back to sleep in his castle. Apparently there are three bonus postgame dungeons and something like 6 possible endings depending on how completist you’re willing to be.

Overall: I’d call this middle-tier. It wasn’t fantastic, but it had enough to it that I played through the whole thing. The difficulty was fair (if a little uneven) but it had some system and pacing issues that other KEMCO/EXE-Create games have done better at. And while I don’t think Silky’s storyline was offensive, I think it was questionable enough to turn people off.
 
Beowulf

Beowulf

Son of The Answer Man
(He/Him)
Monochrome Order
KEMCO November Sale 2023 #2. Played in 2024. Published by Hit-Point.

You are a newly-appointed Arbiter (albeit one who’s been having memory problems), sent to keep the peace in a minor kingdom. There are clearly major events afoot, as Lord Jystice of the Order is plotting to control the world, the Divine Enemies created a miasma that creates monsters, and a woman called the Calamity Witch is fleeing through the countryside. But at the moment, you just need to handle the minor affairs of the townspeople.

A Hit-Point game, and a significantly different one from many others: The big gimmick is that you can pass “judgments” over the course of the game that affect the game world. The first one involves choosing whether the item shop owner can complete a business deal that involves his daughter marrying the partner’s son: If you say yes, the local economy and the item shop’s wares improve. If you say no, you gain personal fame and a free accessory. A number of the judgments are connected to the main plot, and there are multiple endings depending on which you choose. (And there’s a New Game Plus mode so you can see all of the endings and overpower your party to fight the optional superbosses.) At least on your first time through the game, the dungeons and battling are a relatively small portion of the game compared to running around town passing judgment and trying to balance fame, peace and the economy. (Fame is required to use some of the recruitable characters in your party; Peace reduces the chances bandits will attack on the world map; Economy reduces the prices for armor and items in shops.)

I think they did a decent job writing out the stories of each of the Judgment sidequests, though a lot of the time there’s an “obvious” answer but the reward for going against it (…which I looked up rather than save-scum) is better. There’s no morality system—you’re balancing your personal popularity with keeping the peace and boosting the economy, but there’s no equivalent to “losing an eighth”. If you side with the slavers and the murderers every time…that’s fine! You’re the Arbiter, your word is law.

The difficulty is rather wildly uneven, partially because you can free-roam into a lot of areas whenever you feel like it, but also because Hit-Point isn’t the best at balancing their games. You can only use three characters at a time, but there are more than a dozen you can recruit (which is determined by your Judgments --different characters are unlocked depending on how your judgments come down) and they tried to balance the game to punish you for, say, only using fighter or only wizards. It’s debatable how well that works, but your main character has one of the few healing skills and also one of the few hit-all attacks, so if you’re careful and grind a little you can manage. (If you have trouble with the late-game on your first pass, Amtese River north of the starting city is actually a great place to grind XP. There’s also a bonus boss area south of Rufael Grassland that can give you mega-XP if you have fire attacks to kill the monsters with.)

Your characters each have a single weapon that you can upgrade at the blacksmith, and a small skill list you can improve by equipping orbs. There are combo skills you can create by using yours in the correct order in combat; and monsters can activate combos too. I found money to be pretty tight all through the game, between upgrading weapons and trying to keep everyone equipped with decent armor. Characters you aren’t using get “leaked XP” and seem to get recruited at the average level of your main party.

Also worth noting is the art style for the character designs, which makes everyone look vaguely goth and the daemon characters look super-goth. (The sprites, on the other hand, look like typical 32-bit colorful fare.)

I first opted to protect Leyce (the Calamity Witch) at all turns and eventually joined the anti-Lybra group and joined daemons in storming my own base. Because shockingly, the Order is evil. Lord Jystice feeds criminals into the Order Stone to get magical power; and he came up with a way of making artificial Arbiters so he could control them. Your main character is an artificial Arbiter, and it seems like he was created when Jystice stole the divine power from Leyce, who was supposed to be an Arbiter and instead became a wizard. I suspect the endings I didn’t get (particularly the final ending) shed more light on the nature of Arbiters and Divine Enemies and miasma and all that.

I tried the New Game Plus and went for the most different plot I could: I opted not to protect Leyce in the very first choice. And indeed, the “main plot” events go completely differently, though you cover most of the same physical ground—you basically run around investigating several spikes in miasma and monster activity and learn that fellow Arbiter Septer is evil (and a jerk), and then just…decide to go along with Jystice’s evil plan to revive the Divine Enemy Elvil by sacrificing Leyce. Then it turns out the Arbiter Fenge is actually the “X”, eternally reincarnated, cosmically aware, and chosen to bring the divine retribution of the gods. But you defeat her and become a Divine Enemy yourself, and follow Jystice to destroy and remake the miasma-covered world. It’s entertaining how radically different it goes when you make the “wrong” choice on the very first plot Judgment.

The annoying part on repeated plays is that you still have to do all of the steps of all of the Judgments (I mostly ignored Peace and Economy in favor of lots of companions and Fame) and you need to fight tedious battles traveling through the easy areas to unlock everything. If I wanted to do all of the endings, I’d definitely want to shell out for the encounter toggle in the IAP store. I’m curious about the rest of the endings and mythology, but I think I’m stopping after 2 rounds.

Overall: This is something different, and I think it really works for that. The free-roaming/exploration aspect of the world map has a SaGa sort of feel; the Judgment system mixes in a lot of Visual Novel elements; the difficulty is a little rocky but manageable; and a single play-through only takes around 8 hours. Upper-tier!
 
Beowulf

Beowulf

Son of The Answer Man
(He/Him)
Blood of Calamity
KEMCO November Sale 2023 #3. Played in 2024. Published by Magitec.

In a Japan-flavored setting, Kenshiro is the prince of one of the four clans, and he’s a dunderhead who cares more about chasing women (badly, he’s a perv and obvious about it) than actually managing his country’s problems. His trusty retainer is the only reason he seems to stay on track with anything at all. Fortunately, he’s a half-decent fighter, so when yokai attack the village and steal his father’s blood, he’s willing to go out into the world to stop it from becoming a calamity.

This is one of the last Magitec games I hadn’t yet played, and I got it for a dollar!

…and I’m glad I did.

The game itself just feels “clunky;” the menus aren’t well designed and you spend a lot of time swapping and tapping through things to try to get to the things you actually want. Credit where it’s due: There’s an easily-accessible “reminder” system of what’s going on in the plot and where you’re supposed to go next. I just wish that pulling out an antidote when you’re poisoned after battle was nearly as easy.

The initial difficulty is pretty high; monsters do a lot of damage and you aren’t taught how to raise your stats (or allowed to buy new equipment) until you beat the first boss, and the grind doesn’t get easier after that. After grinding up enough to get through the first sidequest the difficulty leveled off for a bit, but the battles remain slow and clunky and you don’t really have enough MP to be wasting skills on random battles unless you’re grinding close to a healing fountain.

The skills system is deceptive: You get to distribute you stat gains at each level up, and it seems like, oh, if you load up on strength you’ll get attack skills and the like. No, you actually just need to raise all of your stats fairly evenly, and you’ll get new stacks of abilities when every stat hits a certain threshold. Nothing in the game tells you this; I found it out from a walkthrough. The other battle gimmick is that you can assign “mandara” to each of your (three) characters in battle, which give them small stat boosts depending on which one you pick. In practice, I didn’t see much benefit from them.

There are standard “kill a bonus boss” and “kill 10 of X monster” sidequests in some of the towns. The map is actually really open, but if you try to wander off the plot path your characters will remind you where you’re supposed to be going and make you turn back. I’d imagine this makes navigating in the late-game easier, but in the beginning it’s just annoying.

The graphics are mediocre. Like, they’re fine, 16-bit stuff, but the battles are stiffly animated and the minimap is often useful in telling what’s an obstacle and what isn’t in the dungeons.

But the fact that I find the protagonist unpleasant is the icing on top of this. Like, I could handle the totally routine plot (go to each country, meet a new party member, solve a local problem but discover it’s part of the wider conspiracy, etc etc) if the characters were entertaining and the dialogue was witty. It’s trying to be, but it’s not—Kenshiro isn’t funny, he’s just a lazy asshole and a pervert who needs to be shepherded into trying to save the world. I don’t want that as my viewpoint character, and I don’t care about the anime-trope women reacting to his bad behavior in equally immature ways.

Overall: Alas, KEMCO/Magitec flubbed this one. I gave this three hours in several segments, the last after having played a few other KEMCO games in the interim and that just made the slow systems and annoying characters stand out even more. It’s a very “routine” jrpg with lousy characters, the innovations didn’t really work, and they didn’t do a good enough job making it pleasant to play.
 
Beowulf

Beowulf

Son of The Answer Man
(He/Him)
For those keeping track at home, I've now finished everything I bought last summer, and three of five games I bought in the fall. (That's 46 hours of KEMCO games in 2024 so far!) Aaaaand then I have six more I bought in January.
 
Beowulf

Beowulf

Son of The Answer Man
(He/Him)
Ruinverse
KEMCO November Sale 2023 #4. Played in 2024. Published by EXE-Create.

Kit was able to make his dream of being a Transporter come true when a magical ruin gifted him with Warp magic. Four years later, he and his best friend Allie encounter a second ruin that has a strange effect on her memory, which turns out to be because a magical spirit named Alvyn has taken up co-residence in her body. And meanwhile, an earthquake has raised a giant tree from the ocean and brought along three demons searching for their missing Lord, who kill the elven king and impersonate his children.

This has the bajillion trappings we’ve come to expect from more recent EXE-Create games: The grid-based battle setup and “follow” attacks from your party. In-game achievements. Grumbly-person sidequests in towns that encourage you to go back to previous dungeons. Encounter-rate adjusting devices at the beginning and end of each dungeon. Small, large and metal monsters (and boulders and crates in battle). Easy teleportation between areas. (It’s also got a proper world map with a ship and airship, which we haven’t seen in a while.)

Oh, and Maidame Curie has a cameo in the IAP-locked dungeon and postgame.

Weapons come with all manner of enhancements (which look identical to a number of the other games) but oddly, there’s no crafting/combining system at all. There’s nothing to do with your extreme excess of weapons and armor except to sell them—which works out okay, because you need lots of money to upgrade the daily skill-point dispenser, but is still mildly frustrating when you get a good ability or big bonus on a lousy weapon, or vice-versa.

New to this one: The skill system is a points-based tree, and you get points from leveling up and can spend them to enhance or learn new skills along the branches you’ve unlocked.

There are a LOT of real-time-dependent systems: There’s a real-time gardening system for stat-boosting seeds, which we’ve seen before. There’s the Avelonia Tree, a real time “skill tree” that grows skill points every six hours. (You’ll eventually get way more skill points from the tree than from levels.) There’s a daily “roulette” that gives you items or IAP points. There are three daily monster-killing quests that reward you with IAP. This really, really wants you to play it daily for a few weeks rather than all at once, and I’m not really sure why.

A bunch of the features don't unlock until a few hours in, including a 100-battle arena, and "magic circles" that affect the battlefield but can only be used every 20 turns. There are also extremely high-level areas you can start accessing once you get a ship but clearly are intended for postgame grinding, and a bonus dungeon that you can unlock with IAP that I could reach the end of two-thirds through the game (when I’d saved up enough to unlock it) but couldn’t beat the boss until I was ready for the final dungeon.

The game’s biggest problem is that they hit a couple of uncomfortable comedy tropes that we should be past now, and they don’t let them go. There’s Lexor, the elf doctor character, who constantly sexually harasses your main character under the guise of examining his "magical flow" as payment for services. Nana the dwarf girl's entire shtick is molesting Kit the fox-man because his fur is so soft. And Allie keeps "hilariously" hitting Kit and accidentally switching to Alvyn. And it’s not just once: These are the three running gags that recur constantly, more than a dozen times over the course of the game.

The first twist this that Alvyn is the missing Demon Lord Ordyn, not a Seraph. (He’s been in Allie’s body her whole life, the encounters with relics just woke him up.) The second twist is that the Seraphs only created the elves; the demons created humans, beasts and dwarves--and the Seraphs instigated the war. (And the demons, generally nice guys, were betrayed from within.) The ending reveals that lieutenant Erebos had it in for Ordyn the whole time and was the betrayer. I got the Normal Ending, where Alvyn ends up stuck in control of Allie’s body but lies while searching for a solution. I was tired by then and didn’t bother with the postgame, but it seems safe to assume that ending allows Alvyn to get his own body back.

Overall: This is a really mixed bag. The systems are fine, maybe a little weaker than other recent EXE-Create titles, and the battles are pretty breezy. The plot and pacing are decent, there are some fun twists... it's just that the characterization and "humor" are such 90s anime nonsense. There will be a serious moment about a parent's dementia or fear of death that leads straight into "now let me molest you so I feel better!" And that really keeps this off my recommended list.
 
Violentvixen

Violentvixen

(She/Her)
Beowulf said:
Either Adventure Bar Story or Marenian Tavern Story; they have the same gameplay loop. The former is more simple and straightforward, the latter has prettier graphics and a stronger plot.
Click to expand...
Adventure Bar Story was just ported to Switch this week. I enjoyed my time with it on 3DS, it's been delisted from Android for a while so nice to have a way to pick it up again.
 
Beowulf

Beowulf

Son of The Answer Man
(He/Him)
Everdark Tower
Ad-Supported KEMCO Games #10. Played in 2024. Published by Hit-Point.

Dawn hasn’t come in some time, and monsters grow bolder in the darkness. Albus has mysterious dreams about a girl in the clock tower that is said to control time itself, so he goes to investigate.

In very much the same vein as Archlion Saga, this is a short and incredibly simplified jrpg. Your party of (eventually) four has a combined HP meter, as do the enemies; and despite there being consumable items and equipment, your only real commodity is the Stars that you earn in-game and from watching ads. Stars fully heal your party (even if you fall in battle), can be spent to open bonus chests and get double XP from a battle, and can be used to automatically get a critical hit. Your characters gain XP, but there really isn’t much ability to grind, and the skills—which have timeouts and specific activation situations, there’s no MP—that you get are what really define battle strategy. The game gets markedly easier in the third chapter when you get a healing spell, and as long as you are able to be a little strategic most battles are just tests of patience after that.

The first area is a lighthouse with a bunch of “step on the right squares” puzzles. The second is the clock tower which is fully of switch puzzles, and the third is a mindscape full of teleporters. The entire game is about two and a half hours long, so they don’t have time for a lot of nuance or for the system to get boring. The entire plot boils down to a time-spirit freezing time so the human who kept him company wouldn’t die, and you need to defeat the “time dragon” causing her illness so she doesn’t die.

Overall: Short, sweet, simple, and free. Pretty decent overall!
 
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