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

[Beowulf]

Destiny Fantasia
KEMCO Holiday Sale #6. Played in 2017. Published by WorldWideSoftware.

You're a humble lad living in a humble village with your grandmother. There's a mysterious shrine in the caves behind the village, but nobody cares much about that. Then, after you go to the big city to find work, your home village is destroyed by a warmongering empire, and emissaries of a strange cult spirit you away and reveal what the shrine already knew: You're the heir to an ancient power that might save the world.

This is by WorldWideSoftware, the same developer that brought us Adventure Bar Story and plenty of other KEMCO games. As noted earlier, their plots are decent and systems moderately interesting; but their translations are some of the worst.

The character advancement is randomize/piecemeal: Rather than gaining levels, you gain stats after battle, SaGa style. It's clearly influenced by the 16-bit SaGa games, because the text boxes when your stats increase are exactly the same. Skills, on he other hand, are attached to weapons and you need to acquire enough AP (from battles) while they're equipped to learn the skills permanently. Unlike SaGa, however, you gain stats and skills quickly enough for their to be a reasonable difficulty curve, and there don't seem to be any anti-grinding features in place.

There's a bunch of IAP story content, but you only get 1 IAP point for every 20 battles, so unlocking it without paying isn't really feasible. (It irritates me to pay for the game, and then also have additional paid content within it, but I realize that's a meaningless complaint at this point in time.) As I only had 24 IAP when I finished the game and new story content is 100 apiece, I obviously didn't play it. The game was perfectly fine without it.

The translation is clearly the weakest part of this—the dialogue is clunky in places, the names are kinda dumb (I can't help but wonder if “Crag” was supposed to be Craig—though he's “Clag” in the credits!), and there are a few lines (like Spirit's counterattack) that are still in Japanese.

The dungeons have actual mazes, long branches, and puzzles. There are several mine-cart puzzle areas and an ice cave; plus several areas where you need consumables to see or avoid damage. Granted, it appears that many of the dungeons are technically optional (“Hey, look, ruins!” “We could test our strength here.”) but the difficulty curve pretty much assumes you're going to do them just because they're there.

Hidden through the game are “Crest Orbs”, an equivalent to Small Medals or other collectibles. I had to resort to the internet to figure out where to trade them in: You need to take the submarine into the lake near Noname Village. You can also go around the back of that hut to find the name-changer and the guy who trades even-more-hidden Crest Emblems for the ultimate weapons.

Overall: A perfectly respectable 10-hour jrpg. The story is fun once you get past the terrible translation and the difficulty level is generally just right. Upper-tier KEMCO game.

 

[Beowulf]

Asdivine Dios
KEMCO Holiday Sale #7. Played in 2017. Published by EXE-Create.

In a change of pace, you are actually playing as the world's guardian/creator deity, who has been trapped in human form by damage to his spirit tree. In a flip from the usual jrpg script, instead of needing to kill god, you need to help god kill a human with a magic sword who's trying to destroy the world.

There are many gimmick bits returning from other Exe-Create games: Magic is linked to three elements, and you need to equip accessories to learn ones other than your own. Weapons randomly include special qualities and you can upgrade / transfer them (and the IAP includes a Barrel Busters game that provides random weapons). There are standard sidequests, and also a number of fairies and maids to recruit for a special town. There are limit breaks and unison attacks.

The characters are standard anime tropes and we end up with “the hero and his harem” as the party. I think a story about a creator god and his sub-deities trying to regain their sealed-off powers to fight an evil-empowered human is totally a workable thing, and I'm perfectly fine with a 3/1 gender ratio in my party. But the fact that two of the three women are constantly shown agonizing about their attraction to the clueless male character (and the third makes it clear she could have him if she ever wanted) detracts from all of that. We could have more real character development; or we could have a better-paced plot; but instead of either we have more scenes of Minerva trying to grapple with her schoolgirl crush on Izayoi.

The story-intense presence of Maidame Curie both breaks the internal structure of the story (when the main plot centers on an internal-universe threat, why keep dragging in random plot points about people from other worlds?) and breaks my immersion into the game, because seriously, what's the obsession with maids? This game is about spirits, which usually manifest as fairies and need to be found and rescued, etc etc. Why did we also need the random maids to show up in every town and be anime caricatures? (The answer is likely that one of the creators has a maid fetish, but I suppose a terrible sense of humor could also be at fault.)

Overall: It really is maddening that EXE-Create manages to do the most fun things with their battle/magic systems (and build on them with each new game), but their characterization tends to be insultingly inane and sexist. I played more than half of this, but lost interest and couldn't get myself to go back.

 

[Beowulf]

Justice Chronicles
Amazon Underground “Actually Free” Games #6. Played in 2017. Published by Hit-Point.

The people of the surface kingdom of Illumica fear a disaster coming from the underground world of Laft, and dispatch a group of Rivell soldiers to investigate. These soldiers can partner with the Guardian Beasts of the High Beast Lord. But will their power be enough to stop the flood of Darkness?

Another KEMCO rpg developed by Hit-Point, who also made Chronus Arc and Bonds of the Skies, both of which I found rather flawed. This continued to be a step in the right direction of making a fun game, but there are still issues.

Pretty much everything that you can level up in up KEMCO games you'll see here. Your characters level up. Their skills level up from use. You have materia ("magic meteorites") that level up and get you more spells. You need to use vendortrash and gold to level up your equipment (just like Chronus Arc) and each character has a monster sidekick that gains levels separately (just like Bonds of the Skies). You can equip any item in one of four slots on your "shells" (monster sidekicks) which give them both stat boost and extra abilities--revive potions make them regenerate, for instance, or consumable spell-casting items give them those spells. That's a clever addition in this case.

You get two IAP points per five battles, and also there's a calendar that distributes them to you each day you play. This isn't quite as nice as getting them in a bundle for $0, but I think it still qualifies as "Actually Free". I logged in five days in a row, then purchased the "double XP" bonus before I actually started playing. The IAP shop makes all the difference in the playability of the game: Being able to cut grinding in half changes the setup from “Argh, so much grinding” to “I can just play straight through and fight everything I meet, and as long as I do every sidequest the game is super-easy.” Even the material-gathering is simplified in the later game, as an NPC will do it for you and you can buy him helpers in the IAP shop. Which is not to say there isn’t any grinding—the sidequests are typically just an excuse to do it—but it’s in the realm of tolerable.

There's no minimap, and the view is the most zoomed-in I think I've ever seen for a jrpg. There's very little viewable area, which makes the dungeons more confusing than is really warranted. And makes them seem bigger, which is probably why they did it that way. Most of the dungeons are actually really small, with no puzzles, traps or locked doors. The dungeons get longer as the game goes on, but the pacing is weirdly uneven. You have about three hours of following the plot with very little equipment-crafting, then you get access to “request” sidequests and the main plot takes a difficulty spike (indicating you’re supposed to go do them for two hours). Then you’re back on the plot rails and most of the new sidequests are unavailable to complete (because they require access to areas you haven’t unlocked), but the crafting recipes start coming fast and furious. But you can’t actually craft the high-level weapons unless you grind a huge amount of vendortrash.

Not that you desperately need them: As long you you’ve got access to free IAP stuff, you can ignore several aspects of the game that annoy you. I barely used Magic Meteors because the characters’ individual skills did just about everything I needed. I only got the characters’ equipment into the third rank (of four, with multiple branches) and it didn’t cause any issues.

The main character is, as is often the case, kinda dumb. In this case, he's a naïve chowderhead who gets very lucky several times as conspiracies rage around him. I mean, in the opening, he gleefully tells his military superior that he wants to kill their patron god. (The superior, who admittedly is a double-agent working for an evil conspiracy, basically tells him to shut up.)

There’s a lot going on, though, to the point where it seems to become plot roulette. Kline is the High Beast Lord! No, wait, he isn’t. The sect is evil! Or good! Or just trying to save people! The commander is really on your side; except he’s really one of the Grey Sages! Actually, there’s an alternate world and the High Beast Lord (aka God of Darkness, aka “Justice”) comes from there. Actually, the High Beast Lord was in Alia the whole time! Dozens of reveals without foreshadowing or, in many cases, real rhyme or reason makes it feel cheap.

Overall: I mostly played this as a casual game, grinding for sidequest completion and periodically advancing the plot, because as a plot-based rpg it falls flat. This particular developer of KEMCO games hasn’t been winning my love.

 

[Beowulf]

A KEMCO Summary

[Originally written Jul. 20th, 2017, this fell somewhere between the last few reviews. Don't worry--I'm not finished posting reviews yet. There's at least 14 games still to go.]

So, it occurred to me that I've played a lot of KEMCO's Android jrpg fare in the last few years, and I should probably try to actually look at the details and try to summarize it.

I have played 31 KEMCO-published games (25 to completion), virtually all of which cost me $1 or were free. That's on the order of 270+ hours of gameplay for around $25. Completed games average around 11 hours each, and Adventure Bar Story was the only one to crack the 20-hour mark.

KEMCO publishes games from four major developers, and though they're all retro-jrpgs, they each have their own style and evolution, which I've conflated in some places and becomes clearer as I've played more of their games.

EXE-Create made the Asdivine and Alphadia series, as well as the contents of the second KEMCO Humble Bundle (Fanatic Earth, Illusion of 'Phalcia, Journey to Kreisia, Revenant Saga). Their games tend to be longer, have multiple difficulty levels, rely less on IAP, and have the best translations. That said, their characters tend to be identical and the plot sequences, sidequests and worldbuilding don't change much from game to game. They have been steadily improving; I should probably try a few of their most recent offerings.

Hit-Point tends more towards games with monster companions and a variety of ways to grind. Several of their offerings (Crystareino, Justice Chronicles) were on Amazon Underground and I bought several others in their holiday sale (Soul of Deva, Chronus Arc). If you need to grind for materials to craft weapons, it's a Hit-Point game. On the other hand, they're most likely to put actual puzzles into the dungeons. Their IAP is usually there to reduce grinding time. A bunch of their games were in the Humble KEMCO x HyperDevBox bundle, so it'll be interesting to see how those function without IAP.

Magitec tries the hardest to get creative with their plots, often to the point of cramming in too many twists. They also had a bunch of Amazon Underground games (Grace of Letoile, Soul Historica, Dead Dragons) and a bunch I got in the holiday sale (Covenant of Solitude, Chrome Wolf, Shelterra the Skyworld). They tend to go in for class systems, mission-based plot sequences, and very standard space-filling dungeons that have the same half-dozen styles (take the long way around to hit a switch; one-way doors/traps; sliding ice/walkways; damage floors you need items to avoid, etc). They'll often have cool stuff in their IAP, though sometimes it breaks the game more than others.

WorldWideSoftware provided the first KEMCO Humble Bundle (Eclipse of Illusion, Aeon Avenger, Fortuna Magus, Silver Nornir, Symphony of the Origin, Eve of the Genesis). They're most likely to hide story content behind IAP (if you aren't playing a Humble version), and their translations are sometimes rocky. They've gotten better at designing dungeons in later games, but it's not hard to improve from three open screens with two arrangements of enemies, which was the standard in their earliest offerings.

I suspect I'll continue to play games from a variety of the developers, but I'll likely seek out the WorldWideSoftware or later EXE-Create ones when I next go looking, unless I'm really in the mood for a decent plot and willing to handle the Magitec style to get it.

[I'll write a more proper summary when I finish this thread, but subsequent to this posting, Magitec and WorldwideSoftware both stopped producing new games for KEMCO. I actually played almost everything published by both of them. As I think I noted earlier, all but 1 of the Android games added 2020-2023 were by EXE-Create or Hit-Point.]

 

[Beowulf]

Cross Hearts Arcadia
Humble Mobile Bundle: KEMCO X HyperDevbox! #1. Played in 2017. Published by Hit-Point.

A quiet, nerdy researcher named Nirva finds a strange egg in some ruins, and it hatches into an Eng, a strange sprite that bonds itself to him. But it has no idea what to do after that, so the pair go exploring to learn more about Engs and their world.

A KEMCO/Hit-Point game, with all the usual trappings of such. JRPG tropes in full force.

The need to grind materials from spawn points is less absurd than some of the other games, because each upgrade is a new piece of equipment, there aren't five levels of "+1" first. You do have to de-equip items to upgrade them (or even see if you can) which is irritating. You could probably get through the game without forging anything, relying on stores and found objects, but it would be tough. That said, there are multiple layers of equipment that I never even got near forging when I beat the final boss—you don't need the top-tier stuff.

The game doesn't give you nearly enough iron early enough to make it useful. (There’s a pair of spawn points just inside the far end of Burgundy Cave that are the best place to farm it.) Silver Nuggets have the same problem, being required in large quantities for a lot of recipes, but only being available in the final dungeon. There are "hover stone fragments", "hover stone pieces" and “hover stones” that are not interchangeable, which is an irritating translation issue. Also, because you need to wait to find the guy who hands you recipes, there's a major cap on what you can forge at any given point.

The "Life Drops" that give +50 max HP are totally broken in the early game, because you can collect a bunch from mimics and double your main character's hit points, making several boss battles much easier. (You should totally steal from mimics: They'll either give you Platinum or Damascus, both of which are rare and useful.)

The plot is okay—power of friendship, sealed evil from ancient times, blag blah blah. There's some royalty who are actually useful and a political struggle that actually works as a plot motivator, but also a lot of points in the worldbuilding that go completely unused. The "ancient writing" bits (especially the prologue scroll) are badly translated to the point of being nonsensical, but the dialogue is fine. There's one random bit where the conversation inexplicably focuses on one character's boobs, which I think was supposed to be funny or something. Nirva's official protagonist silence is also handled awkwardly, and there a bunch of places where they really should have either had an Ys-style "Nirva explained the situation" or just had him speak.

Overall: Ten hours, eminently playable, nothing to write home about.

 

[Beowulf]

Symphony of Eternity
Humble Mobile Bundle: RPGS!!! #2. Played in 2018. Published by WorldWideSoftware.

The royals of the Kingdom of Easthend are overthrown in a bloody coup d’etat, and their lost princess is found by an adventurer and his golem partner. The three of them go to search for a legendary wish-granting artifact to try to save the kingdom, and meet plenty of golems, elves and dwarves along the way.

This is a WorldWideSoftware game, which means it has perfectly fine systems, a perfectly fine plot, a reasonable if somewhat awkward translation, and some reasonably good dungeon design. The graphic scheme shows a love for FF6, but a lack of talent to fully mimic it. Character designs are fine. Dungeons are often full of barely-visible obstacles and the scale for staircases (or towns on the world map) is really weird, but they get creative with the layouts and there are a few simple setpiece puzzles. Monsters are visible and you can determine surprise attacks depending on how you run into them.

The battle system is turn-based, but with a weird sort of nod to active time battle. Skills are learned through a class system--you equip "tablets" which grant skills and battle stances, and can permanently learn them via points acquired in battle. Human characters have one set (which are not entirely shared—one human is mage-focused, the other martial-focused), and the golem character has another. Equipment is independent of this, and character-specific. The tablets have undocumented permanent stat bonuses, usually at 800 and 1000/Master if there's nothing else listed. So there's a reason to master tablets even if there's no power listed at that level.

The lack of both full-party healing and all-enemy attacks for most of the game means that boss battles often become adventures in round-robin item use. (Bosses virtually always have a powerful hit-all attack in their rotation, though they never seem to use it twice in a row.) Though it turns out I made my own life much more difficult by missing the Holy Priest tablet in the Cave of the Abyss (left path after the first boss), which has all the higher-level healing spells.

Laishutia's "Sleep Cloud" spell is actually amazingly effective for random battles, because it almost always works and enemies don't wake up until you hit them. Once you also have "Mental Steal" (which seems effective on anything that isn't undead), you can use magic to your heart's content without worrying about items. Of course, given the Campset item (fully refills the party, can't be used in battle) becomes trivially cheap in the later game, you can spam magic a lot already.

The "break" system is badly documented, but when your meter fills to 100% (by taking damage), you can opt to enhance one attack and jump it to the front of the action queue. Given how slowly the meter fills and the mild chain benefits from using attacks in succession, I found that the best way to use them was to throw out buffs and debuffs like crazy in the first two rounds of a boss battle, then unleash my best attacks as breaks in one big smash. On the topic of buffs/debuffs, they last only a few rounds and Dauturu (who gets most of the debuffs) never has as much MP as you want, so you need to make them count.

The ability to "make" weapons rather than buying them is minor in the first half of the game, as it just lets you arrange merit points slightly differently. Later in the game it becomes a critical system, as you hit rounds of weapons that can only be made with Silver Ore or Mithril Ore, which you collect in dungeons. (There's an Orichalcum third set available once the final dungeon opens up, but you need to go to the Dwarf town to make them. Nothing tells you this, of course. A Zebulon fourth set is available in the post-game dungeons.)

It irritates me that you can often reach destinations that aren't on "the plotted line", but there's no benefit to doing so--most of the time, the characters will just say, "We have no reason to be here now." There are at least five locked locations around the world that are apparently only used for the post-game.

Periodically, you'll split your main party and get other characters to join you for portions of a dungeon. This is mildly irritating because of the way the tablet system works, that you're wasting time earning skills for characters who'll leave your party shortly thereafter. You're given the option of putting any of the temporary characters back into your party for the final dungeon and post-game (replacing a main character, of course), but I don't see a lot of value in that, as my main characters were well ahead of them in mastered classes at that point.

Overall: The plot is forgettable, but inoffensive. There are fun breaks and corner-cases to find in the systems, and the difficulty curve is fair. Better than average for a KEMCO game, overall.

 

[Beowulf]

Dragon Lapis
Ad-Supported KEMCO Games #3. Played in 2018. Published by EXE-Create.

A thousand years ago, two dragons rampaged across the world and devastated everything in sight, until a hero came and sealed them both away. Now, they’ve both returned, intent on retrieving the powers the hero sealed in the Dragon Lapis scattered across the world. As the descendent of the hero, you side with the gold dragon. Is that a mistake? (Probably not.)

The ads are generally unobtrusive—there’s a small banner at the bottom, they sometimes play a 5-second ad when you save, and you can opt to watch a 30-second ad to get free LPP. About six hours in, you get alerted that the number of ads is going to go up, and it does—to one after every few battles. At that point, I was fairly certain I wanted to play the entire game, so I paid the $5 to remove the ads and get some free LPP. (You get LPP and lottery tickets for free every few battles, though it takes a long time to save up for anything particularly good. I blew all of mine on the XP tripler accessory.)

Oddly, they have standard gold and then multiple non-standard currencies, the odd one out being “Coins”, which you trade Magus Stones for and can use in special shops to buy better weapons and special accessories. The 200-coin weapons seem to be the very best the game offers—and that’s saying something—but saving up for those takes forever. I blew my coins on the accessory that recovers everyone’s MP in battle.

XP, as it happens, is only of middling importance: The only important thing you get from going up a level is EP to distribute onto a class plate (and there are other sources of EP, like from rare items or by completing randomly-assigned “missions” in battle, which I actually thought were a good idea that broke up the monotony of random battles). Like the Sphere Grid in FFX, each node on a class plate gives you a small stat boost or a new ability. Unlike it, the plates are small and each character can use almost all of them, and you get bonuses for completing them. The setup for the higher-level classes (you need to “level up” a lower class to reach high classes and use those skills, but can use the plates to learn the skills at any time—it's a weird double-unlock) is a little obtuse, but not so critical that you need to worry about screwing it up.

Graphics are very deliberately “retro” pixelated, but not bad by any means. The game unquestionably feels like an Exe-Create game, with a number of different things to upgrade, but the system is actually fairly straightforward. (Especially since all of the magic is lumped into Light and Shadow and just unlocked in clusters from the Priest and Mage classes.)

I love the minimap system, actually—each area has a gray outline of the corridors which turns into a proper, detailed map as you explore it. It makes it really easy to tell where you haven’t been yet, and also means you can guess what will be a dead end and what will be the way through.

While the characters are still clearly anime-trope inspired, the party isn’t “the hero and his harem,” nor are there any random maids. The characters banter and bicker, but the writing is much more tolerable than, say, the Asdivine games.

And there’s plenty to do: I spent about 20 hours on the game, but a lot of that was optional content—there are three optional dungeons that are there to make grinding more pleasant, there are 15 sidequests (most of which are short revisits of the previous dungeon), there is a post-game/”good ending” dungeon, and a 30-floor bonus dungeon that can be accessed before the final dungeon. Oh, and bonus bosses both scattered around the world (who give lousy rewards) and clustered in the “heroes grave” (who give some of the best weapons). I made it halfway up the Goddess Tower and my characters were in the high 80s when I got bored, so I beat the bonus bosses and steamrollered the final and post-final dungeons. (I actually beat both forms of both final bosses in a single hit each—my Iria was an utter beast in her Neo-Dragonite class.)

Overall: I’d put this in the top quartile of KEMCO games, as it manages the good game experience of most EXE-Create games without the wince-worthy plot elements. I definitely got my $5 worth.

 

[Beowulf]

Legna Tactica
Humble Mobile Bundle: KEMCO X HyperDevbox! #2. Played in 2018. Published by Hit-Point.

The Kingdom of Legna is at war with the Empire of Izrool, and you're a trainee soldier who isn't the best, but tries very hard. Then you inexplicably start getting put in charge of important missions as the enemy starts employing demons and monsters in the war.

The setup and controls are straight out of Final Fantasy Tactics, but without the bother of a job system—each character just has a unique skill tree. This is fine with me. They actually do a nice job of differentiating the characters who share a class: One of the two wizards has fire/earth magic and mostly area effects; the other has ice/lightning and hits single targets. One of the archers is dedicated to that task; the other is the buffer-bard. One of the heavy tanks is very defensively focused with a “hit me!” move; the other is the berserker and can decrease his defense to increase his attack.

The Humble version of the game doles out the IAP currency every few battles and for accomplishing various achievements. You can easily have enough for the experience and gold doublers less than a third of the way through the game. The battles (until the late game) don’t give anywhere near enough gold to outfit your whole party, but doing the Tavern-based sidequests makes up for that (as they’re clearly intended to).

I think my biggest complaint about the battle system is just that the areas are so damn big: Even for random battles, you lose the first round or two just closing the distance to the enemies. They try to be as creative as possible with the scenery given that you can’t rotate the field; some of the most “interesting” layouts are the final couple. (And after Wild Arms XF I’m just as happy not to have any “puzzle” levels.)

For those of you paying attention, the last descendent of the Light Dragon is very clearly ending up romantically linked to the last descendent of the Dark Dragon. That’s generational sequel bait if ever I’ve seen it.

Overall: It’s KEMCO/Hit-Point sensibilities, only with a tactical rpg framework. The difficulty level is perfectly reasonably and the grinding isn’t overdone; the plot is nothing new but half-decent. It doesn’t overstay its welcome. I enjoyed it as a change of pace.

 

[Beowulf]

Fairy Elements
Ad-Supported KEMCO Games #4. Played in 2018. Published by EXE-Create.

A knight is caught in a massive power backlash when he defeats the evil Demonius King, and wakes up 200 years later, when a new demonic empire has destroyed his old kingdom. It’s been a while, but he’s still a knight and killing demons is what he does best.

A KEMCO/EXE-Create game with a lot of the usual trappings. This one is big on vendortrash as the way to upgrade your weapons along various tracks. Thankfully, you can sell extra weapons and vendortrash for “coins” (separate from gold) which you can use to buy more vendortrash. There’s also a random-weapon-providing lottery ticket system (that you can also spend IAP on), and an arena that you can access from anywhere in the game. Upon reflection, this is the closest I’ve seen to a melding of an EXE-Create game with a Hit-Point game, mostly based around the need to hit specific spots repeatedly to grind vendortrash to upgrade your weapons. They do make it very easy to find or buy the items you need, though, so that sets it apart.

Interestingly, though you can get oodles of weapons from the lottery and you can buy then at stores, by the halfway point in the game, you want each of your characters to have a primary weapon that you never remove—you can’t “merge” weapons, so you want to use all of the “cauldron” bonuses and Transmigration Ores on a set of four weapons to concentrate your gains, making sure everyone gets slots for the Material Crystals (essentially materia; it grants stat bonuses and skills/spells, and needs to be equipped on your weapons). I didn’t find attack magic particularly useful at all, because level-based stat bonuses lagged far behind the equipment-based bonuses I could get from enhanced weapons. Buffs/debuffs and healing magic were useful, though.

(Side note: There's a late-game boss who you need to use magic attacks to kill, and a second one in the bonus dungeon. That's pretty much the only time attack magic is better than weapons, though.)

Enemies are visible on the map screen and don’t move, though they have a “threat zone” in the direction that they’re looking, and you engage in battle if they spot you. You can use the search feature to find them and find out what their random drops are, making it easier to collect the vendortrash you need. There are also special “elimination rooms” in dungeons where the monsters don’t give gold, but beating them all gives a special treasure.

For the record, though this game is “ad-supported”, the only ads I saw were on the title screen until about six hours in, when the game alerted me that trial mode was off. Then, annoyingly, I paid the $5 for the ad remover and bonus IAP points, but the ad remover didn’t actually work. I played the rest of the game in airplane mode so all of the ads were just a splash screen of “Buy the ad remover!” I don't recommend doing that, but dangit, I paid the money so I'm not looking at the ads.

Most of the plot events actually revolve around the fourth character to join your party, who clearly has a bucketload of secrets. Your main character being a man out of time is barely touched upon; he and the token girl are both just interested in finding their missing 200-year-old partner/mentor. And the fuzzy thing doesn’t talk, it just punches things and purrs a lot. The final dungeon feels like they ran out of time, as they do a time-skip and a fifth character joins your party after the penultimate dungeon, but then you do a 30-floor tower with stops for infodumps / plot revelations. I have to wonder if their original plan was for something more complex, but they ended up rushing in a copy-paste dungeon instead. (There's no post-game either, just the 20-floor bonus dungeon that unlocks two-thirds through the game.)

They also only throw in references to fairies at the end of the game, and never mention elements. I'm going to guess that there's a translation issue, because “Demon Materials” would have made perfect sense as the title.

Overall: Interesting systems and attempts to be creative, the balance is wonky but never gets too hard, and the plot is generally not bad. (Stupid sexist cooking subplot aside.) The need to grind vendortrash is rarely a good choice, but they mitigate a lot of the worst parts of it. Respectable, middle-tier game.

 

[Beowulf]

[The next half-dozen games I only did mini-reviews of, and unfortunately I don't remember enough to expand them. There will be more full reviews before I finish this thread.]

Archlion Saga
Ad-Supported KEMCO Games #5. Played in 2018. Published by Hit-Point.

A KEMCO/Hit-Point ad-supported game that gave me a “babby’s first jrpg” sort of impression. It’s very short, only two hours, and puts you through the motions of an rpg without actually making you try very hard. The IAP gimmick is “stars,” which you can use to double XP after a battle, fully heal the party, open certain chests and doors, etc. You can watch videos or pay money for stars; the thing is, there are enough of them scattered around the game that you’ll never need to. The different equipment carries different stat bonuses, but the number inflation of the game is such that it never really matters which gear you pick. Spells have charge times/cooldown times instead of using MP, so battles are vaguely strategic but mostly about attrition. And as per Hit-Point in general, the plot is ambitious but the translation is lackluster. Not much to it overall (the entire game is maybe 2 hours long), but the price was right.


Wizards of Brandel
Ad-Supported KEMCO Games #6. Played in 2018. Published by EXE-Create.

A KEMCO/EXE-Create ad-supported game with their usual standards, the gimmick here being that everyone has a spirit or fairy companion who learns special abilities and attacks along with them. The story revolved around a wizard/pseudo-novelist who accidentally finds himself in the hospitality of the Dark Lord, who’s really rather a nice guy, and when a holy warrior comes to kill him, the wizard decides recruit her and get to the bottom of the whole “dark lord” thing. Overall, the plot didn’t win me, the mechanics were routine, and I bored of it.

 

[RT-55J]

A 2 hour long JRPG is such a weird thought, I don't know how to process it. Are all the battle animations, fanfares, and such super quick?

 

[Beowulf]

A 2 hour long JRPG is such a weird thought, I don't know how to process it. Are all the battle animations, fanfares, and such super quick?

Everything is super-condensed. Here's an in-depth Youtube review.

 

[Beowulf]

Djinn Caster
Ad-Supported KEMCO Games #7. Played in 2018. Published by Chocoarts.

An Arabian Nights-flavored action-rpg by new developer Chocoarts. A thief rebelling against an unjust Sultan lucks into a magic dagger containing a djinn, which leads him to going on missions to help people and discover more djinn. (The cultural sensitivity is...questionable.) This puts the pay-to-play nature front-and-center, including a play-time counter that you need to watch ads to refill, the usual IAP shop to make your character stronger, and a lot of randomization. The battle system is a lot of attack-button mashing, and I'd be lying if I said my accidentally using all my potions because they're right next to the “pick stuff up” button didn't play a role in my dislike of the game.

What Hadjane Says Goes!
Ad-Supported KEMCO Games #8. Played in 2018. Published by Hit-Point.

In a homage/takeoff of Nippon Ichi games, the queen of Hell wakes up from a long nap to find that most of her minions have abandoned her. This was made by Hit-Point, and despite being an action-rpg, the need from grinding vendortrash shows it. The game is broken up into short stages in which you button-mash to kill monsters and summon minions from their remains to help you defeat a boss. Then you use the various dropped items to upgrade your stats, your equipment, and your available minions. All of the plot happens via cutscene in a central location, as Hadjane is domineering but incompetent and belittles her new, shrinking-violet maid and her competent-but-clearly-planning-to-betray-her demon underling.

Onigo Hunter
Ad-Supported KEMCO Games #9. Played in 2018. Published by EXE-Create.

On a mysterious island chain, an up-and-coming monster hunter is recruited by a princess to help rescue the missing king and re-establish her birthright. (And they're joined by a sassy combat butler.) An Exe-Create game with most of their usual system trappings (weapon upgrading, bonus tickets, multiple currencies, etc) but with the twist that “energy” is both your primary currency and your MP, and you have a very limited wallet for it; and you need to capture monsters (“onigos”) to raise your hunter rank to go on better quests—the entire game is quest-based from one town and, because MP is also money and you get some after every battle, you're expected to take long forays into the field without returning to that town. Note also that while you need to whittle down monsters and use special attacks or traps to capture them, you don't ever seem to be able to do anything with captured monsters—you get your hunter points and they fill in your bestiary, but this isn't a mon-battle game.

Overall: I gave each of these about an hour, and none of them really won me. Part of it is my old-fashioned desire to have physical buttons for my button-mashing experience; but I think it's also that the play experience just isn't quite the right thing to hold me for obvious grind-fests. The fact that these are all IAP-driven and are likely keeping the more pleasant play experience behind their paywalls doesn't help, either.

 

[Beowulf]

Marenian Tavern Story
Full-Price KEMCO Games #1. Played in 2019. Published by Rideon.

An important lesson: If you meet the God of Poverty on the road, you apparently shouldn’t feed him, because he’ll follow you home and ruin your life. Fortunately, his power can be defeated by stuffing him full of food and then building a new restaurant through the power of friendship.

This is a remake/sequel to Adventure Bar Story, with a number of new twists. The daily sequence of “go out and explore, cook, eat to gain levels, set a menu and open the restaurant” remains the same. But now menus/customers are more complicated, with preference trends. You can’t just load it up with the most expensive food every day. They also slow down the tavern level-up sequence by putting various restrictions: You can only rank up once a week, and only if you’ve made a certain amount of money, satisfied the God of Poverty (with food), and gotten through certain plot events. There’s a weapon enhancement system added, a simple fishing minigame, a local farm you can get additional ingredients from, and “search skip cards” that let you get all the gather spots from an area without actually entering. (In practice, the latter only get you produce and fish; you still need to fight enemies for meat and dairy.)

The once-a-week upgrade was the most limiting factor for me; there were several weeks when I ended up just short of the sales I needed for an upgrade, and then had to speed through four days of selling cheap stuff and sometimes not bothering to go out exploring. In theory this meant I was higher level (from eating during those days) but in practice it was just frustrating because I couldn’t advance the plot.

There’s a plot cutscene practically every day, mostly cute everyday life stuff. Your active party is only three people, but four more join you and you can swap them in. Characters gain levels from eating, but learn their special skills from elemental EP you get in battles; so you really need to pick a party and stick with it. There aren’t that many equipment upgrades comparatively; it’s often better to stick with a weapon with a special ability you like rather than upgrade for a few more attack points. Most of your success against bosses comes from levels and tactics, anyway.

The biggest negative change is that they upgraded the graphics to a smoother DS-style, and that leads to way too much loading. You’ll have a few seconds of loading for every new area, but also before and after every battle. (I suspect that this might run better on something more advanced than my five-year-old tablet. I see things get a bit janky, but that may not be everyone’s concern.)

The recipes are interesting in that you can get something like 70% of them with the 80% of ingredients you can get in the first few areas. After that, it’s mostly upgrades. Recipes are generally either “same stuff with a different main ingredient” like jellies, juices or pies where you can just swap in a different fruit and it’s a new recipe (and that’ll work for every fruit); there are a few fruits saved for later areas like pineapple or mango, but you can mostly make all of these early on. The other approach is “upgrade everything that uses this one ingredient” where you’ll have a dozen different styles of food that all use eggs, and you can remake them with Garuda eggs and also Dragon eggs. The same is generally true for mushrooms → pine mushrooms → black mushrooms, crab → emperor crab, salmon → king salmon, and aurochs meat → dragon meat. There are also a few ingredients that are clearly just for completionists: You unlock mistgrass in a late-game cutscene and it’s only used for one recipe; and the rare drop aurochs tongue (and the upgraded dragon tongue) only appears in two recipes.

Random translation note: Apparently “sea chestnut” is a possible translation for an urchin? Because the ingredient is the former, the recipes call for the latter, and that stymied me for a while. (Also, there are a few extremely Japanese moments in the game, most notably when the evil bank manager tells people you’re having a free buffet, and you…throw a free buffet to save face. As an American, I feel the proper response to people showing up for a free buffet you aren’t having is, “Sorry, that jerk lied to you. Maybe you should stop banking with him, as he clearly isn’t trustworthy.”)

Once you’ve gotten the tavern up to level 10 (at which point, sales don’t really seem to matter anymore), you go into a few weeks of endgame sequence where you rescue your father, then need to collect four unique ingredients to make Mystery Soup (which require 500,000 gold, 10 aurochs tongues, and beating two powerful bosses), then need to get through a final dungeon that’s a full 15 levels stronger than the ones before it and beat a two-stage final boss. I ran from almost every encounter in that dungeon, squeaked past the final boss, and call myself done despite the existence of a completionist postgame. At that point, I had found all the recipes and made my tavern great, and that was everything that had appealed to me.

Overall: The technological “improvements” versus the first game weren’t great, but the game itself was pretty decent and I had fun with it. It wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I was entertained.

 

[Beowulf]

Link of Hearts
Full-Price KEMCO Games #2. Played in 2020. Published by WorldWideSoftware.

Everything is peaceful, until the Goddess (aka “Administrator”) of the world warns you that a terrible catastrophe is about to occur. It turns out that the truth of the situation is a bit more complicated.

It’s been a while since I played a KEMCO jrpg, and I opted for a WorldWideSoftware one. As with most by this developer, the translation is functional (the dialogue is fine, but in-battles messages are clunky “Mars is now Poison” stuff) and the systems are a little clunky. It reminds me of the Phantasy Star series more than anything else, with a sci-fi/fantasy blend and first-person battle view. The pacing and dungeons are standard; there’s a town with new equipment for sale after pretty much every one, and there’s switch puzzles, tightropes, teleporters and sliding ice in some of the dungeons. The plot is very linear and won’t let you do things out of order.

It’s barely a six-hour game, which isn’t bad for $4. The game has five IAP bonus areas and two bonus characters, though given that it’s pretty easy if you just fight through the main storyline, I’m not sure why you’d need to spend extra money on sidequests. (They cost 120 IAP points each, or about a dollar. You’d need to fight 1,200 battles to unlock each one otherwise, which is about three times what I did playing the main game. So the “full” game would run you about $10.) The character IAP also gives you backstory and motivation for side characters who join your party but never get used because they’d have to replace an existing character in your five-person lineup.

The initial area you’re in is actually the Moon, or a colony on it. After various events, that colony flies to earth and sets down in a lake, merging with the nearby landmasses and letting you combine your two sets of characters. It’s the kind of event that you’d expect to happen with more build-up, but given they don’t have a lot of game to work with…There’s a choice to use a blue or red key in that event; using the wrong one gives you a bad ending. Similarly, there’s a choice near the very end that leads to a bad ending that better explains the main villain's motivation.

The fact that one of your team members is an android is important to the story but ignored by the systems. He suffers from poison, paralyze and sleep just like the human characters, too. Oh, and in one instance, the party is sprayed with poison gas and the android is affected just like everyone else…except the girl who, it’s later theorized, is a miasma-resistant mutant. (They then go to lengths to say it’s not “just” poison gas, but seriously. Use your damn premise, people.)

The game uses a materia-style system to equip special attacks, which you can link together for various bonuses. Though you have new options after every dungeon, you’re probably going to just pick a configuration you like and make occasional edits to it. The boss battles are generally the only “challenge”; you can safely put random battles on Auto. The early bosses are just a matter of running down your MP using special attacks and healing until they die. Putting the hit-all element linked with a Heal spell on Lily eliminated any worries from the later boss battles, though I also use the attack buff and assorted debuffs because they were there (and I suspect they made the battles much faster). Poison was also nice on bosses if you could land it. Defensive buffs weren’t really worth the trouble.

Overall: I’d call this a lower-tier KEMCO game, playable and decently balanced but nothing special. It’s fine, it’s generic. And it was apparently what I was briefly in the mood for.

 

[Violentvixen]

This is a remake/sequel to Adventure Bar Story, with a number of new twists.

Oh huh, that was something I picked up when the 3DS eshop was closing and I liked it, I didn't realize there was a sequel. Neat. Onto the wishlist it goes for a sale, currently listed at $20, think I got the first one for $3, maybe even less.

 

[Beowulf]

Monster Viator
KEMCO August Sale 2023 #1. Played in 2023. Published by Hit-Point.

Our hero is a mysterious amnesiac who apparently made some kind of deal with the local evil-eye witch; but he doesn’t remember anything (not even his name), except that he has a brother who he used to travel with. So the witch gives him a flying cat companion and he discovers he has the mysterious power to talk to monsters (and tame them to fight for him), so off on adventure he goes.

This is a KEMCO rpg, the first I’ve played in a few years. “Full price” for this during a random sale is a mere $3, and the in-app purchases don’t even bother with a secondary currency. You can just pay real money for double damage, triple XP, or a no-encounters travel method. (Somewhere around 11 hours in, I opted to pay an additional $3 for the no-encounters travel, because I wanted to hunt down sidequests in earlier dungeons but didn’t want to fight a zillion easy, unrewarding battles. The full game took me about 15 hours to beat.)

You don’t actually “capture” monsters Pokemon-style or anything like that; you recruit them periodically as the story progresses. (You have two slots for monsters in your active party and something like two dozen monsters join you—I only used three for the whole game. Fortunately, non-active monsters still get XP and there are no skills to unlock.) You have two human characters who each have classes they can switch between (which determine their skill sets), but class progression is also locked by story progression and finding various special items. Each equipment item can be upgraded by spending gold, up to +5, which can give you a nice advantage if you grind money but also can make it hard to tell if a new item in a shop is actually going to be an upgrade or not. There are lots of sidequests, mostly finding special bosses to fight but occasionally visiting locations or finding new classes. (There are more side dungeons that don’t matter to the plot than there are actual story locations! Plus, there’s a fully-optional roguelike tower dungeon that I skipped entirely.) The story quest system is great; it’s easy to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing if you lose track.

The opening segments of the game are a bit deceptive: The first “dungeon” is a single screen area, but they soon balloon into real dungeons with some simple puzzles and mazes. There are also semi-optional side areas attached to some of the dungeons later on.

Difficulty is highly variable—at the very beginning you can die a bunch if you challenge the wrong bonus enemy or if your skills that can land repeatedly…don’t. But if you get the ice sword from the first sidequest boss, you can wipe out random battles for the next whole area with ease. There’s also a heavy emphasis on the Random Number God being nice to you, since whether an enemy uses their nastiest attack or whether your skills proc sufficiently often determines how far out of your weight class you can punch at any point in the game. It’s occasionally difficult to tell whether you’ve hit a place you aren’t supposed to be yet, or if you’d just unlucky/have a lousy strategy. They did use the lovely feature from Final Fantasy Mystic Quest where you can immediately retry a battle you lose, which was what got me through the two final battles and a few of the bonus bosses.

Instead of regular MP, you have a gauge that returns to a starting value at the beginning of every battle and regenerates each turn, so you basically can use skills with impunity in random battles but need to balance them with normal attacks in boss battles so you have MP when you need it. The fact that your HP refills in every battle (and you can upgrade weapons anywhere) also means you aren’t tethered to towns. (Every town has an Inn, but they’re only there for sidequest trading games.)

There are two special encounters: A Doom Gaze-esque overworld monster who’ll destroy you repeatedly before you whittle him down (dying to him has no penalties) who awards you with the second special ability slot when you finally beat him; and the Gold Panchos, which are invincible but give gold proportional to the amount of damage you can do to them in three turns. The latter is fantastic for upgrading weapons.

The main antagonist is Biscute, who is a terribly spoiled prince who wants to be the best Monster Tamer in the world, and what he lacks in talent he makes up for with wealth, privilege, and generally being an asshole. You keep almost feeling sorry for the guy, but then he’ll roll out another jerk move. And he isn’t the final boss: The final boss shows up because he does something stupid and short-sighted. I appreciate this level of class-consciousness in my games.

Spoiler: PLOT SPOILERS

We finally get a title drop when Biscute introduces his most powerful monster, a wolf-creature called a Viator. And immediately after that it’s revealed that Culter (the protagonist) and his brother were both Viators who traveled the world together, but Biscute captured the brother, and the witch made a deal with Culter to transform him into a human so he could face the trial to become a Hero. (Harpist sidekick Aira, on the other hand, is the descendant of the legendary Beast King. This never really becomes important.)

Overall: The plot’s a little thin and the amount of randomness in the battles may or may not be your thing, but this was entertaining, especially for the price. I’d also call this particularly strong for a Hit-Point game (probably my least favorite of KEMCO’s developers).

 

[Beowulf]

Tears Revolude
Steam Golden Week Sale 2020 #1. Played in 2023. Published by WorldWideSoftware.

Sion and Michelle are mercenaries who discover a strange amnesiac girl named Liana in a cave. At the same time, they also start finding strange jewel-covered boss monsters while searching for treasures left by the famous artist Orwiel; and supposing the two things are related, start following every random lead they can. They quickly discover that the Guild, who run the local area, are also after the girl; so they enlist the leader of the Resistance to help find out what’s going on.

One of the last WorldWideSoftware games I hadn’t played, I picked this up in a Steam Golden Week sale a few years ago, and my thread of re-posting KEMCO reviews inspired me to actually get around to playing it. (WorldWideSoftware clearly stopped producing new games for KEMCO years ago; but it’s not clear to me if they became Rideon or just sold some IP to Rideon; because Adventure Bar Story was made by them and Marenian Tavern Story was credited to Rideon and the two games share far too many assets to be unrelated.)

This game is pretty weird visually and pretty rote in all other respects: The controls are a hybrid of touchscreen (or mouse, in my case) and arrow keys. The dungeon view shows you the character is in a semi-3D angled view, but also gives you a minimap and a first-person view. The enemies are visible (as dark-color balls in all the views), but the worm-tunnel layout of the dungeons generally makes them unavoidable, and they respawn every time you change floors. There also are only 2-3 monsters in a couple of formations in each dungeon, so the battles get particularly repetitive. The graphics feel like they pieced together several unrelated systems (monster designs, character designs, the 3D walls, the visual novel-style character conversations, the menu towns) from different, unrelated sources. Battles are shown in first-person with a style of monster design that again seems different from the rest of the art; and a button style that don’t look familiar to me at all.

You need to revisit several of the earlier dungeons, but it’s to get to new areas within them that require virtually no retreading, so that’s not so bad. There are some puzzles in the later dungeons: Pressing buttons, key-in-lock, pushing blocks; and gradually ramping up into more obtuse candle-lighting sequences. The hardest block-pushing puzzles are in the purchasable bonus dungeon, and they’re mostly hard because the angles are weird and the elevations are hard to discern. (Those areas must have been hell to play on a phone, and a quick check on Youtube seems to indicate they didn’t change anything meaningful in the port.)

Your weapons never change, but you can upgrade them and shift them more towards attack or magic. Unlocking your skills is tied to how much you’ve upgraded your weapons, which means there aren’t a lot of them or a lot of variety, but you can unlock higher-level versions of the skills (which use more MP and have bigger effects) by using them over and over. Albus’ Smoke Blast is the only ability that hits all enemies at level 1, so it was my go-to. Instead of armor, there are accessories and a system of “gems” that you equip for stat bonuses. There’s also “SP” that builds up as you fight which you can use for big combo attacks. Every 5 enemies killed gets you a TRP, which take the place of the IAP store for unlocking bonus dungeons and special items. There’s also a system of achievements that reward you TRP; most of which you’ll stumble into in the normal course of play. Random people in town will request 5 or 10 of a vendortrash item dropped by monsters as a sidequest, which you can fulfill as you walk into and out of each dungeon (which you’ll have to do if you didn’t think to stock up on “recall crystals”).

There are four difficulty levels, and I played on Easy because I had a suspicion this wouldn’t be a game I wanted to grind. (I was correct.) I made it to the proper ending sequence but didn’t bother with the postgame “trial dungeon” and extra achievements.

The plot is honestly forgettable: The Guild has an evil plan, Liana has superpowers that are critical to it, except they actually aren’t and even without her the Guild will destroy the world anyway if you don’t stop them. Also, she and all the Guild heads are artificial humans. It turns out that a downplayed sidekick to the head of the Guild is secretly Orwiel and he organized everything, including creating all of the artificial humans in the search for perfect beauty. The characters have some banter (which is moderately cute in an overdone anime sort of way) and some trauma (which is often downplayed rather than really explored). The Power of Optimistic Thinking (and also punching dudes really hard) saves the day.

Overall: Nothing to write home about, especially since the only thing unique about this was the weird graphic scheme, which doesn’t actually improve anything. It’s not bad, it’s just nothing special.

 

[Beowulf]

Dragon Sinker
Steam Golden Week Sale 2020 #2. Played in 2023. Published by EXE-Create.

1,000 years after a trio of heroes defeated the evil Wyrmvarg, the creature has awakened once more. The creature can only be defeated and re-sealed by a union of humans, elves and dwarves. Unfortunately, everyone in this world is tremendously racist.

The other KEMCO game I got in the 2020 Steam Golden Week sale. I played some of this in 2020 but apparently failed to make any notes about it.

You start play as the human prince (and his nervous advisor), but are quickly joined by the haughty elf princess and her jerkish advisor, and the random dwarf craftsman and his horny wife. Characters generally get a single personality trait for their anime-style bickering; and though you get lots of additional followers joining you, none demonstrate any personality after their initial introduction. The plot is painfully generic; you’re trying to collect and restore the three legendary weapons so you can defeat the evil dragon.

This game has a weird party and job system based around each team having a leader and three followers. You can only buy equipment for the leader, but you can set classes for the followers (with each class giving them different skills and combinations of classes giving various bonuses). You then have three leader-follower parties that you can swap among during battles to take advantage of their setups and bonuses. Leaders have a set skill list but can learn new skills as their followers master classes. Besides swapping parties, battles are a fairly standard turn-based affair.

The graphics are very mid-SNES-era pixelated; I’m reminded most strongly of the SNES remake of Dragon Quest. The music is particularly “beepy”.

There are sidequests designated in the usual EXE-Create way, with people in towns having the “grumbling” thought balloon to signify them. Some of the sidequests don’t require you to hike back to the person, which is nice (though some do). They also have the randomly “big red” or “small blue” versions of enemies that are popular in EXE-Create games.

The IAP system works off DRP points, but at least on Steam there’s no actual store option. You get 1,000 DRP to start and another 5 every few battles, and you can either buy stat-increasing items and special accessories; or you can use DRP or lottery tickets to randomly get consumables, optional party members, or high-end weapons. I spent 400 DRP right off the bat on the XP and JP doubler accessories. The fact that they rebalanced the IAP currencies and shops for a bunch of these games for the Steam versions (similar to what they did for the Humble standalone versions of a bunch of the older games) is definitely a nice touch and probably necessary for playability.

This and the Steam version of Tears Revolude have the same problem of the controls being designed for a touchscreen (or maaaaybe an Android device with a controller attached) and nobody really cared about keyboards. RPGMaker games default very nicely to using X and Z for control keys, where these use Spacebar/Enter for Yes and Backspace/Delete for No, neither of which is actually particularly comfortable for extended play. And you can’t remap them.

Honestly, the Steam versions of these games generally feel like lazy ports: The graphics were clearly designed for viewing on a 5” phone, not a 20” monitor. The control schemes are designed for touch. The games were balanced with IAP in mind and have various fixes to compensate for that. Steam in general doesn’t do “pick-up-and-play” as well as Android devices can, and KEMCO games are often best suited for 15-30 minute bursts. Oh, and at full price the Steam versions of these games cost twice as much as the Android versions: Most of the KEMCO games on Steam are $10-15, versus the Play Store ad-free “Premium” versions topping out at $8.

Overall: I can see why I didn’t make it through this the first time I tried; the big gimmick is the multiple parties setup and that isn’t appealing enough to make the rest of this Dragon Quest 2 clone interesting. I played 90 minutes into it a second time and decided there are other things I’d rather play. (And it’s particularly interesting given how much I liked Dragon Lapis, from the same series.)

 

[Beowulf]

Miden Tower
KEMCO August Sale 2023 #2. Played in 2023. Published by EXE-Create.

Everyone Velan loved was gleefully murdered by Imperial soldiers when they attacked the Miden Tower ten years ago. Varen has dedicated himself to learning magic and killing as many soldiers as possible in retaliation. When he gets himself into trouble, he reads some magic writing and accidentally summons a living, shapeshifting wall to be his bodyguard. They’re joined by a 100-year-old sage who looks 14 and a gruff tough guy; and they endeavor to take back their magical tower that contains a dozen different mini-worlds.

I didn’t think I’d say this, but there is just too much damn stuff to this system: You gain skills like achievements (or like the “treasure” items in Monster Viator) for doing all sorts of things including using your skills and advancing the plot. You can gain magic skills from scrolls and then gain levels in them with XP to unlock new spells. There are “fruits” for IAP currency (that you gain every few battles and as prizes for various missions), but also Tickets you can use to play a prize-box game for extra weapons. There’s a weapon-enhancement system to use up all of those excess weapons. Your wall-based teammate has a separate upgrade system based on equipping bricks in her. There’s the main story quest (which the system keeps good track of, to be fair); and 15 subquests you pick up from people in town; and once you get a ways in, you unlock Guild Quests that are daily (real time) "kill lots of monsters" quests. There are also several slates of bonus general Missions with rewards that slowly unlock. There’s a screen of real-time alchemy pots that upgrade your equipment and consumables in a semi-random way. (I never managed to get useful armor out of them, but putting in a stat-up herb will get you back either several of them or an upgraded stat “extract” that gives a bigger bonus.) There's a battle arena where you earn "bear coins" you can trade for... something. More stuff!

There’s a grid setup for battle that determines hit areas but also provides you with places to summon “golems” to help during individual fights. Oh, and you do combo attacks at random, but doing them increases the associated skills so you do them more. There are bigger, smaller and metal versions of monsters that can randomly appear and give special rewards; and also eggs and statues that give random rewards if you kill them with special items before the battle ends (or they flee). Battles can have "mana fields" with random effects. Health refills after every battle, which is nice for going all-out.

There are statues in each dungeon that let you increase or decrease the encounter rate or just summon a three-battle batch. (I really do like this feature, actually!) You also have the option to instant-win weak battles (it’s a toggle) but still get the rewards.

What REALLY breaks the game is the “Metal Area” you can access by talking to a sheep in one of the houses in the second town about halfway through the game. Every enemy there is a massive-XP-bonus metal creature, and there’s an Earth spell that gives good odds of crits to metal enemies. With the help of a few XP Bottles—easily enhanced from S to M in the alchemy pot—you can jump your characters 100 levels without much fuss.

And really, you can ignore half of these if you want to, especially since you can play on Easy mode and autobattle will destroy 90% of encounters easily.

All of that said, there’s some decent worldbuilding going on here and the game itself is a pretty breezy, pleasant experience. Each area is a “floor” of the tower, magically created to hold a specific biome but of a contained size. Which means that none of the dungeons are stupidly large, but none are too small, either. And because they weren’t chained to a world map design, they could just put the plot beats in a sensible order and not worry about whether you were on an island or a volcano on the map. The closest thing to a world map is the fast-travel system between floors, which is super-convenient.

The “anime” tropes we’ve come to expect from EXE-Create are there (in the art style as much as anything else!) but it feels more cartoony and less fetishistic than a bunch of the other games, so credit there. The contrast between one character being a goofy cartoon wall who turns into a pink-haired anime girl, and another being a tortured vampire-looking trauma-magnet who just wants to murder is…well, it’s very Japanese, is what it is. The backdrop of the entire story is the horrors of war. Several named characters die senseless, mourned deaths. Valen’s arc is being convinced not to continue a cycle of death and revenge. And Leila makes tea that’s so bad it can dissolve magic barriers!

(And oddly, that kinda works?)

Spoiler: PLOT SPOILERS

The normal ending sees the Emperor defeated and the tower reconnected with the outside world. Valen goes out to see the world, but the child of a slain soldier attacks him. He opts to break the cycle of death by dying. But then there’s a post-game that picks up right before they leave, where the High Sage reveals he engineered the whole mess to channel the energy of the dead into an ultimate spell, summoning a Dark Lord. The party then needs to face the ghosts of various dead characters and settle their emotional turmoil. The final-final dungeon is kinda space-filling cut-and-paste nonsense, but it’s postgame, so whatever. Then when they leave the tower, Valen has advanced enough to bring a projection of Leila with him, who stops the stabby kid and allows for a better resolution.

Overall: I really enjoyed this one, actually. The setting was something a little different and the plot and characters both had something going for them. The systems were a little overloaded for a 12-15 hour game, but the difficulty is also variable enough that you can ignore half of those systems if you don’t want to deal with them. Upper-tier KEMCO game.

 

[RT-55J]

I showed the Kemco RPG bundle to some friends and this was the first one anybody pointed out in particular, mostly to react in bewilderment. It's very funny to see that this is one of the better ones.

 

[Beowulf]

Blacksmith of the Sand Kingdom
Full-Price KEMCO Games #3. Played in 2023. Published by Rideon.

Your goal in life is to be an adventurer, but when dad dies and leaves you his blacksmith shop, you decide that you need to also become the greatest blacksmith in the kingdom as well. You can do both things at once, right?

This was made by Rideon (and published by KEMCO), the same folks who did Marenian Tavern Story, and it shows. It has the same basic gameplay loop: Each day you go to a dungeon area and gather materials. Some materials you get from spawn points, some you get from battles. Then you return to town and use those materials to make items, which you either use for your party or list for sale at your shop. Along the way there are sidequests to kill monsters or collect/create items, little vignettes in the town, and periodic stops at the item shop for upgrades and consumables.

In terms of things that change: The materials are mostly things like copper, cotton, fur, etc. used to build or forge things rather than foods (though there are vendortrash food items used for sidequests), because you’re making equipment rather than meals. A lot of the combat systems (including the battle grid and many of the skills) carry over from Marenian Tavern Story, but this adds a full class system and increases the party size to 5. The characters are all “generics” that you name yourself; the creation process is basically just choosing a class and a patron god (which gives small bonuses). Enemies are visible and avoidable on the dungeon screen; and if they’re required for a sidequest there will be an indicator over their heads so you can tell. (Nice!) Enemies give XP, but very little compared to the amount you get from eating in the restaurant each day. Instead of learning skills in battle, you need to pay to learn and upgrade them in town. There’s no daily auto-heal, you need to go to the infirmary and pay each day. (It feels like it’s easier to create an unwinnable poverty situation in this game than the others.) The town is a “menu town” and the cutscenes are shown visual novel style; the 3/4-view pseudo-3D exploration is only in dungeons. Once you reach the second area, the Arena also unlocks, where you can fight battles each day for prizes (and as another requirement to advance the story).

The biggest change I dislike? There’s no guessing recipes. Instead, there are books you can buy or win that have recipes, and there’s a “blacksmith tree”. You gain “proficiency” with items either by using them (fighting with them equipped) or by making lots of them. At max proficiency, items get a “+”, better stats, higher sales rates, and sometimes unlock other recipes in the tree.

The translation is a bit messy; though the dialogue is often better than the mechanical stuff. The first dungeon (an outdoor plain) is called “the suburbs”, and that sort of odd naming is common. The plot may deepen later into the game, but for the first few hours it’s extremely generic and summed up by my opening paragraph.

One other bit of irritation: Unlike the other two recent Android KEMCO offerings, this game doesn’t recognize the control pad from the Retroid Pocket 3, forcing me to either play with on-screen buttons or touch controls. Urgh. So I played this for a couple of hours on my tablet instead.

Overall: I paid full price (Eight dollars!) for this, but was disappointed. It turns out that the cooking aspect of the previous games of this style were really what won me, and it’s just not the same when you’re making equipment. Also, the fact that the characters in this are all generics (the named NPCs with personalities are all townspeople) made the plotline less interesting. I’m not saying I’ll never go back to this, but I’m not playing all the way through it now.

 

[Beowulf]

A KEMCO Summary, 2023 Edition

Since I took the time to update my spreadsheet and re-read/re-post all of my reviews, I figured it was also time to write a new summary post. As of this writing (August, 2023), I have played 50 KEMCO-published games, 37 of them to completion. That’s out of 102 total games I’ve found, so I’ve tried just under half of their output. All but two of those were on Android devices; the remaining two were the Steam versions.

Though a small handful of the games cracked the 20-hour mark, the vast majority fell in the 5-15 hour range and averaged 11 hours each. As of this writing, most KEMCO games on Android cost $5-8 at full price and go on sale for $2-3 each; and on Steam they cost $10-15. There was a massive Xbox Live sale with 50 games for $200 (cheap!), but that’s hardly the first time KEMCO games have been on sale. KEMCO’s Android offerings have been in at least 4 Humble Bundles, though none of them recently. KEMCO also ports their games to Switch and various Playstations.

KEMCO publishes games from four major developers, and a handful of smaller developers.

EXE-Create is the most prolific, having 46 games (I’ve played 16, or 35%) and still churning them out at a furious rate.

Hit-Point is second and still rolling out new games here and there; they have 24 games (and I’ve played 10, or 42%).

Magitec made 9 games that KEMCO published. (I’ve played 7, or 78%). While they don’t seem to have made anything new in years, KEMCO continues to port their games to Steam.

WorldWideSoftware made 15 games (I’ve played 14, or 93%), and it’s unclear whether they then became Rideon, which made 2 more games (I played both).

KEMCO itself developed two more games I found (I haven’t played either), and 1 game came from each of ChocoArts, ArticNet, Asobox Co.,Ltd. and Eden Industries. The latter three are not available on Android, and the ChocoArts game is the only one among them that I tried.

I played the majority of these games in 2016-2018, petering out with a series of free-to-pay clunkers near the end. I played one in 2019 and one in 2020, then took a hiatus until I played five more since starting this thread. (I actually started a sixth, too. So I’ve spent $18 and played roughly 42 hours of KEMCO games directly because of this project.)

While I don’t think there’s any “best” KEMCO game (there’s never been one that really blew me away), there are definitely some that are better than others. If you want to pick out a short list, I’d recommend:

• From EXE-Create: Revenant Saga, Dragon Lapis, Miden Tower
• From Hit-Point: Cross Hearts Arcadia
• From Magitec: Soul Historica or Shelterra the Skyworld
• From WorldWideSoftware: Symphony of the Origin, Destiny Fantasia
• Legna Tactica, particular because as a tactical rpg it’s something a little different.
• Either Adventure Bar Story or Marenian Tavern Story; they have the same gameplay loop. The former is more simple and straightforward, the latter has prettier graphics and a stronger plot.

And that’s the official end of my KEMCO reviews for now. I picked up a couple more $3 games in this month’s sale, so I’ll inevitably bump this thread with reviews when I play them. And I’m pretty sure I’ll eventually go back and try the couple of Magitec and WorldWideSoftware titles I never played.

Does anyone have any games they played that I didn’t, or comments that I might have missed?

 

[Peklo]

I was wondering if it would come up, though by the nature of this bundle I don't think it quite fits into its--or KEMCO's, really--general purview, so I'll give a nod to Yōdanji... both because it's the only one of KEMCO's modern output I've played, and because I think it's just genuinely good, and not "good... for a KEMCO RPG" as the grading curve may often be. Down below is what I had to say about it around 2019, so refer to that for thoughts.

Spoiler

Kemco are an interesting company and development house. With a history stretching as far back as the early '80s, their status among enthusiasts generally does not reflect that vintage in equal measure. Known mostly for ports and licensed games when both are seen as less prestigious compared to original works, they are difficult to conjure up an elevator pitch for or something identifiable to latch onto. After several generation shifts in the industry that always come with their own casualties, Kemco are still around, seemingly weathering the storm the only way they know how: quietly and persistently, widespread acclaim and renown be damned. The last decade and more especially have seen the company pump out a dizzying number of derivative, low-risk RPGs--a niche they've more than managed to fill. Every so often, though, something different manages to materialize from this assembly line-like context.

Yōdanji is a 2017 mobile roguelike later ported to PC and Switch. Kemco themselves market it as a "coffee-break" roguelike, which is a succinct encapsulation of both the wider genre's immediate appeal and the ways Yōdanji plays with that formula to bring it even closer to the fore. What we've got here is a repeating micro-structure that involves delving into a 10-floor dungeon always with a set goal in sight: collect three scrolls along the way, use them for a ritual to summon the yōkai described in the folktale therein, and survive an encounter with Lord Enma to escape with a new ally in tow. Each yōkai enlisted in this way becomes a playable character in their own right; there are over twenty in all and each is a veritable unique character class in their own right, possessing completely unique skills and play strategies required to survive in their adventures. It's an incredibly compelling carrot-and-stick set-up that not only draws on the inherent one-more-go allure of roguelikes but puts it in a hyperfocus, thanks to the compact dungeon that comprises a successful "run" and the promise of a completely new toolset to play with upon that success.

The specifics of play also set the game apart from its peers, especially if we're talking about the Mystery Dungeon lineage and tradition of console roguelikes. Inventory space in games such as them is always a consideration, but something that's not always a pressing issue as pockets tend to be deep on a base level and ways to fold inventory space in on itself with storage items and such also exist. Yōdanji gives you a five-slot inventory--you cannot work around it through stacking items or having storage compartments. As the game's central loop revolves around locating and transporting three items to the end of each dungeon, you are given extremely limited space to work with, making inventory management and mutually exclusive choices not only beneficial but paramount to survival. It's not a static consideration either, where one item will always hold priority over another; different yōkai can be dependent on particular status-altering omamori amulets according to the needs of their playstyle, or require a different sort of restorative to make the most of their arsenal. And everyone gets hungry. Next to lucking out and coming across an actual filling meal somewhere in the labyrinth, the hostile yōkai standing in the way of the one guided by the player can be devoured for modest sustenance after death. Even in that interaction there are wrinkles, as a nekomata might desire to raise the dead as necromantic thralls instead of supping on them. Or maybe they'll simply store away the corpse, to be deployed at a time of their own choosing.

A signature mixture of convenience, thrilling danger and hard choices also come into play in how leveling is treated in Yōdanji. Defeating enemies grants no experience--instead the only way to increase a yōkai's level is to find an errant hitodama located somewhere on a given floor and defeat it, and there is always one and exactly one. They are often stationary, but sometimes enemies absorb them in turn and require to be defeated in order to free the prize. The effect this has is that despite the very objective-driven premise and ostensibly quick leveling, exploration is still a central aspect all the way through, but the rewards for it are doled out in transparent, concrete increments. Each gained level allows the allotment of one skill point towards each yōkai's four personal skills, each having four tiers of power to them in addition. As it is, each "complete" adventure will never see a yōkai investing fully in their potential arsenal as that's impossible by design, and necessitates only picking and focusing on what you truly need as with managing items. The background math, the moment-to-moment play, the statistics involved--none of these are complex in Yōdanji, but the simplicity of the systems belies just how engaging and carefully weighed each decision is to undertake and implement.

Like the game's sense of economy in its mechanical construction, that same sense of making the most of things thematically and aesthetically lives in the rest of the production. Yōkai are always an interesting subject to approach in media considering the wealth of material, tradition and personal interpretation to draw from, but they are often seen from the outside only. Yōdanji contains the flimsiest of framing devices the first time you start the game up--something about mobile devices, virtual worlds and mythology colliding--but in effect and practice this game casts its yōkai residents in the central, player-inhabited roles as well as the entire rest of the opposition along the way. It is about their spooky misadventures holistically to its core, from the evocative oral traditions attached to each figure you can read about, to the way they act in the game world itself, both as player-controlled entities and not. Kodama dwell in little clearings of wood and give rise to vegetation in their wake which in turn sustains them; karakasa masquerade as simple umbrellas before suddenly and wildly swooping on others; kamaitachi move like the wind and slash at the hamstrings of their victims to incapacitate them. This is a game that treats its material both with fondness and respect and the self-awareness to see that you can be both authentic and humorous in a sideways manner as the source tale often can be and are. Even the tutorial and interface text manages to be wry and conversational, like settling in for a session with a personable storyteller.

After dozens of sessions and attempts with the game, I've managed to unlock a grand total of one additional yōkai--the inimitable karasu tengu, nimble swordmasters that act like a "melee class" such as the starting kamaitachi but in completely different ways. There is a core of repetition and stymied voyages here, whether through one's own miscalculations or a bad bit of luck, but also those miraculous escapes and near-disasters in just reading a situation correctly or simply lucking out the other way. With innumerable yōkai dead and lost, what I feel for Yōdanji is not frustration or enervation, but curiosity and excitement at what it can still offer me. Yōdanji is a hard game, but it is not a hard game to like.

~~~​

Yōdanji! I think it's good. It costs maybe like a fiver, and it might be on sale right now, because it often is. I recommend it for all spook 'em up enthusiasts.

 

[Beowulf]

I was wondering if it would come up, though by the nature of this bundle I don't think it quite fits into its--or KEMCO's, really--general purview, so I'll give a nod to Yōdanji... both because it's the only one of KEMCO's modern output I've played, and because I think it's just genuinely good, and not "good... for a KEMCO RPG" as the grading curve may often be. Down below is what I had to say about it around 2019, so refer to that for thoughts.

Yes! See, this was genuinely the kind of thing I was hoping someone else would be able to offer. I never played Yodanji and now I want to!

 

[Yimothy]

I fell a bit behind on this thread but am now caught up. The only one of these games that I’ve played is Adventure Bar Story, which I think I had on my phone but wound up playing through on 3DS. I vaguely remember being frustrated that it didn’t keep track of recipe guesses, so if I was trying to figure something out I risked making the same mistake repeatedly. I think I wound up looking up a recipe list for that reason.

There’s a sequel, Adventure Bar Labyrinth, which I have on my Vita but haven’t played. Apparently it’s a roguelike.

 

[Beowulf]

Adventure Bar Labyrinth, which I have on my Vita but haven’t played. Apparently it’s a roguelike.

Hunh! Looks like that was a Vita exclusive at first, then released for 3DS and PlayStation Mobile; but it doesn't seem to have a release on more modern platforms. It also was published directly by Rideon, as far as I can tell, without KEMCO in the middle.

 

[Beowulf]

Gale of Windoria
KEMCO August Sale 2023 #3. Played in 2023. Published by Hit-Point.

In a world where each of the four nations has its own element and a great Tetra Quartz that maintains their way of life, a young boy from the wind nation aches to be a warrior when his father wants him to take over the family crafting business. Then everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked. Then everything changed when the Tetra Quartz somehow became “sullied” and the leaders decided that human sacrifice was the only solution. Shan rescues his friend from sacrifice and sets off on adventure to restore the Tetra Quartzes and blow away the dark clouds of death.

A Hit-Point game, and it’s amusing how it reuses a number of features I saw in Monster Viator. Like, the heroes look very similar and the map screen/dungeon screens are pretty certainly the same engine, but the battle screen is completely different. You still regain all HP and your SP back to a base level in every battle. On the other hand, you spend a LOT of time with only a single party member and no consumables, which makes the early-game battles rather harrowing.

The power-up gimmick here (besides gaining levels) is “quartz” items you can equip to give yourself spells and stat bonuses. (You gain more slots as the game goes on.) Each quartz has a number of available levels, and you raise them by sacrificing other quartzes. In practice, this means that you have to watch for which ones you can get lots of and then burn those to raise the levels of the ones you’re actually using. The game implies there’s strategy to rearranging your quartzes to unlock special bonuses or to change which attacks you can use. And there’s a little of that, but your characters gain their best abilities just from levels and many of the quartzes are just duplicates of each other with slight differences. I found that my quartz loadout was pretty steady and if I couldn’t beat a battle, either grinding for levels or just trying it again and hoping the RNG was nicer were better bets. (Again like Monster Viator, you can retry any battle you lose immediately. The impact of the RNG on battles is lessened before there are fewer percent-chance secondary effects, but luck and what moves the monsters use can cause big swings in difficulty in many battles.) The auto-battle uses your skills freely (and semi-randomly), but because you fully restore after battle, as long as you’re pretty sure you’ll win you can autobattle every random encounter, which does streamline grinding a bit.

And the grind is real: At least for the first five hours or so, the plot is very linear and there aren’t really any sidequests, but just fighting everything you meet won’t get you up to snuff for the bosses. And though I fiddled with my quartz layout and adjusted strategies a bunch, I couldn’t find a way to really get “ahead” of the leveling curve like in some other games. So you really just need to grind a bit in every area, which got frustrating.

Enemies have levels, which in retrospect I think they did in Monster Viator also (there were definitely monsters in different areas that were identical but obviously stronger or weaker), but here they’re explicit, so you know if you’re fighting a level 3 lizard or a level 9 lizard.

There are IAP points, and in this case you start with 150 of them free and get 1 every couple of battles. Each 100 gives you a pick from the random prize box. (interestingly, while the Android version only lets you buy WHP, the Steam version looks like it has XP/GP doublers available as purchasable DLC.) I was five hours in when I’d earned the 50 WHP necessary for a second spin of the wheel.

This game hits you with a lot of jargon in the first ten minutes (your father is a “Beakle” craftsman, which turn out to be little flying baskets that are a theme for the game). The translation is pretty rocky, though—characters who clearly have different ways of speaking in Japanese speak oddly in English, with weird turns of phrase that native English speakers wouldn’t use. The battle dialogue uses the word “unlock” to mean an effect has worn off, which is particularly odd. The plot starts fairly strong, with actual characters and personalities, but gets generic fairly quickly: The evil cult of Death has sent recruits into each country to mess up their way of life and sully their Tetra Quartz and you need to go through each area, stopping the cult and recruiting a new teammate. I’m sure there’s some big twist about the nature of the quartzes or the Death God or something like that at the end, but the constant need to stop and grind to get past bosses wore down my interest in getting to it.

Overall: This has a stronger plot than some other Hit-Point games and definitely stronger characterization, but the translation is a little rocky and the system locks you into a grinding pattern that I don’t love. Five hours of it was worth my $3, but I’m not getting to the end.

 

[Violentvixen]

Marenian Tavern Story
Full-Price KEMCO Games #1. Played in 2019. Published by Rideon.

Oh huh, that was something I picked up when the 3DS eshop was closing and I liked it, I didn't realize there was a sequel. Neat. Onto the wishlist it goes for a sale, currently listed at $20, think I got the first one for $3, maybe even less.

So this is currently on sale on Switch for 50% off and I had a bunch of eShop credit so now I have it! Look forward to playing it since I liked the 3DS Adventure Bar Story so much.

 

[Octopus Prime]

On a related note, Metro Quester is out next week and it looks… weirdly good and ambitious for a Kemco game; looks like Dungeon Encounters but a lot more visually interesting.

Wild that a Kemco rpg is visually far above a Squenix release but here we are