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KEMCO Made a Lot of RPGs...and I'm the Maniac Who Played Most of Them
Odd-eyed cats are rare but they do exist in the real world. (But they don't have anime eye colors.)
Forces you to use a mechanic from the YuGiOh card game?
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Bonds of the Skies
Ad-Supported KEMCO Games #1. Played in 2016. Published by Hit-Point.
The four elemental Grimoas created the world, but when three of them split off child-Grimoas, the Fire Grimoa made a grab for power. Now, the other Grimoas must band together with human Partners to revitalize the world’s faith in them and stop the Fire Grimoa’s plans to burn the world.
The first thing I noticed about this game was that it uses a different graphical style from a lot of KEMCO’s other games; this one much more like Chrono Trigger. It’s not tile-based and it’s more detailed. This is clearly where the designers put their effort.
The plot feels generic, which shouldn’t really come as a surprise. You need to gather up the elemental gods so that you can challenge the one that’s gone rogue and wants to destroy humanity. They make an effort towards character development, but the clunky translation makes a lot of that fall flat and causes a lot of mood whiplash.
The difficulty level is also higher than most KEMCO offerings, necessitating more grinding. Battles are frequent and enemies are very free with status ailment attacks, particularly ones that are annoying to cure. The game’s unique ailment, “Pancho” turns you into a weak tiny bird (but with a 10 MP powerful strike) and most stores don’t sell the item that cures it. Poison also persists after battle and makes extremely frequent appearances.
The quest system is an excuse for grinding, as all of them are either “kill 5 random monsters” or “kill a specific monster”. The latter irritated me, because I couldn’t find any of the special monsters I was supposed to be killing.
There’s also a crafting system that was underwhelming. You can pick up tons of vendortrash from random battles and “sparkles” in dungeons, which you can use recipes to combine. But the combinations are all either consumables that you can (and probably should) just buy, or accessories that aren’t better than what you find in chests and stores. So it’s awkward to use and the benefits of using it are minimal.
The ads are intrusive—not to the point that they make the game unplayable, but definitely annoying. You get a pop up ad after every other battle, and a short video ad after every time you save. (You can also optionally see video ads when you gather materials from sparkle points, but there doesn’t seem to be any benefit to doing so.) A $5 in-app purchase turns off the ads; you can also buy points to spend on game-breaking accessories, like in their other games.
Overall: I wasn’t enthralled here, and I think there were a lot of factors to that. The increased emphasis on grinding versus other games; the simplistic “find all the elements” plot; the emphasis on status ailments that you need limited items to cure; and the mild irritation of the ads. If the game had otherwise be great, I’d have paid the $5 to remove the ads. I opted to stop playing instead.
Ad-Supported KEMCO Games #1. Played in 2016. Published by Hit-Point.
The four elemental Grimoas created the world, but when three of them split off child-Grimoas, the Fire Grimoa made a grab for power. Now, the other Grimoas must band together with human Partners to revitalize the world’s faith in them and stop the Fire Grimoa’s plans to burn the world.
The first thing I noticed about this game was that it uses a different graphical style from a lot of KEMCO’s other games; this one much more like Chrono Trigger. It’s not tile-based and it’s more detailed. This is clearly where the designers put their effort.
The plot feels generic, which shouldn’t really come as a surprise. You need to gather up the elemental gods so that you can challenge the one that’s gone rogue and wants to destroy humanity. They make an effort towards character development, but the clunky translation makes a lot of that fall flat and causes a lot of mood whiplash.
The difficulty level is also higher than most KEMCO offerings, necessitating more grinding. Battles are frequent and enemies are very free with status ailment attacks, particularly ones that are annoying to cure. The game’s unique ailment, “Pancho” turns you into a weak tiny bird (but with a 10 MP powerful strike) and most stores don’t sell the item that cures it. Poison also persists after battle and makes extremely frequent appearances.
The quest system is an excuse for grinding, as all of them are either “kill 5 random monsters” or “kill a specific monster”. The latter irritated me, because I couldn’t find any of the special monsters I was supposed to be killing.
There’s also a crafting system that was underwhelming. You can pick up tons of vendortrash from random battles and “sparkles” in dungeons, which you can use recipes to combine. But the combinations are all either consumables that you can (and probably should) just buy, or accessories that aren’t better than what you find in chests and stores. So it’s awkward to use and the benefits of using it are minimal.
The ads are intrusive—not to the point that they make the game unplayable, but definitely annoying. You get a pop up ad after every other battle, and a short video ad after every time you save. (You can also optionally see video ads when you gather materials from sparkle points, but there doesn’t seem to be any benefit to doing so.) A $5 in-app purchase turns off the ads; you can also buy points to spend on game-breaking accessories, like in their other games.
Overall: I wasn’t enthralled here, and I think there were a lot of factors to that. The increased emphasis on grinding versus other games; the simplistic “find all the elements” plot; the emphasis on status ailments that you need limited items to cure; and the mild irritation of the ads. If the game had otherwise be great, I’d have paid the $5 to remove the ads. I opted to stop playing instead.
Antiquia Lost
Ad-Supported KEMCO Games #2. Played in 2016. Published by EXE-Create.
A boy with a mysterious power meets a shapeshifting girl just as the royal families of the three major nations start vanishing. Representatives of the three nations will all need to come together to find out what truth of the past was lost, and how it’s returned to haunt them.
Mechanically, this is a culmination of a lot of things the earlier KEMCO games had introduced: Each character has elemental magic they learn and you can sacrifice accessory slots to give them access to other elements. There’s a limit break bar that fills during battle and can be spent for super-powerful effects. You can merge and upgrade your weapons, which have various special abilities and you find in abundance. There are randomly large, mini and metal versions of standard enemies. The mini-map is useful, the dungeons have some interesting map designs, there are reminders on the menu screen of where to go next, and there are two dozen sidequests that are neatly organized.
New stuff: There’s an Earthbound-style feature that you can enable which lets you instant-win battles that are well below your level. This is excellent. This game adds a “farm” feature where you can plant the stat-raising seeds you find, and after a set period of real time they’ll grow into much more effective stat-raising fruits. Buying “Warehouse keys” from the in-app store gives you access to several treasure rooms and a multi-part bonus dungeon.
Speaking of that: After about two hours, the ads go from “barely noticeable” to “totally insane”, which is actually pretty clever. It gives you a “try before you buy” experience of the game, and then remains “playable” for the remainder, but unpleasant. Because their goal is clearly less to show you the ads (that’s obviously not the profit center here) but to convince you to pay the $5 for the full ad-free version of the game. Also, you get 800 free in-app currency crystals with the ad-free game, enough to unlock the two extra farm pots, all four characters’ third accessory slots, and the seven Warehouse doors. I was impressed enough to actually fork over the five bucks.
The game is astoundingly breakable, even without using the IAP store. When you get the ship, there are unmarked, empty islands that feature either metal enemies (give massive XP drops but can only be killed by critical hits) or gold enemies (very strong but given massive gold drops). The metal enemies, if you’re careful and a little patient, can level your characters dozens of levels in only a few battles. Because of Lunaria’s special leveling method—she has to eat accessory gems to get stat boosts, rather than earning XP—she’ll fall well behind the rest of the party. But then you’re strong enough to fight gold enemies for cash, and you can buy the alpha elemental gems from Port Topaz and feed them to her by the dozen. Her stats max at 9999, not that you need to be anywhere near that to beat the game or even the bonus bosses. At level 100+, you can instant-win fights in the postgame final dungeon. (Though the bonus dungeon’s higher floors will still kick your ass.)
Plot-wise, there’s nothing particularly new here. Four unlikely heroes from different nations reveal their secrets and learn the power of friendship. Along the way, they rescue people and defeat demons and collect random drops and visit every location on the map. The villains end up unusually sympathetic and the true ending is shockingly positive and non-violent.
The character design reads like a laundry list of otaku fetishes (though, admittedly, I probably wouldn’t realize this if I saw them in a vacuum): One of the nations is all shape-shifting slime girls; and there are two in your party, one of whom likes to glom onto the main character and the other who likes to squeeze into small spaces. Another nation is all anthropomorphic animal people. The shipping trade is run by an entire association of combat maids in frilly dresses; their leader is prone to punishing people with comedic violence. It’s…a little weird.
Overall: While it’s still a standard jrpg, the folks at KEMCO have clearly been learning and improving their games. The plot is fine, respectable; the systems are very nice and it’s fun to play. Recommended among this style of game.
Ad-Supported KEMCO Games #2. Played in 2016. Published by EXE-Create.
A boy with a mysterious power meets a shapeshifting girl just as the royal families of the three major nations start vanishing. Representatives of the three nations will all need to come together to find out what truth of the past was lost, and how it’s returned to haunt them.
Mechanically, this is a culmination of a lot of things the earlier KEMCO games had introduced: Each character has elemental magic they learn and you can sacrifice accessory slots to give them access to other elements. There’s a limit break bar that fills during battle and can be spent for super-powerful effects. You can merge and upgrade your weapons, which have various special abilities and you find in abundance. There are randomly large, mini and metal versions of standard enemies. The mini-map is useful, the dungeons have some interesting map designs, there are reminders on the menu screen of where to go next, and there are two dozen sidequests that are neatly organized.
New stuff: There’s an Earthbound-style feature that you can enable which lets you instant-win battles that are well below your level. This is excellent. This game adds a “farm” feature where you can plant the stat-raising seeds you find, and after a set period of real time they’ll grow into much more effective stat-raising fruits. Buying “Warehouse keys” from the in-app store gives you access to several treasure rooms and a multi-part bonus dungeon.
Speaking of that: After about two hours, the ads go from “barely noticeable” to “totally insane”, which is actually pretty clever. It gives you a “try before you buy” experience of the game, and then remains “playable” for the remainder, but unpleasant. Because their goal is clearly less to show you the ads (that’s obviously not the profit center here) but to convince you to pay the $5 for the full ad-free version of the game. Also, you get 800 free in-app currency crystals with the ad-free game, enough to unlock the two extra farm pots, all four characters’ third accessory slots, and the seven Warehouse doors. I was impressed enough to actually fork over the five bucks.
The game is astoundingly breakable, even without using the IAP store. When you get the ship, there are unmarked, empty islands that feature either metal enemies (give massive XP drops but can only be killed by critical hits) or gold enemies (very strong but given massive gold drops). The metal enemies, if you’re careful and a little patient, can level your characters dozens of levels in only a few battles. Because of Lunaria’s special leveling method—she has to eat accessory gems to get stat boosts, rather than earning XP—she’ll fall well behind the rest of the party. But then you’re strong enough to fight gold enemies for cash, and you can buy the alpha elemental gems from Port Topaz and feed them to her by the dozen. Her stats max at 9999, not that you need to be anywhere near that to beat the game or even the bonus bosses. At level 100+, you can instant-win fights in the postgame final dungeon. (Though the bonus dungeon’s higher floors will still kick your ass.)
Plot-wise, there’s nothing particularly new here. Four unlikely heroes from different nations reveal their secrets and learn the power of friendship. Along the way, they rescue people and defeat demons and collect random drops and visit every location on the map. The villains end up unusually sympathetic and the true ending is shockingly positive and non-violent.
The character design reads like a laundry list of otaku fetishes (though, admittedly, I probably wouldn’t realize this if I saw them in a vacuum): One of the nations is all shape-shifting slime girls; and there are two in your party, one of whom likes to glom onto the main character and the other who likes to squeeze into small spaces. Another nation is all anthropomorphic animal people. The shipping trade is run by an entire association of combat maids in frilly dresses; their leader is prone to punishing people with comedic violence. It’s…a little weird.
Overall: While it’s still a standard jrpg, the folks at KEMCO have clearly been learning and improving their games. The plot is fine, respectable; the systems are very nice and it’s fun to play. Recommended among this style of game.
The issue with Kemco games is that their titles are… really not distinctive and some of these seem like the kind of thing I’d enjoy but I’ll bet dollars to donuts I won’t remember what they are called when they go on sale
Why do you think I made a spreadsheet? (Well, besides the fact that I'm me and make spreadsheets for everything.)
It was an act of wisdom and preservation
Grace of Letoile
Amazon Underground “Actually Free” Games #1. Played in 2016. Published by Magitec.
Vedley made a stupid mistake in his youth and his parents were killed by a monster because of it. When a mysterious stranger tells him that he can use the power of the Letoile automatons to control time and restore the past, he jumps at the chance without even asking for details. This was not the best plan.
This is yet another KEMCO jrpg, but playing it via Amazon Underground has an amazing side effect: The IAP points can be purchased for $0.00. So anything you want from the IAP store, you can just get. Nice! There’s nothing game-breaking there, but you can unlock some bonus content and skill slots right off the bat, increase your XP gains, and grab a few stat-boosting accessories. You could also load up on stat-boosting consumables if you had the desire and the patience to do so.
The interface is a little clunkier, a little slower, and feels a little more “choppy” than some of the other games, though there’s nothing abjectly wrong with it.
The magic system is based on skill gems that also provide stat boosts (basically Materia); in battle there’s a chronos gauge that you boost by using skills in certain slots, and allows you to get extra turns or use special attacks. Given that there are also bonus and penalty slots that apply to acting on certain turns, this reminds me most of the Xenosaga boost system.
Dungeon were nothing special; mostly space-filing paths to disguise the fact they were just straight lines with short treasure branches. The final dungeon adds a lot of one-way paths that dump you back at the start, to be annoying. The world map deserves special mention, as this area is apparently an island archipelago connected by bridges; and your characters will only cross the bridges they're currently allowed to by the plot. You visit areas exactly once, in order. It's the most boring, straight-line world map I've ever seen.
There are rare random "Lantern" enemies that drop IAP points. There are two extra dungeons you can buy with IAP points, one mid-game and one just before the final dungeon. Both are moderately tougher than the main game but in turn give you a leg up on the areas right after them. (And both literally feel pasted into the plot.) The bonus dungeons are the only sidequests.
The dialogue in unnecessarily wordy; there are a number of totally pointless scenes where the characters debate about where to go and make a plan, and then are immediately interrupted by an NPC who tells them where to go next. Jethrien asked me at one point if I was actually reading the dialogue because she saw me speeding through text—I was, but it was all so trite and entirely expected that I was blazing through it.
Also, there’s a major character named Blart, which should give you a solid idea of the translation quality.
The game tries to grind into you the idea that Vedley is a good person and always tries to help those in need, and further cements it by giving you morally acceptable opportunities to kill the other Letoiles—the genuinely nice one sacrifices herself for you, a neutral one is killed by one of the others, and the three you have to kill are definitely nasty killers who are also trying to kill you. (Heck, one is actually an active serial killer who has multiple towns shaking in fear.) You’re going to be the hero and the game will go out of its way to make you be heroic.
The thing is, the concept wasn’t a bad one: Six people are told that if they win the robot-battling tournament they can control time and fix their greatest mistake. Only they soon discover that these robots are actually sentient beings with hopes and dreams, and all six of them eventually need to die to make your wish come true. Of course, you find out at the end that the mad scientist who set all this up was only doing it to further his own ends—a Letoile had to get strong enough to actually handle the full power of all six time-controlling Sertze cores, and this was the best way to arrange for that—but when presented with the option of saving the last Letoile or sacrificing her to change the past, a better writer would have made that more of a dilemma, or a pair of alternate endings. Between this game’s clunky writing and the lame “power of friendship / obvious answer” ending, it fell flat.
Overall: Decent concept, mediocre execution; middling as KEMCO games go. Can’t argue with the price, though.
Amazon Underground “Actually Free” Games #1. Played in 2016. Published by Magitec.
Vedley made a stupid mistake in his youth and his parents were killed by a monster because of it. When a mysterious stranger tells him that he can use the power of the Letoile automatons to control time and restore the past, he jumps at the chance without even asking for details. This was not the best plan.
This is yet another KEMCO jrpg, but playing it via Amazon Underground has an amazing side effect: The IAP points can be purchased for $0.00. So anything you want from the IAP store, you can just get. Nice! There’s nothing game-breaking there, but you can unlock some bonus content and skill slots right off the bat, increase your XP gains, and grab a few stat-boosting accessories. You could also load up on stat-boosting consumables if you had the desire and the patience to do so.
The interface is a little clunkier, a little slower, and feels a little more “choppy” than some of the other games, though there’s nothing abjectly wrong with it.
The magic system is based on skill gems that also provide stat boosts (basically Materia); in battle there’s a chronos gauge that you boost by using skills in certain slots, and allows you to get extra turns or use special attacks. Given that there are also bonus and penalty slots that apply to acting on certain turns, this reminds me most of the Xenosaga boost system.
Dungeon were nothing special; mostly space-filing paths to disguise the fact they were just straight lines with short treasure branches. The final dungeon adds a lot of one-way paths that dump you back at the start, to be annoying. The world map deserves special mention, as this area is apparently an island archipelago connected by bridges; and your characters will only cross the bridges they're currently allowed to by the plot. You visit areas exactly once, in order. It's the most boring, straight-line world map I've ever seen.
There are rare random "Lantern" enemies that drop IAP points. There are two extra dungeons you can buy with IAP points, one mid-game and one just before the final dungeon. Both are moderately tougher than the main game but in turn give you a leg up on the areas right after them. (And both literally feel pasted into the plot.) The bonus dungeons are the only sidequests.
The dialogue in unnecessarily wordy; there are a number of totally pointless scenes where the characters debate about where to go and make a plan, and then are immediately interrupted by an NPC who tells them where to go next. Jethrien asked me at one point if I was actually reading the dialogue because she saw me speeding through text—I was, but it was all so trite and entirely expected that I was blazing through it.
Also, there’s a major character named Blart, which should give you a solid idea of the translation quality.
The game tries to grind into you the idea that Vedley is a good person and always tries to help those in need, and further cements it by giving you morally acceptable opportunities to kill the other Letoiles—the genuinely nice one sacrifices herself for you, a neutral one is killed by one of the others, and the three you have to kill are definitely nasty killers who are also trying to kill you. (Heck, one is actually an active serial killer who has multiple towns shaking in fear.) You’re going to be the hero and the game will go out of its way to make you be heroic.
The thing is, the concept wasn’t a bad one: Six people are told that if they win the robot-battling tournament they can control time and fix their greatest mistake. Only they soon discover that these robots are actually sentient beings with hopes and dreams, and all six of them eventually need to die to make your wish come true. Of course, you find out at the end that the mad scientist who set all this up was only doing it to further his own ends—a Letoile had to get strong enough to actually handle the full power of all six time-controlling Sertze cores, and this was the best way to arrange for that—but when presented with the option of saving the last Letoile or sacrificing her to change the past, a better writer would have made that more of a dilemma, or a pair of alternate endings. Between this game’s clunky writing and the lame “power of friendship / obvious answer” ending, it fell flat.
Overall: Decent concept, mediocre execution; middling as KEMCO games go. Can’t argue with the price, though.
Soul Historica
Amazon Underground “Actually Free” Games #2. Played in 2016. Published by Magitec.
In a world where humanity’s extinction by soul-stealing monsters has only been held off by the prophetic abilities of the mysterious Nemesis and the Soul Cages that he introduced, York discovers that Nemesis’ intentions may not be as pure as he’s always been taught. When his home town is burned and his girlfriend is killed in a deliberate sacrifice by Nemesis, he leaves the order of knights. When he discovers that his wife is still alive and has been held captive by the order, he vows to discover the truth behind Nemesis’ actions.
Clearly, KEMCO divided up their catalog so that games from some developers would end up in the Humble Bundles, while games from others would end up on Amazon Underground. This game is by the same developer as Grace of Letoile and has a similar feel, with only two sidequests (the IAP dungeons), and rare encounters with “Lantern” enemies that drop IAP points. The artwork is similar, and the battle system is as well, being turn-based with a moving action bar. Characters can move around during battle, and each weapon has an effective range of attack, so your position matters. Also, there’s a “tension” bar that fills up as you attack: The fuller it is, the more damage you do, but you also take more damage and healing effects are less effective.
The class/ability system is based around monster souls that you equip in your Soul Cage that grant abilities like accessories do in most games. Which selection of souls you use also lets you get a special ability from your Soul Cage, and determines which classes you can switch into. Each class has 3 levels (and comes with associated stats and equipment options) and each level unlocks a new power that the character keeps permanently. There are three general groups of classes (fighter, scout and wizard) and each character is locked into one of those three categories.
Note that this game, despite having a seemingly-complicated system, is still totally breakable. Just buy an Original Soul at the IAP store—it allows you to set your soul cage to “special attack”, which means your normal attacks hit everything and ignore range.
Beating the game gives access to a New Game Plus and an IAP item that lets you skip ahead through the story. As there’s a major plot branch, this gives a nice opportunity to play through both sides. The only hiccup is that while you keep equipment, souls and class progress, you don’t actually keep your levels, so jumping ahead in the story can be a bit harrowing for your first few fights (even with end-game equipment) with your level 1 characters.
The story here is notably better than most KEMCO games, to the point where I actually cared enough to take detailed notes.
Overall: This is short and decent from a gameplay perspective, but I think it actually manages to have one of the best plots of any KEMCO game—lots of things happen with relatively little filler (besides replaying the multiple paths, and those are both fast and worth it for the plot), and it doesn’t all wrap up neatly. Nice!
Amazon Underground “Actually Free” Games #2. Played in 2016. Published by Magitec.
In a world where humanity’s extinction by soul-stealing monsters has only been held off by the prophetic abilities of the mysterious Nemesis and the Soul Cages that he introduced, York discovers that Nemesis’ intentions may not be as pure as he’s always been taught. When his home town is burned and his girlfriend is killed in a deliberate sacrifice by Nemesis, he leaves the order of knights. When he discovers that his wife is still alive and has been held captive by the order, he vows to discover the truth behind Nemesis’ actions.
Clearly, KEMCO divided up their catalog so that games from some developers would end up in the Humble Bundles, while games from others would end up on Amazon Underground. This game is by the same developer as Grace of Letoile and has a similar feel, with only two sidequests (the IAP dungeons), and rare encounters with “Lantern” enemies that drop IAP points. The artwork is similar, and the battle system is as well, being turn-based with a moving action bar. Characters can move around during battle, and each weapon has an effective range of attack, so your position matters. Also, there’s a “tension” bar that fills up as you attack: The fuller it is, the more damage you do, but you also take more damage and healing effects are less effective.
The class/ability system is based around monster souls that you equip in your Soul Cage that grant abilities like accessories do in most games. Which selection of souls you use also lets you get a special ability from your Soul Cage, and determines which classes you can switch into. Each class has 3 levels (and comes with associated stats and equipment options) and each level unlocks a new power that the character keeps permanently. There are three general groups of classes (fighter, scout and wizard) and each character is locked into one of those three categories.
Note that this game, despite having a seemingly-complicated system, is still totally breakable. Just buy an Original Soul at the IAP store—it allows you to set your soul cage to “special attack”, which means your normal attacks hit everything and ignore range.
Beating the game gives access to a New Game Plus and an IAP item that lets you skip ahead through the story. As there’s a major plot branch, this gives a nice opportunity to play through both sides. The only hiccup is that while you keep equipment, souls and class progress, you don’t actually keep your levels, so jumping ahead in the story can be a bit harrowing for your first few fights (even with end-game equipment) with your level 1 characters.
The story here is notably better than most KEMCO games, to the point where I actually cared enough to take detailed notes.
The big reveal is that the world these characters live in is an artificial “Sandbox World” created to house the few survivors of humanity after a plague called “the Curse” destroyed humanity in the previous one. Disembodied souls inhabit this virtual world, and an Angel will eventually arrive to lead them to “the Promised Land” aka the real world. Lord Nemesis is the System Administrator, and Fiora’s soul is the key to the Gate to that world. Arioch has a high “clearance level” like Nemesis, which allows him to make adjustments to the world’s settings.
The game branches around the halfway point, allowing you to follow either York or Fiora (and giving you a different ending depending on who you choose). I opted to follow York first, as he was already buffed and good to go. (I was very tempted to go back and re-play the game to choose Fiora from early on, because she dies fairly early on York’s path.)
The next set of reveals is that the Sandbox World has reached its limits and is degrading. The “Angel” system was supposed to be using the souls of people who died in the Sandbox to build a Curse-resistant humanity, but it malfunctioned and started sending monsters to claim more souls. Nemesis couldn’t fix it, so she came inside and set up the resistance. She also used the power of “restoration” to rewind/reset the world, which is how she’d been able to read the future—but those resets were in turn damaging the Sandbox. Nemesis was the real Eris all along, and Fiora was the daughter of York and Eris, who survived through a reset by being placed in a copy of Eris’ body; and her soul was the one the Angel needed to create the new bodies. Arioch was an aspect of the Angel system, artificially-created to manage the system. He dies to upload Fiora’s soul and complete his mission.
In York’s ending, he’s left a broken wreck of a man, with his world torn apart and his wife and daughter dead. Presumably the rest of humanity evacuates back into the real world as the Sandbox World crumbles.
In Fiora’s story, she opts to go with Arioch, but changes her mind when York and Nemesis catch up with them. Ibis is stabbed with the sacred dagger while protecting her and dies. The party kills Arioch. Nemesis reveals her identity as Eris. Arioch is revealed as an AI created by the Angel system, which goes out of control without him. The party then retrieves the flying machine so they can shut down the Sandbox World’s terminal connection and seal it off from the Angel. The Angel proves too strong, but Arioch reappears, and by killing him again the party is able to self-destruct the Angel, which forever cuts them off from the real world. In that ending, the world is doomed, but Fiora and Olber go in search of a new way to save it and York and Eris get to live happily in the time they have remaining.
But there’s a third path, Arioch, that opens once you’ve beaten the other two. It starts almost identical to Fiora’s path, but then Nemesis starts revealing her identity to everyone. And Arioch reveals…that he’s York! Nemesis had been using the restoration function to save York’s life by rewinding the Sandbox World. Arioch was made of fragments of York’s soul, left behind with the Angel every time he was restored and then combined with various administrative functions. After much debate, Fiora opts to sacrifice herself but everyone else survives.
York’s interactions with Arioch make is very clear how much he hates himself. Once again, Arioch dies to upload Fiora’s soul into the Angel system. But then the refugee groups in the Promised Land start being attacked by monsters, and the party travels through to a new world.
The Arioch program/soul still exists, in the administrative tower. He explains that Eris’ father’s true research was the “Angelic Evangelism Project,” trying to build a better humanity. When it was shut down for ethical concerns, Eris’ father created the Curse, to shut humanity away into the Sandbox World and then force them to evolve. The Angel system is now out of control, because even though the new humans can withstand the Curse, they aren’t as evolved as it wants them to be. Hence creating monsters to kill them in the real world. Turns out that Eris’ father loaded his own soul into the Angel before dying; and he’s gone from Evilutionary Biologist to full-on Genocidal Maniac. They destroy him and the system, and retrieve Fiora’s soul in the process. Some time later, humanity has been relocated to the real world, the Knights are clearing out the remaining monsters, and Eris is pregnant with a new body for Fiora’s soul. A messy, but happy, final ending.
The game branches around the halfway point, allowing you to follow either York or Fiora (and giving you a different ending depending on who you choose). I opted to follow York first, as he was already buffed and good to go. (I was very tempted to go back and re-play the game to choose Fiora from early on, because she dies fairly early on York’s path.)
The next set of reveals is that the Sandbox World has reached its limits and is degrading. The “Angel” system was supposed to be using the souls of people who died in the Sandbox to build a Curse-resistant humanity, but it malfunctioned and started sending monsters to claim more souls. Nemesis couldn’t fix it, so she came inside and set up the resistance. She also used the power of “restoration” to rewind/reset the world, which is how she’d been able to read the future—but those resets were in turn damaging the Sandbox. Nemesis was the real Eris all along, and Fiora was the daughter of York and Eris, who survived through a reset by being placed in a copy of Eris’ body; and her soul was the one the Angel needed to create the new bodies. Arioch was an aspect of the Angel system, artificially-created to manage the system. He dies to upload Fiora’s soul and complete his mission.
In York’s ending, he’s left a broken wreck of a man, with his world torn apart and his wife and daughter dead. Presumably the rest of humanity evacuates back into the real world as the Sandbox World crumbles.
In Fiora’s story, she opts to go with Arioch, but changes her mind when York and Nemesis catch up with them. Ibis is stabbed with the sacred dagger while protecting her and dies. The party kills Arioch. Nemesis reveals her identity as Eris. Arioch is revealed as an AI created by the Angel system, which goes out of control without him. The party then retrieves the flying machine so they can shut down the Sandbox World’s terminal connection and seal it off from the Angel. The Angel proves too strong, but Arioch reappears, and by killing him again the party is able to self-destruct the Angel, which forever cuts them off from the real world. In that ending, the world is doomed, but Fiora and Olber go in search of a new way to save it and York and Eris get to live happily in the time they have remaining.
But there’s a third path, Arioch, that opens once you’ve beaten the other two. It starts almost identical to Fiora’s path, but then Nemesis starts revealing her identity to everyone. And Arioch reveals…that he’s York! Nemesis had been using the restoration function to save York’s life by rewinding the Sandbox World. Arioch was made of fragments of York’s soul, left behind with the Angel every time he was restored and then combined with various administrative functions. After much debate, Fiora opts to sacrifice herself but everyone else survives.
York’s interactions with Arioch make is very clear how much he hates himself. Once again, Arioch dies to upload Fiora’s soul into the Angel system. But then the refugee groups in the Promised Land start being attacked by monsters, and the party travels through to a new world.
The Arioch program/soul still exists, in the administrative tower. He explains that Eris’ father’s true research was the “Angelic Evangelism Project,” trying to build a better humanity. When it was shut down for ethical concerns, Eris’ father created the Curse, to shut humanity away into the Sandbox World and then force them to evolve. The Angel system is now out of control, because even though the new humans can withstand the Curse, they aren’t as evolved as it wants them to be. Hence creating monsters to kill them in the real world. Turns out that Eris’ father loaded his own soul into the Angel before dying; and he’s gone from Evilutionary Biologist to full-on Genocidal Maniac. They destroy him and the system, and retrieve Fiora’s soul in the process. Some time later, humanity has been relocated to the real world, the Knights are clearing out the remaining monsters, and Eris is pregnant with a new body for Fiora’s soul. A messy, but happy, final ending.
Overall: This is short and decent from a gameplay perspective, but I think it actually manages to have one of the best plots of any KEMCO game—lots of things happen with relatively little filler (besides replaying the multiple paths, and those are both fast and worth it for the plot), and it doesn’t all wrap up neatly. Nice!
Dead Dragons
Amazon Underground “Actually Free” Games #3. Played in 2016. Published by Magitec.
Dragons once ruled the world, but humans defeated them 100 years ago. Now, there’s a rumor one has been seen again. When Will hunts down that dragon, he’s scarred with a cursed dragonmark that will give him awesome powers but then kill him. But were the dragons really evil, and was their slaughter really justified?
Despite the innovations it presents (see below), this feels very primitive. I think I saw “janky” used in a description of the graphics and controls, and that feels like an appropriate word. It’s easy to slide off the touchpad or walk the wrong way, and this developer loves damage tiles.
The skill system is based on points that you distribute to your stats, which in turn unlock skills. Putting points into attack gets you attack skills; putting points into defense gets you buff skills; etc. (You don’t know what you’re going to get, of course.) They make an attempt to make battles more active by adding a set of three diamonds that appear when you do a normal attack; if you hit the right one you get a better chance at a crit and it fills the Ruin gauge (limit meter). The right one seems to be randomized, though, so it’s not really a strategic addition so much as one more button to press hopefully.
The Toucharcade.com review of this game noted of Magitek-developed KEMCO games: “Typically, their games have pretty good plots, weak characters, awful dungeon designs, at least some vague attempt at gameplay innovation, poor technical performance, and story content locked behind IAP.” That describes this game pretty well, though in this case, the plot didn’t grab me enough that I felt the weak gameplay was worth it.
It seems like the plot is going somewhere, but the translation isn’t great and the characters don’t come off particularly well, which means I don’t really want to slog through hoping for interesting material.
Overall: I couldn’t get into it, which was surprising and disappointing after Soul Historica. I suspect I should wait a bit before I try the next KEMCO game, just to go into it fresh.
Amazon Underground “Actually Free” Games #3. Played in 2016. Published by Magitec.
Dragons once ruled the world, but humans defeated them 100 years ago. Now, there’s a rumor one has been seen again. When Will hunts down that dragon, he’s scarred with a cursed dragonmark that will give him awesome powers but then kill him. But were the dragons really evil, and was their slaughter really justified?
Despite the innovations it presents (see below), this feels very primitive. I think I saw “janky” used in a description of the graphics and controls, and that feels like an appropriate word. It’s easy to slide off the touchpad or walk the wrong way, and this developer loves damage tiles.
The skill system is based on points that you distribute to your stats, which in turn unlock skills. Putting points into attack gets you attack skills; putting points into defense gets you buff skills; etc. (You don’t know what you’re going to get, of course.) They make an attempt to make battles more active by adding a set of three diamonds that appear when you do a normal attack; if you hit the right one you get a better chance at a crit and it fills the Ruin gauge (limit meter). The right one seems to be randomized, though, so it’s not really a strategic addition so much as one more button to press hopefully.
The Toucharcade.com review of this game noted of Magitek-developed KEMCO games: “Typically, their games have pretty good plots, weak characters, awful dungeon designs, at least some vague attempt at gameplay innovation, poor technical performance, and story content locked behind IAP.” That describes this game pretty well, though in this case, the plot didn’t grab me enough that I felt the weak gameplay was worth it.
It seems like the plot is going somewhere, but the translation isn’t great and the characters don’t come off particularly well, which means I don’t really want to slog through hoping for interesting material.
Overall: I couldn’t get into it, which was surprising and disappointing after Soul Historica. I suspect I should wait a bit before I try the next KEMCO game, just to go into it fresh.
Alphadia 2
The Second KEMCO Humble Bundle #6. Played in 2016. Published by EXE-Create.
Two centuries after Energi mostly disappeared (in the ending of the first Alphadia), the mechanical revolution has taken place. Reunited childhood friends Leon and Milfy are working for the Guild, doing odd jobs and protecting the locals from monsters.
So, really, what you need to do is read my review of the first game. Because practically everything still applies: The skill system is the same, the dungeons are wildly uneven, the equipment is all oddly front-loaded, there’s too much enforced linearity, every item has “energi” in the name, only buff/debuff spells matter and autobattle is a must.
The difficulty takes a jump around the time you reach the town of Starway, and the Schwartz Pass, which is a far, far larger and less linear dungeon than any of the previous ones. They also revisit remade-but-very-similar versions of the tower dungeons from the first game. (Including all the dick-move pits and spikes.) Somewhere around the time you get a ship, the character advancement slows significantly and the plot seems to needlessly stretch out. There aren’t any equipment upgrades to purchase once you get the ship, as you’ve already effectively visited every town. The airship makes half a dozen interesting-looking dungeon locations accessible, but if you go to any but the next step in the plot sequence the characters scold you about entering dangerous areas without a good reason.
Needless to say, chunks of the plot make no sense if you haven’t played the first game. Enah is now the guildmistress and looks exactly the same, though she’s lost all of her high-level skills. Ash went inert for 150 years, then woke up and has been investigating “energi holes” and getting progressively less stable.
The thing that pissed me off the most is that, while you have six characters, two of them (your better mages) sit out half the boss battles, and then your strongest fighter abandons the party for the final boss battle. Characters not in the active party don’t gain levels as quickly and don’t gain skills at all, which means if you’d been using said fighter (and I was), you suddenly are at ¾ strength for the final battle. Not cool, game, not cool.
Overall: If you enjoyed the first Alphadia, this is more of the same to a ridiculous degree. Honestly, though, it’s not great, and KEMCO has much stronger offerings.
The Second KEMCO Humble Bundle #6. Played in 2016. Published by EXE-Create.
Two centuries after Energi mostly disappeared (in the ending of the first Alphadia), the mechanical revolution has taken place. Reunited childhood friends Leon and Milfy are working for the Guild, doing odd jobs and protecting the locals from monsters.
So, really, what you need to do is read my review of the first game. Because practically everything still applies: The skill system is the same, the dungeons are wildly uneven, the equipment is all oddly front-loaded, there’s too much enforced linearity, every item has “energi” in the name, only buff/debuff spells matter and autobattle is a must.
The difficulty takes a jump around the time you reach the town of Starway, and the Schwartz Pass, which is a far, far larger and less linear dungeon than any of the previous ones. They also revisit remade-but-very-similar versions of the tower dungeons from the first game. (Including all the dick-move pits and spikes.) Somewhere around the time you get a ship, the character advancement slows significantly and the plot seems to needlessly stretch out. There aren’t any equipment upgrades to purchase once you get the ship, as you’ve already effectively visited every town. The airship makes half a dozen interesting-looking dungeon locations accessible, but if you go to any but the next step in the plot sequence the characters scold you about entering dangerous areas without a good reason.
Needless to say, chunks of the plot make no sense if you haven’t played the first game. Enah is now the guildmistress and looks exactly the same, though she’s lost all of her high-level skills. Ash went inert for 150 years, then woke up and has been investigating “energi holes” and getting progressively less stable.
The thing that pissed me off the most is that, while you have six characters, two of them (your better mages) sit out half the boss battles, and then your strongest fighter abandons the party for the final boss battle. Characters not in the active party don’t gain levels as quickly and don’t gain skills at all, which means if you’d been using said fighter (and I was), you suddenly are at ¾ strength for the final battle. Not cool, game, not cool.
Overall: If you enjoyed the first Alphadia, this is more of the same to a ridiculous degree. Honestly, though, it’s not great, and KEMCO has much stronger offerings.
Journey to Kreisia
The Second KEMCO Humble Bundle #7. Played in 2016. Published by EXE-Create.
After suddenly being summoned to an unknown world, a high schooler by the name of Yusis learns of his destiny to become the Savior and face off against the Overlord - a being who threatens the destruction of Kreisia.
Most of the game systems (enemy styles, spells/skills, dungeon layouts) are exactly what you’d expect from the developer of the Asdivine series and Illusion of L'Phalcia; no big surprises here. I was going to be annoyed with the grinding, then I realized that (like those other games) there was a difficulty slider. I’ve never seen a game where the virtual keypad blocked off this much of the screen. I’m guessing it was added to the game as an afterthought.
You seem to acquire IAP points randomly over time—I’d occasionally check and noticed I’d accumulated more. There are a few decent items you can buy with IAP (the accessory that restores your HP to full every time you act in combat is impressively broken, and buying a second “heavy orb” lets you short-circuit several dungeons) but most of it has too many downsides to actually be useful. I have to wonder how much they actually playtest some of this stuff.
The “guy gets mistaken for a pervert” and “no one talks to each other” and “women react with hilarious violence” bad anime-style thing is starting to get old. Especially since it happens in every game by this developer.
While the translation is generally fine, the host of the battle arena is called “Tranny Maid” REALLY?
Overall: There's nothing here I haven't seen before from this developer. When I wrote this seven years ago, I commented "It's not their best; it's hardly their worst. Middle-of-the-pack, only recommended after a number of other KEMCO games." But you know what? They have nearly a hundred games, skip this one and you can play one where the translator was smart enough not to use a slur as a random side character.
The Second KEMCO Humble Bundle #7. Played in 2016. Published by EXE-Create.
After suddenly being summoned to an unknown world, a high schooler by the name of Yusis learns of his destiny to become the Savior and face off against the Overlord - a being who threatens the destruction of Kreisia.
Most of the game systems (enemy styles, spells/skills, dungeon layouts) are exactly what you’d expect from the developer of the Asdivine series and Illusion of L'Phalcia; no big surprises here. I was going to be annoyed with the grinding, then I realized that (like those other games) there was a difficulty slider. I’ve never seen a game where the virtual keypad blocked off this much of the screen. I’m guessing it was added to the game as an afterthought.
You seem to acquire IAP points randomly over time—I’d occasionally check and noticed I’d accumulated more. There are a few decent items you can buy with IAP (the accessory that restores your HP to full every time you act in combat is impressively broken, and buying a second “heavy orb” lets you short-circuit several dungeons) but most of it has too many downsides to actually be useful. I have to wonder how much they actually playtest some of this stuff.
The “guy gets mistaken for a pervert” and “no one talks to each other” and “women react with hilarious violence” bad anime-style thing is starting to get old. Especially since it happens in every game by this developer.
While the translation is generally fine, the host of the battle arena is called “Tranny Maid” REALLY?
They're obviously aping Final Fantasy X with the big "twist" that the summoned hero is corrupted after the final battle and becomes the next Overlord, and though I'm curious to see if the cycle gets broken (and how) in the "True" ending, not enough to New Game Plus the entire 10 hour game to find out.
Overall: There's nothing here I haven't seen before from this developer. When I wrote this seven years ago, I commented "It's not their best; it's hardly their worst. Middle-of-the-pack, only recommended after a number of other KEMCO games." But you know what? They have nearly a hundred games, skip this one and you can play one where the translator was smart enough not to use a slur as a random side character.
Soul of Deva
KEMCO Holiday Sale #1. Played in 2017. Published by Hit-Point.
Sania is the mysterious Savior, gifted with magical powers that can defeat demons. She attracts a group of demon and half-demon bodyguards to help guide her to Raglis, the organization in the far west that might help her use her powers to save the world.
I bought 7 more KEMCO rpgs in their holiday sale each for $1. I’ll definitely get a buck’s worth of entertainment out of each.
I played this game for a full two hours before I realized that it was a fancy version of the Journey to the West. Sania is Xuanzang, Shin is Son Wukong (with his nickname “ape-man,” fiery temper, blunt speaking style, clever thinking and especially the sequence where he gets a magic crown locked on his head), Hagg is the childish and food-obsessed Zhu Bajie, Gyok is the pious and loyal Sha Wujing-equivalent. The goal is to travel all the way across the world, but when you do finally get there, you learn that things aren’t as they seem.
Oh, and I hope you like the “fantastic racism” trope, because it hits that one hard.
One of the game’s gimmicks is that you can move around during battle: The actual formation doesn’t seem to matter and there doesn’t seem to be a difference between front and back rows, but the act of moving reduces both your damage/accuracy and the damage/accuracy of physical attacks against you. (So, effectively, moving is the same as being in the back row.) There are also moves that can put bombs or blocks on the battlefield that you want to move away from, and items that add buff-providing statues to your side.
The lack of healing magic gets old really fast, and the attack magic variety is shockingly limited—among other things, there’s a maximum of only four spells equipped on any character at one time, and you get access to them very slowly. (Especially given that the SECOND dungeon has an enemy only vulnerable to spells, at a point in the game when you have exactly one attack spell and no opportunity to get more.) I was almost four hours in, having gotten through half a dozen dungeons, when a healing spell showed up buried in the list of status ailment orbs in the item shop.
I can't recall the last time that, when given a choice of accessories, the HP-boosting ones seemed like the best bet. Granted, the lack of other stat-boosting accessories to fill the slots (which are often my go-to) plays a role, but the fact that the base HP on most character is insufficient to save you from nastier hits as you get further into the game is more of it. That, plus the aforementioned limited healing magic and the fact that the character-specific special abilities mostly consume HP rather than MP when used.
You have a party-wide pool of “soul points” that you can use to upgrade each character’s weapons on different axis, including physical attack, magical attack, critical hit rate, and accuracy. This is clearly an attempt to make up for there being no "leaked" experience--when a character isn't in the active party, they gain nothing at all. I switched a level 10 Shin back into my active party to grind him when the main three were in the high 20s, and that proved very useful when Sania was removed for the last third of the game. (I don’t recall the last time the clear main character left the party for that long.)
A bunch of the playability considerations of other games aren’t here: No useful indicators of sidequests--not only are the NPCs that grant them not marked or indicated, the "Journal" feature doesn't record them. No minimap at all, though the dungeon design is decent and doesn't generally need one. You can fast-exit any dungeon, though, and fast-travel via the world map is unlocked fairly early.
They do try to break up setting battles to “auto,” also, with the aforementioned enemies only vulnerable to magic, and also enemies that you need to “soften up” with the defense-reducing earth spell before physical attacks are useful against them. I found that in later dungeons I was mostly using Hagg’s World Ruin attack, which hits all enemies for a ton of damage, to burn through random battles quickly.
The IAP choices are interesting—you can buy fun accessories and Soul Points for real money, of course, but there’s also a timer that grants you a bonus battle every half-hour, in which you can win some of those purchasable items. I ended up with an accessory that added +100 SP when my average SP was still around 20; and a +500 HP accessory when my average HP was in the 200s. You can also spend one Atoma Slip (IAP currency; and you get around 50 of them for free as you progress through the game) to revive your party to full when you fall in battle and continue without the enemies recovering at all.
Which contributed to my ability and willingness to complete the game. Without any of the IAP stuff, you’re in for some heavy grinding, especially for the last few bosses—I burned through six Atoma Slips and most of my items on the final boss, and then opted to skip the post-game content. (But I loved the normal ending, anyway and didn’t need to see any more: Sania becomes the new leader of Raglis, but when forced to choose between Sania and the Demon Queen, Shin instead opts to go with Hagg—who’s confessed being in love with him several times—and go open an orphanage together.)
Overall: While the difficult was a bit higher than I usually prefer, this was still a decent dozen-hour classic jrpg. They have a bunch of gameplay innovations which work out okay, and a fairly standard plot with a couple of cute bits.
KEMCO Holiday Sale #1. Played in 2017. Published by Hit-Point.
Sania is the mysterious Savior, gifted with magical powers that can defeat demons. She attracts a group of demon and half-demon bodyguards to help guide her to Raglis, the organization in the far west that might help her use her powers to save the world.
I bought 7 more KEMCO rpgs in their holiday sale each for $1. I’ll definitely get a buck’s worth of entertainment out of each.
I played this game for a full two hours before I realized that it was a fancy version of the Journey to the West. Sania is Xuanzang, Shin is Son Wukong (with his nickname “ape-man,” fiery temper, blunt speaking style, clever thinking and especially the sequence where he gets a magic crown locked on his head), Hagg is the childish and food-obsessed Zhu Bajie, Gyok is the pious and loyal Sha Wujing-equivalent. The goal is to travel all the way across the world, but when you do finally get there, you learn that things aren’t as they seem.
Oh, and I hope you like the “fantastic racism” trope, because it hits that one hard.
One of the game’s gimmicks is that you can move around during battle: The actual formation doesn’t seem to matter and there doesn’t seem to be a difference between front and back rows, but the act of moving reduces both your damage/accuracy and the damage/accuracy of physical attacks against you. (So, effectively, moving is the same as being in the back row.) There are also moves that can put bombs or blocks on the battlefield that you want to move away from, and items that add buff-providing statues to your side.
The lack of healing magic gets old really fast, and the attack magic variety is shockingly limited—among other things, there’s a maximum of only four spells equipped on any character at one time, and you get access to them very slowly. (Especially given that the SECOND dungeon has an enemy only vulnerable to spells, at a point in the game when you have exactly one attack spell and no opportunity to get more.) I was almost four hours in, having gotten through half a dozen dungeons, when a healing spell showed up buried in the list of status ailment orbs in the item shop.
I can't recall the last time that, when given a choice of accessories, the HP-boosting ones seemed like the best bet. Granted, the lack of other stat-boosting accessories to fill the slots (which are often my go-to) plays a role, but the fact that the base HP on most character is insufficient to save you from nastier hits as you get further into the game is more of it. That, plus the aforementioned limited healing magic and the fact that the character-specific special abilities mostly consume HP rather than MP when used.
You have a party-wide pool of “soul points” that you can use to upgrade each character’s weapons on different axis, including physical attack, magical attack, critical hit rate, and accuracy. This is clearly an attempt to make up for there being no "leaked" experience--when a character isn't in the active party, they gain nothing at all. I switched a level 10 Shin back into my active party to grind him when the main three were in the high 20s, and that proved very useful when Sania was removed for the last third of the game. (I don’t recall the last time the clear main character left the party for that long.)
A bunch of the playability considerations of other games aren’t here: No useful indicators of sidequests--not only are the NPCs that grant them not marked or indicated, the "Journal" feature doesn't record them. No minimap at all, though the dungeon design is decent and doesn't generally need one. You can fast-exit any dungeon, though, and fast-travel via the world map is unlocked fairly early.
They do try to break up setting battles to “auto,” also, with the aforementioned enemies only vulnerable to magic, and also enemies that you need to “soften up” with the defense-reducing earth spell before physical attacks are useful against them. I found that in later dungeons I was mostly using Hagg’s World Ruin attack, which hits all enemies for a ton of damage, to burn through random battles quickly.
The IAP choices are interesting—you can buy fun accessories and Soul Points for real money, of course, but there’s also a timer that grants you a bonus battle every half-hour, in which you can win some of those purchasable items. I ended up with an accessory that added +100 SP when my average SP was still around 20; and a +500 HP accessory when my average HP was in the 200s. You can also spend one Atoma Slip (IAP currency; and you get around 50 of them for free as you progress through the game) to revive your party to full when you fall in battle and continue without the enemies recovering at all.
Which contributed to my ability and willingness to complete the game. Without any of the IAP stuff, you’re in for some heavy grinding, especially for the last few bosses—I burned through six Atoma Slips and most of my items on the final boss, and then opted to skip the post-game content. (But I loved the normal ending, anyway and didn’t need to see any more: Sania becomes the new leader of Raglis, but when forced to choose between Sania and the Demon Queen, Shin instead opts to go with Hagg—who’s confessed being in love with him several times—and go open an orphanage together.)
Overall: While the difficult was a bit higher than I usually prefer, this was still a decent dozen-hour classic jrpg. They have a bunch of gameplay innovations which work out okay, and a fairly standard plot with a couple of cute bits.
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Bunch of stuff I hate about comedy anime right there and a big reason why I couldn't stand many of the older Tales games.
heh heh heh
Chronus Arc
KEMCO Holiday Sale #2. Played in 2017. Published by Hit-Point.
The 'Chronus Fragments' are needed to prepare for the 'Time Rewinding', which only takes place once every 10 years. On their way to the Chronus Shrine to get the Fragments, Loka and Teth are surrounded by a mysterious man named Geppel and his gang. They demand the Fragments. Teth and Geppel vanish and Loka, the main character, decides to set out on a journey to find them. He is quickly joined by his childhood best friend and a hammer-wielding pop starlet.
As noted previously, these games were each $1, which tends to be a very good price for the KEMCO rpgs, and means I don’t feel too bad when I don’t like one. This game had some very good ideas and some really lousy execution.
The good: Genuine Lufia 2-style puzzle dungeons! You’ve got a magic ring (a la Tales of Phantasia) that you can use on the map screen to do all sorts of puzzle-solving effects. There are blocks to push and pots to lift; there are multiple levels of dungeons with branching paths and lots of non-linear twists and turns.
Enemies are visible in dungeons (and avoidable). There’s a fast-exit available in dungeons and fast-travel on the world map. The magic system lets you apply your choice of metamagic effects via accessories, including double-effect and hit-all.
The bad: The game is really grind-heavy. The dungeons are full of spawn points for crafting items, and need to collect lots of vendortrash to upgrade your weapons and armor. You also need to kill lots of enemies for the “suppression” sidequests, and you’ll need the XP if you want to survive the next dungeon up the chain. So while the puzzles are cool and the dungeon design is very nice, needing to revisit the dungeons and re-do the puzzles to get enough vendortrash to upgrade equipment? That gets old fast.
Apparently you can also class change at level 30 to learn new skills. I never made it far enough to test that system, but clearly it’s an excuse for even more grinding.
You can get points for the IAP store just by fighting battles (10 battles = 1 point), but the store is mostly full of items that you’ll need late in the game, like the key to the bonus dungeon and high-end crafting materials.
Overall: Decent story concept, very nice dungeon design, but waaaay too much grinding. I seriously would have considered paying for IAP points if there was something that let me put the game into “no-grind” easy mode. Ah, well, can’t win ‘em all.
KEMCO Holiday Sale #2. Played in 2017. Published by Hit-Point.
The 'Chronus Fragments' are needed to prepare for the 'Time Rewinding', which only takes place once every 10 years. On their way to the Chronus Shrine to get the Fragments, Loka and Teth are surrounded by a mysterious man named Geppel and his gang. They demand the Fragments. Teth and Geppel vanish and Loka, the main character, decides to set out on a journey to find them. He is quickly joined by his childhood best friend and a hammer-wielding pop starlet.
As noted previously, these games were each $1, which tends to be a very good price for the KEMCO rpgs, and means I don’t feel too bad when I don’t like one. This game had some very good ideas and some really lousy execution.
The good: Genuine Lufia 2-style puzzle dungeons! You’ve got a magic ring (a la Tales of Phantasia) that you can use on the map screen to do all sorts of puzzle-solving effects. There are blocks to push and pots to lift; there are multiple levels of dungeons with branching paths and lots of non-linear twists and turns.
Enemies are visible in dungeons (and avoidable). There’s a fast-exit available in dungeons and fast-travel on the world map. The magic system lets you apply your choice of metamagic effects via accessories, including double-effect and hit-all.
The bad: The game is really grind-heavy. The dungeons are full of spawn points for crafting items, and need to collect lots of vendortrash to upgrade your weapons and armor. You also need to kill lots of enemies for the “suppression” sidequests, and you’ll need the XP if you want to survive the next dungeon up the chain. So while the puzzles are cool and the dungeon design is very nice, needing to revisit the dungeons and re-do the puzzles to get enough vendortrash to upgrade equipment? That gets old fast.
Apparently you can also class change at level 30 to learn new skills. I never made it far enough to test that system, but clearly it’s an excuse for even more grinding.
You can get points for the IAP store just by fighting battles (10 battles = 1 point), but the store is mostly full of items that you’ll need late in the game, like the key to the bonus dungeon and high-end crafting materials.
Overall: Decent story concept, very nice dungeon design, but waaaay too much grinding. I seriously would have considered paying for IAP points if there was something that let me put the game into “no-grind” easy mode. Ah, well, can’t win ‘em all.
Covenant of Solitude
KEMCO Holiday Sale #3. Played in 2017. Published by Magitec.
“You are remarkably honest about your stupidity, aren’t you, Master?”
Fort is bullied because he can talk to monsters, which makes people say he’s one of the lost/rare “genies” who can summon monsters. Meanwhile, Empire/Kingdom relations are heating up and there might be a war soon. When the Empire attacks the village and kills everyone, Fort summons monsters that accidentally kill the girl he loves. Three years later, the Empire is planning to execute a powerless Fort, but a devil named Wicca makes a contract with him so that he can redeem himself.
This is so very “classic jrpg” I’m not sure where to start. Controls are a little clunky; graphics are early-SNES cartoony and not terribly expressive. It’s slow-moving even when you crank up the battle speed. It feels like one of the earlier KEMCO games because, well, it is, having been originally published in 2012.
Your main character, as mentioned, is a summoner, but this isn’t a mon-battle game. The monsters that join your party function like guild mercenaries in Dragon Quest games: You choose a race, class and special ability for them, and there’s some ability to re-spec, but otherwise they’re just generics. They use normal human weapons and armor and gain spells and abilities from a set list. The main character eventually gets most of the best spells from all the classes, allowing him to fill any party role—he gets healing, teleporting, some buffing, and a few attack spells.
The dungeons are nothing special, just the occasional branching path or key-and-lock puzzle. They love damage floors, but that doesn’t really matter because a cheap consumable or low-level thief spell will prevent the damage, and the damage is only a measly 1 HP per step anyway. The dungeon design—particularly the castle layout, which you encounter twice—I’m fairly certain I’ve seen in a different game. (I don’t remember which one, though--Grinsia, by the same developer, is a likely candidate.)
The battle system is your standard turn-based affair with the usual status effects and an unimpressive variety of spells. Most random battles can be handled on Auto, including the significant number you’ll spend grinding so that bosses won’t wipe your party in a turn or two. I had several dungeons where I wasn’t having any trouble with the monsters but then the boss wiped me and I had to grind a few levels. (You know it’s a “classic-style” jrpg when the “tips and tricks” page essentially just says, “grind more.”)
The lack of useful strategy in the boss battles really grates on me. I got past one by spamming the elemental-attack vendortrash item that was dropped by monsters in that dungeon, and that was really nice, but most of the other bosses have come down to "Okay, time to grind more." Spells are limited to what each class gains via level-up, and re-arranging your team isn't really a viable option (because you're using three out of the four classes to begin with, and grinding up a fourth character takes absurd amounts of time, when you could just level your main party).
In the end, it was the need to grind to get around the punishingly-difficult bosses that took me down. Not only did grinding get boring on the repetitive palette-swap monsters, but even healing after every battle, the random combats required some attention because enemies use status ailments that hit your entire party and rarely miss. Which means you can't just auto-battle the grinding while watching Scooby-Doo, as I learned.
The IAP store is full of lovely stuff, including two bonus dungeons. It’s not clear if you can unlock IAP without paying real money, though. A review I saw claimed you could; I haven’t found that to be the case.
The plot is respectable, really. The fact that the cast is full of power-hungry assholes who are actually competent was a nice change of pace. This is another game that loves the “fantastic racism” trope, as even the “good” NPCs are racist against genies. It’s a good thing Fort is just SO dumb and SO optimistic. I was kinda looking forward to Wicca's sudden but inevitable betrayal, Fort's touching reunion with Legna after beating him mostly to death, and whatever remaining revelations there were. But I'm not spending five hours on grinding (or money on IAP for game-breaking equipment unavailable in any other way) to see those few bits.
Overall: The plot is decent and the setup is fine, but there’s too much grinding to get past the punishing bosses and not enough variety or strategy to go with it. I’ll put this in the lower tier of KEMCO games.
KEMCO Holiday Sale #3. Played in 2017. Published by Magitec.
“You are remarkably honest about your stupidity, aren’t you, Master?”
Fort is bullied because he can talk to monsters, which makes people say he’s one of the lost/rare “genies” who can summon monsters. Meanwhile, Empire/Kingdom relations are heating up and there might be a war soon. When the Empire attacks the village and kills everyone, Fort summons monsters that accidentally kill the girl he loves. Three years later, the Empire is planning to execute a powerless Fort, but a devil named Wicca makes a contract with him so that he can redeem himself.
This is so very “classic jrpg” I’m not sure where to start. Controls are a little clunky; graphics are early-SNES cartoony and not terribly expressive. It’s slow-moving even when you crank up the battle speed. It feels like one of the earlier KEMCO games because, well, it is, having been originally published in 2012.
Your main character, as mentioned, is a summoner, but this isn’t a mon-battle game. The monsters that join your party function like guild mercenaries in Dragon Quest games: You choose a race, class and special ability for them, and there’s some ability to re-spec, but otherwise they’re just generics. They use normal human weapons and armor and gain spells and abilities from a set list. The main character eventually gets most of the best spells from all the classes, allowing him to fill any party role—he gets healing, teleporting, some buffing, and a few attack spells.
The dungeons are nothing special, just the occasional branching path or key-and-lock puzzle. They love damage floors, but that doesn’t really matter because a cheap consumable or low-level thief spell will prevent the damage, and the damage is only a measly 1 HP per step anyway. The dungeon design—particularly the castle layout, which you encounter twice—I’m fairly certain I’ve seen in a different game. (I don’t remember which one, though--Grinsia, by the same developer, is a likely candidate.)
The battle system is your standard turn-based affair with the usual status effects and an unimpressive variety of spells. Most random battles can be handled on Auto, including the significant number you’ll spend grinding so that bosses won’t wipe your party in a turn or two. I had several dungeons where I wasn’t having any trouble with the monsters but then the boss wiped me and I had to grind a few levels. (You know it’s a “classic-style” jrpg when the “tips and tricks” page essentially just says, “grind more.”)
The lack of useful strategy in the boss battles really grates on me. I got past one by spamming the elemental-attack vendortrash item that was dropped by monsters in that dungeon, and that was really nice, but most of the other bosses have come down to "Okay, time to grind more." Spells are limited to what each class gains via level-up, and re-arranging your team isn't really a viable option (because you're using three out of the four classes to begin with, and grinding up a fourth character takes absurd amounts of time, when you could just level your main party).
In the end, it was the need to grind to get around the punishingly-difficult bosses that took me down. Not only did grinding get boring on the repetitive palette-swap monsters, but even healing after every battle, the random combats required some attention because enemies use status ailments that hit your entire party and rarely miss. Which means you can't just auto-battle the grinding while watching Scooby-Doo, as I learned.
The IAP store is full of lovely stuff, including two bonus dungeons. It’s not clear if you can unlock IAP without paying real money, though. A review I saw claimed you could; I haven’t found that to be the case.
The plot is respectable, really. The fact that the cast is full of power-hungry assholes who are actually competent was a nice change of pace. This is another game that loves the “fantastic racism” trope, as even the “good” NPCs are racist against genies. It’s a good thing Fort is just SO dumb and SO optimistic. I was kinda looking forward to Wicca's sudden but inevitable betrayal, Fort's touching reunion with Legna after beating him mostly to death, and whatever remaining revelations there were. But I'm not spending five hours on grinding (or money on IAP for game-breaking equipment unavailable in any other way) to see those few bits.
Overall: The plot is decent and the setup is fine, but there’s too much grinding to get past the punishing bosses and not enough variety or strategy to go with it. I’ll put this in the lower tier of KEMCO games.
Grinsia
Amazon Underground “Actually Free” Games #0. Played in 2015. Published by Magitec.
[This is one more special bonus for today: This wasn't archived with my other reviews so it's out of order; I played this after End of Aspiration but before pretty much anything else.]
A family of treasure hunters spends the last of their money to reach a set of Ancient Ruins, but the evil Empire's troops got there first. They elude the guards, and the spirit of a Goddess charges them to find the six elemental relics that control the world before the Empire does.
The plot is fairly run-of-the-mill: You gather all the macguffins, the villain steals them all, you fight him only to discover there's a worse villain behind him, etc etc. Anti-pollution / technology standard green aesop, power of friendship, fight against God--there's nothing here you haven't seen a dozen times. There's a sunken ship, a lava-filled fire cave, a desert dungeon, a dark dungeon full of secret passages--all the standards.
The interparty banter isn't bad, though most of the amusing stuff is front-loaded. Once you start getting other characters in your party, the amount of noteworthy interaction declines.
The gameplay is Dragon Quest-inspired pseudo-linear: Go to each town, talk to everyone to learn the next destination, upgrade everyone's equipment, then go to the dungeon to find the next plot item that lets you reach the next town. The game opens up a bit once you get the ship and are searching for the six Treasures, though the enemy scaling indicates a definitive order you're supposed to do things in.
The game moves pleasantly fast; it doesn't feel like there's filler or that things are designed to take ridiculously long, which is often the case. The encounter rate seems a little high, but characters also move quickly and gain levels fast. Autobattle is very useful, especially when revisiting old areas. But you can't just rely on autobattle in the later dungeons or in boss battles, because buff/debuff spells actually matter (though elemental weaknesses seem less critical) and the limit breaks can really make the difference in tough fights. There is some amount of strategy and the boss battles do require some care and strategy.
I liked having the options for better graphics vs. faster performance, touchscreen controls vs. virtual keypad, etc., though I would have preferred a real keypad. In retrospect, I probably would have had a better experience on my tablet than on my phone, though the phone was fine. (It just meant squinting to look for secret passages at some points.)
Overall: This is the most expensive of the Kemco shovelware jrpgs (Eight dollars!) and is also available on the 3DS eStore, which said to me that if this isn't worth it, nothing they produce is likely to be. The verdict is that it's not bad, it's just routine and forgettable. It's a "workaday" jrpg with nothing that sets it apart, but nothing particularly unpleasant or offensive, either.
Amazon Underground “Actually Free” Games #0. Played in 2015. Published by Magitec.
[This is one more special bonus for today: This wasn't archived with my other reviews so it's out of order; I played this after End of Aspiration but before pretty much anything else.]
A family of treasure hunters spends the last of their money to reach a set of Ancient Ruins, but the evil Empire's troops got there first. They elude the guards, and the spirit of a Goddess charges them to find the six elemental relics that control the world before the Empire does.
The plot is fairly run-of-the-mill: You gather all the macguffins, the villain steals them all, you fight him only to discover there's a worse villain behind him, etc etc. Anti-pollution / technology standard green aesop, power of friendship, fight against God--there's nothing here you haven't seen a dozen times. There's a sunken ship, a lava-filled fire cave, a desert dungeon, a dark dungeon full of secret passages--all the standards.
The interparty banter isn't bad, though most of the amusing stuff is front-loaded. Once you start getting other characters in your party, the amount of noteworthy interaction declines.
The gameplay is Dragon Quest-inspired pseudo-linear: Go to each town, talk to everyone to learn the next destination, upgrade everyone's equipment, then go to the dungeon to find the next plot item that lets you reach the next town. The game opens up a bit once you get the ship and are searching for the six Treasures, though the enemy scaling indicates a definitive order you're supposed to do things in.
The game moves pleasantly fast; it doesn't feel like there's filler or that things are designed to take ridiculously long, which is often the case. The encounter rate seems a little high, but characters also move quickly and gain levels fast. Autobattle is very useful, especially when revisiting old areas. But you can't just rely on autobattle in the later dungeons or in boss battles, because buff/debuff spells actually matter (though elemental weaknesses seem less critical) and the limit breaks can really make the difference in tough fights. There is some amount of strategy and the boss battles do require some care and strategy.
I liked having the options for better graphics vs. faster performance, touchscreen controls vs. virtual keypad, etc., though I would have preferred a real keypad. In retrospect, I probably would have had a better experience on my tablet than on my phone, though the phone was fine. (It just meant squinting to look for secret passages at some points.)
Overall: This is the most expensive of the Kemco shovelware jrpgs (Eight dollars!) and is also available on the 3DS eStore, which said to me that if this isn't worth it, nothing they produce is likely to be. The verdict is that it's not bad, it's just routine and forgettable. It's a "workaday" jrpg with nothing that sets it apart, but nothing particularly unpleasant or offensive, either.
Crystareino
Amazon Underground “Actually Free” Games #4. Played in 2017. Published by Hit-Point.
The destined hero is pulled from his homeland to defeat the Dark Lord, but it’s too early and neither he nor his spirit companion are terribly enthused by this. But was he truly pulled from another world? Did they travel in time from the lost city of Crystareino?
It’s a KEMCO game developed by Hit-Point, and while it doesn’t seem to have the vendortrash/crafting system the others do (there's a synthesis shop, but it's basically only for ultimate gear), it instead has class system and a system of temporary party members. And it shares the somewhat janky graphics and control systems of some of their other games.
They mashed together several different jrpg influences which don't necessarily play well together: You can recruit mercenaries to fill out your party of 4 characters, and there are also temporary characters who join you in the course of the plot; they don't gain levels and you can't change their equipment. There are also half a dozen “permanent” characters and, from early in the game, you can assign classes to them which teach them new skills and provide stat bonuses. I feel like you really should have either one or the other of these; I was particularly annoyed when story mercenaries forced a permanent character out of my party, who then wasn't gaining XP or class XP.
You earn IAP from fighting battles, specifically 1 for every 5 monsters you defeat (not five battles—so they actually come much faster than otherwise). The ability to get XP / Gold / class XP doublers from the IAP store makes the grinding level very reasonable. The IAP store also includes one of the most delightfully broken items I think I’ve ever seen: The Bandit’s Crest, which causes every enemy to always drop an item. Which means quests to collect random drops much more trivial, but moreso, enemies that have rare weapon drops? Drop them every single time.
The translation leaves a bit to be desired, not because it's bad English, but just because it makes the plot confusing and loses emotional oomph that I suspect was in the original. I give them serious credit, though, for including bonus scenes depending on which permanent characters are in your party when you go to certain areas or trigger certain events. They in turn unlock ending scenes for your “favorites”.
The big twist is straight out of FFX: Was the hero from another world, or the past? Turns out neither, the village he was raised in was an illusion created by his father, the previous hero, to shield him from the Dark Lord. Once the Dark Lord is defeated, that world can end and everyone from it (including the spirit guide companion who's been with you the whole time) will disappear.
Overall: Middle-of-the-road for KEMCO games, runs about a dozen hours with decent pacing but nothing strongly standout.
Amazon Underground “Actually Free” Games #4. Played in 2017. Published by Hit-Point.
The destined hero is pulled from his homeland to defeat the Dark Lord, but it’s too early and neither he nor his spirit companion are terribly enthused by this. But was he truly pulled from another world? Did they travel in time from the lost city of Crystareino?
It’s a KEMCO game developed by Hit-Point, and while it doesn’t seem to have the vendortrash/crafting system the others do (there's a synthesis shop, but it's basically only for ultimate gear), it instead has class system and a system of temporary party members. And it shares the somewhat janky graphics and control systems of some of their other games.
They mashed together several different jrpg influences which don't necessarily play well together: You can recruit mercenaries to fill out your party of 4 characters, and there are also temporary characters who join you in the course of the plot; they don't gain levels and you can't change their equipment. There are also half a dozen “permanent” characters and, from early in the game, you can assign classes to them which teach them new skills and provide stat bonuses. I feel like you really should have either one or the other of these; I was particularly annoyed when story mercenaries forced a permanent character out of my party, who then wasn't gaining XP or class XP.
You earn IAP from fighting battles, specifically 1 for every 5 monsters you defeat (not five battles—so they actually come much faster than otherwise). The ability to get XP / Gold / class XP doublers from the IAP store makes the grinding level very reasonable. The IAP store also includes one of the most delightfully broken items I think I’ve ever seen: The Bandit’s Crest, which causes every enemy to always drop an item. Which means quests to collect random drops much more trivial, but moreso, enemies that have rare weapon drops? Drop them every single time.
The translation leaves a bit to be desired, not because it's bad English, but just because it makes the plot confusing and loses emotional oomph that I suspect was in the original. I give them serious credit, though, for including bonus scenes depending on which permanent characters are in your party when you go to certain areas or trigger certain events. They in turn unlock ending scenes for your “favorites”.
The big twist is straight out of FFX: Was the hero from another world, or the past? Turns out neither, the village he was raised in was an illusion created by his father, the previous hero, to shield him from the Dark Lord. Once the Dark Lord is defeated, that world can end and everyone from it (including the spirit guide companion who's been with you the whole time) will disappear.
Overall: Middle-of-the-road for KEMCO games, runs about a dozen hours with decent pacing but nothing strongly standout.
Alphadia Genesis
The Second KEMCO Humble Bundle #8. Played in 2017. Published by EXE-Create.
Many years before the events of Alphadia, but after the events of the Energi War that rocked that world, clones are attempting to integrate into society, and a guildman named Fray is tasked with figuring out why some of them are going rogue.
More of the same from this developer, really. It uses the 3D battle graphics engine, has a few more character portraits and has voice acting (in Japanese), but it's basically the same as the first two Alphadia games.
Each character (of six, four of whom can fight at any one time) has skills specific to them and mostly-unique equipment. There are three energi elements (down from six in other games), and each character learns spells from one naturally and can learn the other two via upgradable rings. The story is very linear and involves a lot of the characters stopping to chat; and there are well-marked sidequests in most areas.
“Variant” version of enemies reappear, including smaller, faster blue ones and giant red ones. The giant red enemies serve no purpose—they're many times stronger than normal random battles, but don't seem to provide more XP or drop rare items. There's no point in fighting them.
For the Humble Bundle version, the IAP points are hidden in towns and dungeons as barely-visible sparkles. Hunting for them is fun, even if the IAP store equipment isn't particularly necessary to beating the game. (It has Normal and Easy modes.) There are also four optional boss monsters on the world map that drop 100 IAP when beaten.
It's rather fitting that this game's gigantic asshole party member is named Walter. That is, if you've ever met anyone named Walter, you understand.
Overall: This is the most “more of the same” I think I've ever seen. The system is basically identical to half a dozen other Exe-Create KEMCO games, and the plot is generally a retread of every other pseudo-medieval magitek fantasy jrpg. There's nothing bad about it, it's not a bad game by any means, but there's absolutely nothing special or standout about it.
The Second KEMCO Humble Bundle #8. Played in 2017. Published by EXE-Create.
Many years before the events of Alphadia, but after the events of the Energi War that rocked that world, clones are attempting to integrate into society, and a guildman named Fray is tasked with figuring out why some of them are going rogue.
More of the same from this developer, really. It uses the 3D battle graphics engine, has a few more character portraits and has voice acting (in Japanese), but it's basically the same as the first two Alphadia games.
Each character (of six, four of whom can fight at any one time) has skills specific to them and mostly-unique equipment. There are three energi elements (down from six in other games), and each character learns spells from one naturally and can learn the other two via upgradable rings. The story is very linear and involves a lot of the characters stopping to chat; and there are well-marked sidequests in most areas.
“Variant” version of enemies reappear, including smaller, faster blue ones and giant red ones. The giant red enemies serve no purpose—they're many times stronger than normal random battles, but don't seem to provide more XP or drop rare items. There's no point in fighting them.
For the Humble Bundle version, the IAP points are hidden in towns and dungeons as barely-visible sparkles. Hunting for them is fun, even if the IAP store equipment isn't particularly necessary to beating the game. (It has Normal and Easy modes.) There are also four optional boss monsters on the world map that drop 100 IAP when beaten.
It's rather fitting that this game's gigantic asshole party member is named Walter. That is, if you've ever met anyone named Walter, you understand.
Overall: This is the most “more of the same” I think I've ever seen. The system is basically identical to half a dozen other Exe-Create KEMCO games, and the plot is generally a retread of every other pseudo-medieval magitek fantasy jrpg. There's nothing bad about it, it's not a bad game by any means, but there's absolutely nothing special or standout about it.
Astral Frontier
Amazon Underground “Actually Free” Games #5. Played in 2017. Published by WorldWideSoftware.
Orion lives in a remote village where he is the youngest person, as few children have been born and people keep dying off. His wedding to the youngest woman in the village is meant to bring hope for the future. But a chance encounter with a strange blue woman indicates that much more needs to be done if the world is to actually be saved.
The most immediate bit of unusual design is that the game is played in portrait mode, rather than landscape. Also, instead of gaining levels, characters randomly get a level-up equivalent stat boost after battles (and I found them very frequent, even in battles against weaker enemies). The “numbers” of this game are very tightly designed; once you get the next set of equipment in any area, the monsters in the previous area are suddenly doing only 1 damage to you and you're killing them in one hit. But that's only with equipment—leveling gains are very gradual. There are three difficulty levels, and you can switch between them at any time.
The magic system is very simple: Each character has one unique spell, and then can equip elemental gems in various combinations to get the other 11, which are a mix of attack, healing and status effects. Elemental weaknesses and buffs/debuffs don't really exist. (There appear to be two full sets of gems in the main game, one in the post-game, and one in the post-post-game.) The other noteworthy system in the game is “Potential Bits”, which you acquire slowly from defeating bosses, but can be set for various passive special abilities, like regeneration or half damage from physical attacks. The one that allows rare drops makes most enemies drop stat-increasing seeds.
The dungeons are pretty much all straight lines with short treasure branches; and it's generally required to follow those branches given the major effect equipment has on your characters' effectiveness. They do try to manage a few puzzles, including several areas where you need to use consumables periodically to get through and a brief segment of math word problems. The post-game includes several optional dungeons that are actual mazes.
Overall: Very short, relatively easy, a little clunky but some interesting ideas, and it stands out from the usual Exe-Create/KEMCO games in a bunch of ways. And I couldn't argue with the price.
Amazon Underground “Actually Free” Games #5. Played in 2017. Published by WorldWideSoftware.
Orion lives in a remote village where he is the youngest person, as few children have been born and people keep dying off. His wedding to the youngest woman in the village is meant to bring hope for the future. But a chance encounter with a strange blue woman indicates that much more needs to be done if the world is to actually be saved.
The most immediate bit of unusual design is that the game is played in portrait mode, rather than landscape. Also, instead of gaining levels, characters randomly get a level-up equivalent stat boost after battles (and I found them very frequent, even in battles against weaker enemies). The “numbers” of this game are very tightly designed; once you get the next set of equipment in any area, the monsters in the previous area are suddenly doing only 1 damage to you and you're killing them in one hit. But that's only with equipment—leveling gains are very gradual. There are three difficulty levels, and you can switch between them at any time.
The magic system is very simple: Each character has one unique spell, and then can equip elemental gems in various combinations to get the other 11, which are a mix of attack, healing and status effects. Elemental weaknesses and buffs/debuffs don't really exist. (There appear to be two full sets of gems in the main game, one in the post-game, and one in the post-post-game.) The other noteworthy system in the game is “Potential Bits”, which you acquire slowly from defeating bosses, but can be set for various passive special abilities, like regeneration or half damage from physical attacks. The one that allows rare drops makes most enemies drop stat-increasing seeds.
The dungeons are pretty much all straight lines with short treasure branches; and it's generally required to follow those branches given the major effect equipment has on your characters' effectiveness. They do try to manage a few puzzles, including several areas where you need to use consumables periodically to get through and a brief segment of math word problems. The post-game includes several optional dungeons that are actual mazes.
The big plot twist (which I saw coming well in advance, as should anyone familiar with Phantasy Star 3) is that the characters are not on Earth, but instead in a biosphere dome on Mars. And the computer system that maintains it is breaking down. This actually works well with the relatively tiny world the game inhabits: Of course there are only a handful of settlements a few minutes away from each other; there's only so much space inside a dome!
And to be fair, I like this sort of plotline, where the science that built the world has degenerated into fragmented myths. And though the translation limits it a bit, I like the inclusion of hard choices like disabling the “Mother” machine (and thereby dooming the El) to revive an automaton that can potentially help repair the whole world.
The game is super-short: You can reach the credits-roll ending in about three hours. The post-game, aka “Chapter 2,” picks up a year later and lets you access several new areas along with unlocking the blue chests scattered throughout the game (each contains one Potential Bit). This leads to a second final boss and an additional ending; and you can get there in another two hours or less. Then there's the post-post-game, where you can randomly access a series of bonus dungeons and areas where the ultimate weapons are kept and fight an even more final-er bonus boss.
And to be fair, I like this sort of plotline, where the science that built the world has degenerated into fragmented myths. And though the translation limits it a bit, I like the inclusion of hard choices like disabling the “Mother” machine (and thereby dooming the El) to revive an automaton that can potentially help repair the whole world.
The game is super-short: You can reach the credits-roll ending in about three hours. The post-game, aka “Chapter 2,” picks up a year later and lets you access several new areas along with unlocking the blue chests scattered throughout the game (each contains one Potential Bit). This leads to a second final boss and an additional ending; and you can get there in another two hours or less. Then there's the post-post-game, where you can randomly access a series of bonus dungeons and areas where the ultimate weapons are kept and fight an even more final-er bonus boss.
Overall: Very short, relatively easy, a little clunky but some interesting ideas, and it stands out from the usual Exe-Create/KEMCO games in a bunch of ways. And I couldn't argue with the price.
Chrome Wolf
KEMCO Holiday Sale #4. Played in 2017. Published by Magitec.
Kruz is an Imperial soldier that has uncovered a lie behind a mission to suppress the Rebel Army. Continuing the legacy of a fallen comrade, he defects from the Imperial Army and joins the Freedom Fighters. Kruz is devoted to fighting battles where the ideals and pride of a nation and its people are on the line...
This is much less traditional fantasy world and much more a modern/magitek world. Characters use guns and tanks and heal with rations and medkits, but other than the names it's exactly the system you've seen before.
In terms of style and gameplay, it has a similar feel (and engine) to Soul Historica and Covenant of Solitude. Characters are a set team, but you have classes they can be assigned to and elemental “emblems” that determine what sort of magic they learn. The story is broken up into main missions and sub missions, all assigned by your commander at the main camp. Like most games developed by Magitec, it has a perfectly respectable minimap, and dungeons tend to be space-filling paths with damage squares, moving floors, and detours to hit switches.
You start with a team of decoy protagonists, but after it becomes clear that the Empire is full of assholes, Kruz becomes a deserter and joins a proper party of rebels. The fantastic racism is again strong, this time again a race of people who have unicorn horns.
The game's gimmick is that you have a tank that you can enter for overworld battles and that you upgrade by buying new pieces instead of gaining XP. (Kinda like gear battles in the various Xeno games.) Your characters don't gain skill XP when you're fighting in the tank, so there really is a disincentive to do so, but there are also some enemies whose defense is too high to reasonably damage them with your on-foot characters.
The IAP points are collected one per each battle you fight, and your first 100 points are likely to go to a Supply Emblem, which fully refills the equipped character's HP and MP after every battle (which, in turn, if they're your healer, allows you to just cure everybody after every battle). This changes the flow of the game, but because characters also fully heal when they gain levels, not as much as you'd think. There are then three 300-point bonus missions that you can purchase.
Overall: The thing is, this developer's (Magitec) dungeons tend to be uncreative and tedious; mostly excuses to fight very repetitive random battles with virtually no puzzles or interesting hazards. (Or even interesting scenery.) Combined with the tank battles being disincentivised and the plot being another fantasy racism retread, I just lost interest in playing it. Ah, well, I got my dollar's worth.
[Amusing side note: The Steam version of this game comes out this week! As of this writing, there are 56 KEMCO games on Steam, and 5 of them are not available on Android; forcing me to once again re-check and update my spreadsheet and bring the total number of KEMCO games to 102.]
KEMCO Holiday Sale #4. Played in 2017. Published by Magitec.
Kruz is an Imperial soldier that has uncovered a lie behind a mission to suppress the Rebel Army. Continuing the legacy of a fallen comrade, he defects from the Imperial Army and joins the Freedom Fighters. Kruz is devoted to fighting battles where the ideals and pride of a nation and its people are on the line...
This is much less traditional fantasy world and much more a modern/magitek world. Characters use guns and tanks and heal with rations and medkits, but other than the names it's exactly the system you've seen before.
In terms of style and gameplay, it has a similar feel (and engine) to Soul Historica and Covenant of Solitude. Characters are a set team, but you have classes they can be assigned to and elemental “emblems” that determine what sort of magic they learn. The story is broken up into main missions and sub missions, all assigned by your commander at the main camp. Like most games developed by Magitec, it has a perfectly respectable minimap, and dungeons tend to be space-filling paths with damage squares, moving floors, and detours to hit switches.
You start with a team of decoy protagonists, but after it becomes clear that the Empire is full of assholes, Kruz becomes a deserter and joins a proper party of rebels. The fantastic racism is again strong, this time again a race of people who have unicorn horns.
The game's gimmick is that you have a tank that you can enter for overworld battles and that you upgrade by buying new pieces instead of gaining XP. (Kinda like gear battles in the various Xeno games.) Your characters don't gain skill XP when you're fighting in the tank, so there really is a disincentive to do so, but there are also some enemies whose defense is too high to reasonably damage them with your on-foot characters.
The IAP points are collected one per each battle you fight, and your first 100 points are likely to go to a Supply Emblem, which fully refills the equipped character's HP and MP after every battle (which, in turn, if they're your healer, allows you to just cure everybody after every battle). This changes the flow of the game, but because characters also fully heal when they gain levels, not as much as you'd think. There are then three 300-point bonus missions that you can purchase.
Overall: The thing is, this developer's (Magitec) dungeons tend to be uncreative and tedious; mostly excuses to fight very repetitive random battles with virtually no puzzles or interesting hazards. (Or even interesting scenery.) Combined with the tank battles being disincentivised and the plot being another fantasy racism retread, I just lost interest in playing it. Ah, well, I got my dollar's worth.
[Amusing side note: The Steam version of this game comes out this week! As of this writing, there are 56 KEMCO games on Steam, and 5 of them are not available on Android; forcing me to once again re-check and update my spreadsheet and bring the total number of KEMCO games to 102.]
This is, in fact, a game I’m looking forward to; which has never happened with Kemco RPGs before
If you end up with a differing opinion once you've played it, I really want to hear about it!
So do you learn fire magic from the Fire Emblem? Because if so: pretty cheeky move, Kemco
Adventure Bar Story
Humble Mobile Bundle: RPGS!!! #1. Played in 2017. Published by WorldWideSoftware.
Siela and her sister own and operate Kamerina's Bar, but the nefarious Gustav, owner of the most popular restaurant in town, wants to buy them out and shut it down. Siela vows to make her restaurant so popular that Gustav can’t touch them. But that requires the freshest ingredients from all the local monster-infested dungeons. Can she really do it?
It’s a KEMCO jrpg, but the twist to this is that your real goal is to run a successful restaurant, and the dungeon-crawling is just to collect food items to cook and serve. Also, you don’t level up from fighting monsters (though fighting does unlock skills), you level up from eating the things you cook—and more expensive items generally give more XP. So you need to strike a balance between improving your characters and improving your restaurant (and getting more money in the process).
There’s a free version of the game (with IAP) called Adventure Bar Story Lite that I had tried a while ago. The Humble Bundle version is the full version of the game, with all of the pleasant speed-ups enabled. The fact that the monster drops are so much more plentiful (and I think the dungeons are more well-stocked, also) and you start with a ton of cash makes the game eminently more playable, because it eliminates an early "starvation" period. It’s still a really long game and it’s still possible to screw yourself, but you’ve effectively got a running start and it makes the game overall more fun.
I found guessing recipes from hints and logical combinations more fun than the dungeon crawling and grinding for ingredients, which isn’t surprising. But it is a decent balance of the two. There aren’t many dungeons and none of them are super-long (a dozen in total), but that makes each “day” in-game manageable: You can only go to one location per day, including the other towns, so you need to choose wisely based on what ingredients you need and if you think you can get through a harder dungeon with your characters intact.
Certain ingredients are much more useful than others—anything you can turn into another ingredient (flour->bread->bread crumbs, or pork->gelatin, ham, bacon or sausage) you can never have too much of, because all your best recipes use it in some form and if you reach your limit, you can just turn it into other ingredients. You can also never have too much salt or too many eggs. Mushrooms, on the other hand, irritate me. Most of the recipes they figure into require other, costlier ingredients (such as the annoying-to-make Sea Broth) but you find them freakin’ everywhere.
Various forms of croquettes are generally high-value items to both sell and eat; and once you get access to Garuda Eggs, Garbonera is a great go-to. Later in the game, you can level up your characters pretty quickly with the more expensive drinks, which provide very little satiety (you have a 99 satiety limit each day). Once the desert city is unlocked, you can make Pineapple Juice and Tequila for relatively cheap. Royal Iced Tea requires both Ice and Otts Water, but once you need to heavily grind for places like the desert, those are easy to collect.
The battle system is standard turn-based, with a grid that’s only good for determining spell effect areas. There isn’t that much variety to the skills or strategy to the battles, and once you’ve cleared an area and upgraded your equipment, you can safely go back and hit “Auto” for every battle. Buffs and debuffs aren’t terribly useful, though the attack buff Flame Rage makes boss battles go faster. Enemies have elemental strengths and weaknesses and many of the stronger weapons have elemental properties, so you do occasionally need to plan for where you’re going and equip accordingly. The bosses often have the “mountain of HP” problem, where even after you figure out the holding pattern and kill off their minions, you’ll be there another ten minutes attacking and healing until they die.
The translation is serviceable and has occasional errors, though nothing particularly absurd and funny. The story is the standard “making friends and saving the bar” routine you’d expect. There are a bunch of side events, including hidden paths, cooking contests and plot nibbles with your characters; though there aren’t any dungeon puzzles or true minigames.
Overall: This is more of a casual/simulation game than a true rpg, but it blends both game styles pretty well. Might be worth a go if you like that sort of thing.
Humble Mobile Bundle: RPGS!!! #1. Played in 2017. Published by WorldWideSoftware.
Siela and her sister own and operate Kamerina's Bar, but the nefarious Gustav, owner of the most popular restaurant in town, wants to buy them out and shut it down. Siela vows to make her restaurant so popular that Gustav can’t touch them. But that requires the freshest ingredients from all the local monster-infested dungeons. Can she really do it?
It’s a KEMCO jrpg, but the twist to this is that your real goal is to run a successful restaurant, and the dungeon-crawling is just to collect food items to cook and serve. Also, you don’t level up from fighting monsters (though fighting does unlock skills), you level up from eating the things you cook—and more expensive items generally give more XP. So you need to strike a balance between improving your characters and improving your restaurant (and getting more money in the process).
There’s a free version of the game (with IAP) called Adventure Bar Story Lite that I had tried a while ago. The Humble Bundle version is the full version of the game, with all of the pleasant speed-ups enabled. The fact that the monster drops are so much more plentiful (and I think the dungeons are more well-stocked, also) and you start with a ton of cash makes the game eminently more playable, because it eliminates an early "starvation" period. It’s still a really long game and it’s still possible to screw yourself, but you’ve effectively got a running start and it makes the game overall more fun.
I found guessing recipes from hints and logical combinations more fun than the dungeon crawling and grinding for ingredients, which isn’t surprising. But it is a decent balance of the two. There aren’t many dungeons and none of them are super-long (a dozen in total), but that makes each “day” in-game manageable: You can only go to one location per day, including the other towns, so you need to choose wisely based on what ingredients you need and if you think you can get through a harder dungeon with your characters intact.
Certain ingredients are much more useful than others—anything you can turn into another ingredient (flour->bread->bread crumbs, or pork->gelatin, ham, bacon or sausage) you can never have too much of, because all your best recipes use it in some form and if you reach your limit, you can just turn it into other ingredients. You can also never have too much salt or too many eggs. Mushrooms, on the other hand, irritate me. Most of the recipes they figure into require other, costlier ingredients (such as the annoying-to-make Sea Broth) but you find them freakin’ everywhere.
Various forms of croquettes are generally high-value items to both sell and eat; and once you get access to Garuda Eggs, Garbonera is a great go-to. Later in the game, you can level up your characters pretty quickly with the more expensive drinks, which provide very little satiety (you have a 99 satiety limit each day). Once the desert city is unlocked, you can make Pineapple Juice and Tequila for relatively cheap. Royal Iced Tea requires both Ice and Otts Water, but once you need to heavily grind for places like the desert, those are easy to collect.
The battle system is standard turn-based, with a grid that’s only good for determining spell effect areas. There isn’t that much variety to the skills or strategy to the battles, and once you’ve cleared an area and upgraded your equipment, you can safely go back and hit “Auto” for every battle. Buffs and debuffs aren’t terribly useful, though the attack buff Flame Rage makes boss battles go faster. Enemies have elemental strengths and weaknesses and many of the stronger weapons have elemental properties, so you do occasionally need to plan for where you’re going and equip accordingly. The bosses often have the “mountain of HP” problem, where even after you figure out the holding pattern and kill off their minions, you’ll be there another ten minutes attacking and healing until they die.
The translation is serviceable and has occasional errors, though nothing particularly absurd and funny. The story is the standard “making friends and saving the bar” routine you’d expect. There are a bunch of side events, including hidden paths, cooking contests and plot nibbles with your characters; though there aren’t any dungeon puzzles or true minigames.
Overall: This is more of a casual/simulation game than a true rpg, but it blends both game styles pretty well. Might be worth a go if you like that sort of thing.
Shelterra the Skyworld
KEMCO Holiday Sale #5. Played in 2017. Published by Magitec.
You live on a floating continent that's about to fall to the demon-infested world below. A princess and her stuck-up bodyguard hire you, a low-class treasure hunter, to find the magic stones that can save the world. Hmm...this actually sounds really familiar.
Another Magitec game; from the same developers as Chrome Wolf, Covenant of Solitude and others. The graphics are better than the last few (to the point where the world map actually causes slowdown on my tablet, which is bizarre), and you've only got a three-person party (with each character getting a monster partner they can summon for boss battles), but it's basically the same setup.
You learn skills by performing normal attacks on certain enemies and getting lucky; and the type of enemy you're fighting determines the skill you're likely to get. You can pay in-game for clues as to which enemies drop which skills, or you can just auto-battle everything and get what you get. It's basically a melding of blue magic and the SaGa skill system, but I found that I picked up plenty of useful skills without really trying.
Everything is mission-based, and there are only 12 in total. There don't seem to be sidequests, besides the two bonus IAP dungeons. Because of that, the game only runs about 10 hours.
All the standard dungeons are here: The one with damage floors (that a cheap consumable lets you ignore), the one with sliding ice, the one with one-way floating platforms, the one with cliffs you need to jump down, and the ones where you need to go totally out of your way to unlock a door. That is to say, there aren't really any puzzles and most of the dungeons are linear space-filling paths. (Most of them also offer you a quick way back to the entrance, but you're teleported out automatically after beating the boss and there are no sidequests or reasons to return, there isn't much point to that.)
The numbers inflation is really low—just gaining a level or improving your equipment won't suddenly make battles easy. It's a gradual process. There are three missions in the later game that you can do in any order, and while the first one will be a bit harder and the last a bit easier, you can't just glide through any of them. Heck, using IAP to buy a top-end weapon only makes that character a mildly more effective fighter.
I appreciate that, while you have to visit every corner of the map over the course of the game, they actually have an excuse that this isn't the whole world. Shelterra is one small set of floating islands, and the surface land beneath them was protected by the Guardian System, but otherwise the world is overrun by Odium. It's never made clear what exactly Odium consists of, but it's a perfectly good excuse for why you never leave the small map.
It occurs to me that even the plot twists are fairly cookie-cutter: The benevolent sage turns out to be evil, but in the end we learn he was doing evil due to a combination of well-meaning atrocity (he was trying to make humanity immortal by forcing them to adapt to Odium) and mommy issues. Everything wraps up nicely; there's only one ending.
Overall: Short and by-the-numbers KEMCO/Megitek jrpg; the challenge level was reasonable and it didn't outstay its welcome. Not bad, but nothing amazing.
KEMCO Holiday Sale #5. Played in 2017. Published by Magitec.
You live on a floating continent that's about to fall to the demon-infested world below. A princess and her stuck-up bodyguard hire you, a low-class treasure hunter, to find the magic stones that can save the world. Hmm...this actually sounds really familiar.
Another Magitec game; from the same developers as Chrome Wolf, Covenant of Solitude and others. The graphics are better than the last few (to the point where the world map actually causes slowdown on my tablet, which is bizarre), and you've only got a three-person party (with each character getting a monster partner they can summon for boss battles), but it's basically the same setup.
You learn skills by performing normal attacks on certain enemies and getting lucky; and the type of enemy you're fighting determines the skill you're likely to get. You can pay in-game for clues as to which enemies drop which skills, or you can just auto-battle everything and get what you get. It's basically a melding of blue magic and the SaGa skill system, but I found that I picked up plenty of useful skills without really trying.
Everything is mission-based, and there are only 12 in total. There don't seem to be sidequests, besides the two bonus IAP dungeons. Because of that, the game only runs about 10 hours.
All the standard dungeons are here: The one with damage floors (that a cheap consumable lets you ignore), the one with sliding ice, the one with one-way floating platforms, the one with cliffs you need to jump down, and the ones where you need to go totally out of your way to unlock a door. That is to say, there aren't really any puzzles and most of the dungeons are linear space-filling paths. (Most of them also offer you a quick way back to the entrance, but you're teleported out automatically after beating the boss and there are no sidequests or reasons to return, there isn't much point to that.)
The numbers inflation is really low—just gaining a level or improving your equipment won't suddenly make battles easy. It's a gradual process. There are three missions in the later game that you can do in any order, and while the first one will be a bit harder and the last a bit easier, you can't just glide through any of them. Heck, using IAP to buy a top-end weapon only makes that character a mildly more effective fighter.
I appreciate that, while you have to visit every corner of the map over the course of the game, they actually have an excuse that this isn't the whole world. Shelterra is one small set of floating islands, and the surface land beneath them was protected by the Guardian System, but otherwise the world is overrun by Odium. It's never made clear what exactly Odium consists of, but it's a perfectly good excuse for why you never leave the small map.
It occurs to me that even the plot twists are fairly cookie-cutter: The benevolent sage turns out to be evil, but in the end we learn he was doing evil due to a combination of well-meaning atrocity (he was trying to make humanity immortal by forcing them to adapt to Odium) and mommy issues. Everything wraps up nicely; there's only one ending.
Overall: Short and by-the-numbers KEMCO/Megitek jrpg; the challenge level was reasonable and it didn't outstay its welcome. Not bad, but nothing amazing.