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

Fernz Gate
KEMCO November Sale 2023 #1. Played in 2024. Published by EXE-Create.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: While this is overly-packed with systems and stuff, the game itself is pretty breezy and the plot kept my attention. Upper-tier KEMCO game, recommended to fans of Miden Tower specifically.
 
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Liege Dragon
KEMCO August Sale 2023 #4. Played in 2024. Published by EXE-Create.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: I’d call this middle-tier. It wasn’t fantastic, but it had enough to it that I played through the whole thing. The difficulty was fair (if a little uneven) but it had some system and pacing issues that other KEMCO/EXE-Create games have done better at. And while I don’t think Silky’s storyline was offensive, I think it was questionable enough to turn people off.
 
Monochrome Order
KEMCO November Sale 2023 #2. Played in 2024. Published by Hit-Point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: This is something different, and I think it really works for that. The free-roaming/exploration aspect of the world map has a SaGa sort of feel; the Judgment system mixes in a lot of Visual Novel elements; the difficulty is a little rocky but manageable; and a single play-through only takes around 8 hours. Upper-tier!
 
Blood of Calamity
KEMCO November Sale 2023 #3. Played in 2024. Published by Magitec.

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

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

…and I’m glad I did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: Alas, KEMCO/Magitec flubbed this one. I gave this three hours in several segments, the last after having played a few other KEMCO games in the interim and that just made the slow systems and annoying characters stand out even more. It’s a very “routine” jrpg with lousy characters, the innovations didn’t really work, and they didn’t do a good enough job making it pleasant to play.
 
For those keeping track at home, I've now finished everything I bought last summer, and three of five games I bought in the fall. (That's 46 hours of KEMCO games in 2024 so far!) Aaaaand then I have six more I bought in January.
 
Ruinverse
KEMCO November Sale 2023 #4. Played in 2024. Published by EXE-Create.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: This is a really mixed bag. The systems are fine, maybe a little weaker than other recent EXE-Create titles, and the battles are pretty breezy. The plot and pacing are decent, there are some fun twists... it's just that the characterization and "humor" are such 90s anime nonsense. There will be a serious moment about a parent's dementia or fear of death that leads straight into "now let me molest you so I feel better!" And that really keeps this off my recommended list.
 
Beowulf said:
Either Adventure Bar Story or Marenian Tavern Story; they have the same gameplay loop. The former is more simple and straightforward, the latter has prettier graphics and a stronger plot.
Click to expand...
Adventure Bar Story was just ported to Switch this week. I enjoyed my time with it on 3DS, it's been delisted from Android for a while so nice to have a way to pick it up again.
 
Everdark Tower
Ad-Supported KEMCO Games #10. Played in 2024. Published by Hit-Point.

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

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

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

Overall: Short, sweet, simple, and free. Pretty decent overall!
 
Dimension Cross
KEMCO November Sale 2023 #5. Played in 2024. Published by EXE-Create.

In a Star Ocean-inspired opening, Kyle is one of humanity’s explorers on the spaceship Zero, but it makes a rough landing on an unknown planet and it turns out the captain might be manipulating and exploiting the locals. Joined by his robot buddy and several of the locals, Kyle goes on an adventure to try to figure out what’s going on.

This was the last game from the KEMCO collection I bought last fall, and it unfortunately broke my momentum: It’s melding a bunch of the usual EXE-Create systems with some new ideas, and while in theory a lot of what’s here interested me, it didn’t come together well.

The big and obvious new thing: The graphics are 3D! There’s jumping! And by jumping, you can collect gold and silver coins to trade for prizes! They try to introduce puzzles that make use of that mechanic, but unfortunately the engine isn’t that great, so action/timing puzzles don’t actually work well, even on a device with physical buttons. The coins are always floating in the air, so they’re really an excuse to walk to every corner of the map and jump there.

The paid version of the game comes with free IAP points, so I bought the XP doubler right off the bat. This was a necessary move: You have far fewer options in battle than many EXE-Create games, especially early on, and the boasted “Break Skill” system for attacking body parts isn’t actually that helpful in making battles strategic. They have the standard EXE-Create weapons lottery and synthesizing, and you need the Forging Ore to carry over all the properties to a new weapon (like in Liege Dragon).

The difficulty is wildly inconsistent: The second dungeon (keep in mind, this is before you’ve even been to a town) has giants and dragons in the random encounter pool, which are substantially stronger than the bats and oozes. The rewards are great if you beat them, but they can also destroy you fairly easily and running away isn’t assured. And this is before you have any ready access to upgrades, and the only full healing is hiking back to the regen pod at the beginning of the first dungeon.

And the translation, wow. I mean, it might be badly written in the original too, but the dialogue is stilted and weird enough to feel machine-translated. The characterization is awkward and inconsistent. The robot buddy is clearly intended to be a comic relief character, but he doesn’t actually manage that. And there’s the whole fake-out that it’s a star-spanning sci-fi game to begin with; you’re on a medieval planet with some advanced tech that humanity introduced recently.

(A look for spoilers online revealed the total game is about 10 hours, and ends rather abruptly with no post-game. I made it three hours in and just couldn’t drag myself back to it.)

Overall: They were trying something new with the graphics, but they didn’t work the kinks out of the engine. And the story is worse, this feels like a lousy fanfic retelling of a Star Ocean game that got Google Translated. I gave up after a few hours.
 
Chroma Quaternion
KEMCO January Sale 2024 #1. Played in 2024. Published by EXE-Create.

In this world, people (“Springizens”) are born from the magical springs and the Quadeities assign them “roles”, which determine their path in life and their special abilities. The four countries each experience a different season year-round, and through the Saison Order they each worship one of the four Quadeities. Ark is an Evil Hunter (which means he hunts evil, not that he’s a hunter who is evil), and that means he can work as a priest and teacher in a small town. But something happens to the Spring Deity and earthquakes start happening, and he (and his giant fluffy dog) ends up escorting the local rebellious princess and her maidservant around to try to figure out what’s going on.

The systems and setup are a lot of the standards for recent EXE-Create games (Miden Tower onwards). You get lots of weapons with random bonuses on them. Instead of combining them, you can put them in the “recycle pot” and turn them into rings that keep the special powers, and then sacrifice weapons to strengthen those rings. Interestingly, all characters can use the same single weapon type, but most use different armors.

The battle system is also very familiar, with the 3x3 grid setup for skill areas and “follow” attacks in battles. You heal to full after every battle, and there’s no MP, just skill cooldowns. (And the autobattle can be set to freely use skills, because why not?) There are lots of skill sets associated with each role that you can learn for each character, though most of them are variants on the usual “damage on an area, inflict status effect, inflict stat up/down, heal an area, summon a helper” selection. Enemies have weaknesses to various elements and physical damage types, but hitting weak points honestly isn’t terribly important to strategy. The noteworthy new thing is they cribbed from Bravely Default and you can “Act Skip” up to three turns and bank them for later usage in combos; which occasionally makes some abilities stronger but mostly you have to keep track of when the enemies bank turns so you can use an “Act Breaker” before you get smashed.

Maidam Curie is back, running the arena again. There are three daily “Missions” from her that get you IAP currency, which you can also get from the daily lottery and randomly after battles. As usual, that currency can be spent on reward doublers, a few powerful equipment pieces, keys to storehouses scattered through the game, the key to the bonus dungeon, and a powerful weapons lottery. None of it is super-necessary, but I appreciate that a little patience will open the bonus dungeon without having to pay more. (There’s also a multi-dungeon postgame quest that she gives you, full of overpowered bonus bosses. I only did part of it, but even doing part of it made the postgame final dungeon laughably easy.)

I’ll admit, the fact that you have to do the first dungeon twice—even though it’s short and fast, and you can turn off the encounters the second time—put me on guard. But I was worried for nothing, as there are actually some pretty clever dungeon designs and decent variety. Like most games of this style, it zips along at a pleasant pace and if you need to grind (or want to, because every 20 levels you need “refine” your roles to keep upgrading them) there are shrines at the beginning of each dungeon to let you auto-summon battles or change the encounter rate.

They get credit for “gameplay and story integration,” in that everything in the world revolves around Roles: You need to acquire certain roles for plot reasons, but then you can equip them and use the skills related to them or not, as you see fit. The plot revolves around the Quadeities having their roles stolen, because these rules even apply to the gods. And Ark, the main character, has a mystery role that no one understands, which figures into his place in the story and also unlocks as his best role at the end.

In addition to the four Quadeities, there was a fifth deity named Exterminincta who was created by the main villain, a human in the previous version of the world who had a role that allowed him to steal other roles. She wiped out humanity, so the Quadeities forced her into reincarnation and re-created the world of Springizens. That human managed to survive and was secretly manipulating the Saison Order to steal the roles of the four Quadeities and eventually revive Exterminincta to wipe out the Springizens, too. The two children who keep recurring are the reincarnation of the fifth deity...but so are Ark and his dog, who were the incarnation of Exterminincta’s “good heart”. In the good ending, all four of them merge to re-create a kind Exterminincta, and everyone’s memory of Ark is erased, but he’s reborn as a baby two years later. In the True Ending, all five of them are able to keep their separate existences, so Exterminincta joins the two children as pop stars and Ark goes back to being a teacher.

Overall: This was solid. Like many games in this style, it probably had too many systems—there were definitely too many roles and the back-and-forth to unlock and refine them was annoying. But the plot was solid, the translation was good, the difficulty was well-managed, and the dungeons were varied enough to be interested. This goes on the “recommended” list.
 
Ah yes. Though weird little 4 dimensional vector-like thingies that some physicists love. Truly the foundation of a profound role-playing game experience.
 
Seek Hearts
KEMCO January Sale 2024 #2. Played in 2024. Published by EXE-Create.

In a world where humans and fairies live together in symbiosis, mysterious factories appeared and started creating “mechanoids”, most of whom speak in RoBoT sPeAk and aren’t independent. Our main character, however, acts like a human and can absorb weapons to get stronger. 12 years after his creation, he and a human girl who grew up with him (and likes to punch him into walls) go on a journey of discovery.

This is another newer EXE-Create game, with the random “pot breakers” game for weapons and a set of fairy stockings replacing the real-time garden we’ve seen elsewhere. The battle system is a bit simpler, without as many skills, and instead of MP you charge an orb each turn of battle (up to four) and special attacks both consume them and have rebound time. I think it’s one of the earliest games that grew into the Miden Tower style; the animation is a little janky and the pieces are less thought-out and less complicated.

This looks like it could be cute! Unfortunately, the game doesn’t play nicely with my Retroid Pocket 3: You can go to the menu, but going to any submenu (such as equipment, the shop, or quests) brings you to an inescapable black screen. Which makes it completely unplayable. I tested it on my Odin Pro and got the same results. I might try it again on some other device or just in case it gets updated, but I have 11 other KEMCO games in the hopper and this only cost $2, so for now I’m just culling it.
 
There has got to be a book or at least a very interesting article about how this company cranks out so many RPGs.
 
If there isn't, I think we know somebody who might be able to write it.
 
Alvastia Chronicles
KEMCO January Sale 2024 #3. Played in 2024. Published by EXE-Create.

In ages past, people lived on the surface world. However, the demon king attacked and poisoned the seas, so the gods raised the continents into the air. Ten years ago, one of the four crystals sealing the demon king broke and monsters escaped into the world, destroying the hometown of our main characters, a brother-sister pair. Their parents were killed and the brother was made mute in the attack. Now, when patrolling a nearby forest the run into the monster general who killed their parents, so they decide to go on a journey of both revenge and hopefully world salvation.

This uses a more roughly pixelated art style like the Dragon series of EXE-Create games, but the add-on systems are mostly what we’re used to. (And that art style can make it hard to tell what’s a background item versus a thing you can interact with, though honestly that’s a common problem in KEMCO games.) You can meld weapons to strengthen them and there’s a lottery for new ones, that sort of thing. Instead of a real-time garden, you collect “old” treasure chests that only open with time, with bronze ones taking seconds and gold ones taking several real-time hours. (This basically forces you to play the game in limited bursts, because any such chests you collect when your grid is full of already-aging ones are discarded.)

The battle/party system is closer to Dragon Sinker--each main character gets a set of backup characters who bring their own equipment and matter more for which class they hold. Honestly, the 100 companion characters feel less like you’re playing Suikoden and more like a fancy class system. You assign three to each main character, which determines their special ability list and, depending on the combination, an unlockable innate ability. You can set a dozen other characters as your “strategy” team, which means they gain levels and add a percentage-based bonus to your abilities. Most of the characters just join when you talk to them, though a few require subquests such as giving them 15 stat-raising "drink" items or recruiting other characters first.

The game itself feels more like the first Lufia title than anything, especially since the four vaguely-elemental generals of the demon king are running around with their inscrutable plans but keep declining to actually kill you when you lose against them. (Though there’s clearly a heavy Final Fantasy 4 influence, too.) The main character’s muteness means you nod or write notes when you actually participate in the plot, and the actual discussion is carried by his sister (officially the priestess of the fallen pillar) and your two other real companions, the wise-but-tough ogre woman and the lecherous elf man. (Why is “lech” a heroic archetype, anyway? He’s an annoying creep.) There’s also a weird running gag where people insinuate that there’s a romantic interest between the leads, and Elmia exclaiming that they’re siblings; and I’m really not sure why that needed to be a thing.

I only played through the Normal Ending; it looks like a bunch of the content (including getting all 100 companions) is locked into the postgame. Also, you need to engage with the IAP features to get all the companions—for example, there’s one that requires you to play “Pillar Killers” (the weapon lottery) 60 times. You can do that for free with the tickets you randomly get after battle, but it integrates the IAP systems into the game itself in an annoying way.

The human priestess who was assumed to have been killed when the crystal guarded by humans was destroyed was actually the one who broke the crystal and freed the archfiend—she was driven crazy by isolation. She’s the mysterious hooded figure who appears a bunch of times, and she helps the archfiend’s minions destroy the other crystals, but then has a last-minute change of heart when it’s revealed that her brother (the human king) was actually trying to be near her all the time. So she uses her life force to create one last crystal to prevent the archfiend’s full resurrection and prevent the continents from falling. Then the party trudges to the lower world (just a dungeon, not an actual second world map) and defeats the archfiend. In the Normal Ending, all four priestesses and all four trainee priestesses work together to keep the crystal shining and the world safe, which means they get days off to see their loved ones. I suspect the better ending will reveal secrets about the ancient gods that raised the continents and/or reunite the upper and lower worlds, but I don’t actually care enough.

Overall: Not bad but not great; the plot is predictable, the 100-companion mechanism isn’t terribly well-implemented, and everything just feels very routine.
 
Crystal Ortha
KEMCO January Sale 2024 #4. Played in 2024. Published by Hit-Point.

In a magitek world where crystal power has begun replacing fossil fuels, Ross, a mercenary, has a strange dream of a gunslinger girl helping him find a massive load of treasure. When he wakes up, he meets that girl and she recruits him to hunt down the mother lode of all treasures: The Crystal Ortha.

This is by Hit-Point, and the systems are strongly similar to Monster Viator—each character has a sharply limited skill list (you choose five from an eventual ~20 per character), but the skills have a lot to them (the first skill is an attack that increases your agility, removes an enemy stat-up, and also heals you if you’re below 50% HP), and they run on a constantly-replenishing SP pool. So that means strategy during battle really matters, even from the start. (Fortunately, they also carried over the ability to immediately retry any battle you fail.)

If you outfit your team with a decent skill selection (which you need to adjust for certain areas where you randomly get certain elemental statuses in battle), you can autobattle most random combats without issue. Bosses require strategy—and strategy matters much more than grinding or even equipment in a lot of cases.

What’s actually a really clever story/gameplay integration: There’s no money. Your characters are supposed to be poor and searching for the Crystal Ortha to strike it rich, and they are in fact incredibly cash-poor. There are no consumable items, either. (There are lots of random collectables that give your characters a permanent stat boost, though.) You restore HP/SP at the end of every battle, so the Inns are only for story purposes, with cutscenes explaining how you avoid paying for them. Weapons and armor need to be crafted instead of bought, so you need to collect the various ores needed to make them. (And as far as I can tell, there are exactly the right number of ores of each type to craft one of every item at every crafting shop.)

The plot is fairly straightforward and the characters are pretty stock: Ross has mild PTSD and you eventually learn that he was booted from the army for whistleblowing. Margaret’s family is deep in debt because they used to be coal barons but everyone’s switching to crystal power; and she has an asshole ex-fiance trying to hunt her down. You’re eventually joined by Tee (An Indiana Jones knockoff character and the lech; why is there always a lech?) and Marshma (a childish dragon-worshipper who learns enemy skills rather than via leveling). The eight sidequests are mostly entire extra dungeons and while technically optional provide necessary leveling for the ending.

Ross is the reincarnation of Lily, a baby Darkness Dragon whose death set off the final war that wiped out the dragons; and Margaret is the reincarnation of an Ambi (winged precursor-humans) who loved her. The Crystal Ortha is actually the sleeping body of the great Queen of the Darkness Dragons, Lily’s mother, and Lily’s spirit has been driving Ross to find her and finally let her rest so her spirit can go to Paradise. So they defeat the dragon, use the Ambi’s treasure to pay off their debts, and go traveling the world seeking future adventures.

Overall: Not quite as standout as Monster Viator but absolutely cut from the same cloth; if you liked one you’ll like the other. Credit to Hit-Point that they get adventurous with their systems and sometimes it actually works.
 
Knight of the Earthends
KEMCO January Sale 2024 #5. Played in 2024. Published by WorldWideSoftware.

This world is limited by the EarthEdge walls, but there are legends that in the past that wasn’t true, and that the Linchpins of the Heavens are the key to removing those walls. That may or may not be a good thing, of course, because it seems like the king, military, and the church are conspiring to do it without telling their best knight what’s going on. (You are, of course, that knight; and it seems likely you’ll have to fix whatever the conspiracy ends up breaking.)

The last KEMCO/WorldWideSoftware game left that I hadn’t played, and it feels more “primitive” than most of what I’ve played lately. (It’s labeled as copyright 2010-2014, so that makes some sense.) The visuals are very zoomed-out and the characters are tiny (but the dialogue and menus are perfectly readable) on my Retroid Pocket 3; so this was clearly intended to be played on a tablet rather than a phone. It reads the controller inputs fine, though.

The dungeons are all extremely similar; they basically have a single tileset that’s used for caves and ruins, one for all the forests, and one for most of the towers. There are some hidden passages but no puzzles or particular challenges. I'm actually reminded of Final Fantasy 13, where there's an obvious straight line to the boss and then side paths for treasure.

As far as I can tell, there’s no IAP options or benefits at all. There are also no side quests or optional quests at all, just a couple of postgame dungeons pieced together with assorted assets from elsewhere in the game. And it’s very short—around five hours without the postgame stuff.

Your main character is a knight and she’s accompanied by a human-like golem and a strange unicorn girl they find in the first forest area. Each of them get a different set of equipment and skills: The knight gets standard storebought equipment and skill books, but can combine up to three learned skills into a pre-set combo attack. The golem needs to buy upgraded body parts, stat upgrades, and new skills from a specialty store; and needs to choose at each upgrade whether to be physical-focused or magic-focused. The unicorn girl absorbs groups of monster skills (via specialty XP) as a sort of class system, so she has a dozen different classes to swap between on-the-fly (including mid-battle!) that each has its own skills, MP pool, and status immunities.

The translation is acceptable but awkward, with strange turns of phrase and weird characterization that flows from the odd language choices. I think they were in fact trying to make the golem taciturn and sarcastic; but I’m guessing the unicorn-girl flipping between “confused innocent,” “secretly well-informed spy,” and “extremely lecherous kinky lesbian” depending on the scene was not the original intent.

There is, as expected, an entire world outside the Earthedge wall. The unicorn-people sealed up the humans inside there 600 years earlier to stop the races from fighting, because humans kept starting wars. Raud your golem buddy was actually originally human, and was bribed into participating in terrible experiments because the king promised to revive his dead fiancée (which he couldn't and didn't). The military commander is the son of the previous unicorn-person spy and that's why he has the power to destroy the linchpins; he kills the king, steals a powerful golem and views to destroy both races as revenge. He and the priestess merge with the golem to unleash its true power but you defeat it, and the party goes on to bring peace to the two races and the recombined world.

Overall: Short, not bad but not great. The systems are pretty decent and the story is stock; but the lousy translation makes the characterization borderline nonsensical. I could have picked a worse WorldWideSoftware game to end on, certainly.
 
The idea of a world enclosed by walls like this reminds me of those silly flat-earth maps that put a ridiculous amount of landmasses and oceans outside of the great antarctic ice wall.
 
WorldWideSoftware, In Review

Let’s take a quick closer look at WorldWideSoftware, now that I’ve completed their entire catalog. Some of these games are no longer playable on devices I own (at least, according to the Play Store), but I’ve given them all at least a try at some point in the last decade and they’ve all got reviews in this thread.

WorldWideSoftware games were pretty consistent in terms of plots and systems that were mishmashes of other, better games; general playablility; and not-great translations. They were generally pretty short and didn’t drown you in IAP nonsense (or grinding). If you wanted to play a jrpg without a lot of surprises, they were there for you.

I went and looked up the release dates of each of them and sorted by those, which I think will give us a clearer picture of their evolution as a developer. (Of course, these are releases as listed on the US Play Store, so if they were juggling release dates long after the Japanese releases, that’ll mess with our data.)

Symphony of Eternity was their first game, released in December of 2010. I got it late in my play cycle and didn’t play it until 2018, and found it shockingly good. Even from the beginning, it was obvious these developers were cribbing (plots and systems) from better jrpgs of the earlier eras. Given that, I’m guessing the lower quality of some of the later games wasn’t so much an issue of lack of talent and more that they leaned into the “shovelware” aspect and favored quantity over quality.

Aeon Avenger came out the following year, and I found it thoroughly mediocre. This was the one where each “dungeon” area featured two new monsters in half a dozen different formations, followed by an out-of-nowhere boss. Eve of the Genesis, apparently released the same month, had issues of difficulty, too much grinding, and lousy gimmicks. I’m guessing it was made at the same time but by a different team.

Adventure Bar Story was the first of five games released over the course of 2012, and I’d argue it was one of their strongest titles, just because it had a really good gimmick. End of Aspiration was the very first KEMCO Android game I played, so I didn’t have a great context to place it in, but I found it middling with an okay-not-great translation and decent mechanics. Silver Nornir I specifically called out as similar to Fortuna Magus (from the following year), with very simplistic dungeons and enemy formations. Knight of the Earthends I just played, and it had a “cut-and-paste” dungeon problem but the systems and balance were decent. Symphony of the Origin was apparently listed as one of KEMCO’s best games at the time, and it clearly hit the top of my list very early, too. The translation was the weak point but otherwise it was solid.

Destiny Fantasia was released in 2013 and I labeled it as an “upper-tier game” with actual dungeon puzzles, weird leveling, and a lousy translation. Fortuna Magus was another game released only a month off in the same year, and another case where the dungeons are often “nothing” areas—three small screens with a few chests on each, then a healing spot and a boss—and the skill system is obtuse. I’m guessing we had another case of two teams working in tandem.

Link of Hearts was the first 2014 game, and in retrospect was similar to Knight of the Earthends in terms of quality and length. Legend of Ixtona was a standout because it was an isometric tactical rpg; and at some point I should try it on modern hardware. Eclipse of Illusion was apparently a good place to start my Humble Bundle dive into their games, because I thought it was decent and it was apparently the game by the better dev group.

Tears Revolude was the only game they released in 2015; I played the Steam version and while it appears the Android version featured the same 3D dungeon view, it’s not compatible with most current devices. They clearly splurged on a new graphical system to try something new with this; it wasn’t really a success.

Astral Frontier was their only game released in 2016, and the last game made as WorldWideSoftware (Marenian Tavern Story would be released in 2018 by Rideon. As Adventure Bar Story is now also credited to Rideon on Steam, I think it’s safe to assume the two companies are thoroughly connected; I wish I could find more about them on the English-language web.) It managed things like a second ending and some actual puzzles in the dungeons. In retrospect, it feels like a hybrid of the battle system they used for Tears Revolude with the more standard map screen.

So, the best of the 15 games they made: Symphony of Eternity, Adventure Bar Story, Symphony of the Origin, Destiny Fantasia, Eclipse of Illusion, and Astral Frontier.
 
Heirs of the Kings
KEMCO January Sale 2024 #6. Played in 2024. Published by EXE-Create.

Years ago, the Nox Tribe of the underworld attacked the human world, and when the Light Ruler fell, the three Rulers of Fire, Water and Wind sacrificed themselves and combined their powers to build barriers between the dimensions. Now, the son of a local mayor (...who’s mysteriously powerful and knows more than he’s letting on), the daughter of the Fire Ruler, a wandering academic, and a mysterious girl with magical powers but no memory are charged with collecting the elemental crystals Soul Maps to prevent the barriers from falling.

This has a forced-vertical layout, which is a first in my experience, so I played it on my tablet. And man, I have been SPOILED by the physical buttons on the Retroid Pocket 3, because going back to touchscreen controls is a pain. Otherwise the graphics are pretty standard fare. (Though a few of the cutscenes…want to be much more exciting than they come out.) The translation is decent, too. The difficulty is a little inconsistent depending on whether you try to do everything in order or if you go exploring for towns you aren’t supposed to reach yet (and how much you use the IAP systems).

The systems are also a mix of things we’ve seen from EXE-Create before: There are lottery tickets for random weapons that you can merge to upgrade. There are three elements that your characters specialize in and the usual selection of status effects. The soul maps work like a sphere grid; you get SP as you gain levels and also from certain items, and you can activate nodes for stat bonuses and new skills. There are IAP points to buy special items (including storehouse keys for the special treasure rooms—which contain a top-level weapon for each character), but there are also Coins and Rare Coins you collect in-game to buy high-end equipment. In this game you don’t heal between battles, but you do fully heal at level-up.

The dungeons are lackluster; there are several variants of one-way floor tiles and a bunch of switches to press, but nothing complicated and most of them are fairly straight lines. (They do love Mimics, though.) Most of the dungeons have warp points at the halfway and at the end; and many of them have both miniboss and boss fights, virtually all of which are completely immaterial to the plot. (“Oh, there’s a monster in our way. Let’s fight it!”) There are the usual small, large, and metal variants of monsters, and the metal ones just flat-out give you SP rather than XP bonuses.

As you’d expect, the four characters are the heirs of the four rulers. The wandering academic got a blood transfusion from the previous Wind Ruler. The mysterious amnesiac is the daughter of a disinherited heir to the Water Ruler and the deposed king of the Nox Tribe. The Nox king actually wanted peace, but was betrayed by his trusted advisor Bolvo. Bolvo took over the body of the Fire Ruler and is actually the main antagonist. And your main character is the son of the Light Ruler—big shock—who lost most of his power in the last war and knew what’s been going on the whole time but refused to tell you because he’s a smug jerk. In the ending, Bolvo also takes over the Nox king’s body, so after the battle the Light Ruler sacrifices himself to separate them, so that humans and the Nox tribe can live in peace. In the postgame, you need to retrieve rings to power-up the Sea and Sky Gods to transcend time and re-fight the final battle. (I decided not to bother. Ten hours of game was plenty.)

Overall: This is more basic than the most recent EXE-Create fare, and there’s really less variety and actual ability to customize your characters despite the sphere grid. And the forced-vertical layout is weird. The story and characterization are…fine? Rote and honestly forgettable. It’s a perfectly decent experience but nothing standout.
 
For the record, having completed all the games I bought in January, that’s 64 KEMCO games played, 47 to completion; if I did my math right. And I currently have 7 more in the backlog, since I just buy them when I see them on sale for $2-3. I think it's safe to say I'll never actually play their entire catalogue, but I suspect I'm already in their top 1% of players.
 
Sword of Elpisia
KEMCO Spring-Summer Sales 2024 #1. Played in 2024. Published by EXE-Create.

A traveling magitool repairman is just going about his business when he stumbles into a town that’s been attacked by strange monsters with the power to permanently transform humans into magiswords. He ends up semi-adopting an orphan girl, and they meet up with two other adventurers to find out the truth of the monsters and the magiswords.

Yet another “recent era” EXE-Create game with a lot of the usual features with new skins on them. There’s a daily roulette. There’s s grid-based battle system (though only 3x2 this time), and you’ve got both magic based on MP and weapon skills based on a three-dot energy meter that recharges as you do normal attacks. The weapon skills are attached to the weapon you have equipped, which you get lots of from the IAP lottery and random drops, and can combine to strengthen. Armor can be combined in this game, too.

As a change of pace, the party members you have don’t all just join and stay; for the first few hours of the game you have a main character and a rotating cast of other party members.

It occurs to me that while I get down on the EXE-Create games for the systems being very similar, they have been very good about integrating quality-of-life options that the classic jrpgs they’re modeled on didn’t have. Every one of them has a fast-travel option. Every one of them has a mini-map. Most of them put your next destination on the well-detailed world map. They all have detailed logs of the plot and the sidequests; and most have a conversation log in case you skip dialogue too fast. They all have difficulty options (so if you want to just Auto through most battles you can play on Easy); they all have a way to both reduce random encounters and just summon a bunch of them without needing to walk in circles. As annoying as IAP features are, you never actually need them to beat the game, and most of the time buying the full game gives you enough free IAP currency to enjoy the bonus dungeon and/or storage room equipment. Like, I talk a lot of smack about KEMCO and their shovelware tendencies, but especially in the more recent years, their active developers have maintained an awareness of what makes their games fun that 1990s SNES jrpg developers didn’t always manage.

All of that said, I started playing this in August and got about three hours in, then got distracted by other things (and my son borrowed the Retroid Pocket 3 to play N64 games on) because despite the plot being something a little different, it’s all very similar to the previous half-dozen KEMCO games I played in the spring and summer. I loaded it back up intent on finishing it, and then discovered that the very next cutscene—like, literally five minutes from where my last save was—crashes the game. I could probably try transferring my save or restarting on a different device, but I clearly wasn’t engaged enough in this in the first place. It’s not particularly better or worse than any recent EXE-Create game, but be warned about that issue.
 
That puts me at 65 KEMCO games played, 47 to completion. I played 10 to completion in 2024, and tried 4 others (two of which I gave up on because they weren’t very good, and two of which had glitches that made them unplayable). I have 6 more backlogged, so we’ll see when I’m next in the mood to burn through a bunch of them. There’s one last Magitec game I’ve never played (Dark Seven) and then a never-ending supply of EXE-Create and Hit-Point games; plus a bunch of games by other developers that weren’t released on Android. This thread will be revived…whenever the mood next strikes me.
 
Isekai Rondo
KEMCO Winter-Spring Sales 2026 #1. Played in 2026. Published by EXE-Create.

When he’s killed in modern-day Japan, Shaw is reincarnated in a dead man’s body in a fantasy world, and is forced to learn the ins and outs of it very quickly. Fortunately, after a false start, he manages to meet up with a legendary hero and join a proper guild so he can conquer the Dungeon and defeat the Overlord.

This is a very standard EXE-Create game at this point, in both design and systems. Among standouts is that this has an excessively long “start to slime” time, with over an hour of story material (with one example battle) before you really begin playing it. (I also had a repeated issue of the game freezing on a black screen when I tried to ask for a guild quest, though thankfully that went away by the time those quests became mandatory and I was able to finish the game without issue.)

As usual, there are a zillion extra systems and many of them you can spend real money on: There’s a daily roulette and weapon enhancement and a garden and bonus tasks. There’s the grid-based combat system and summons and elemental attacks. One character has 44 findables as a side quest; another gets stronger by eating your excess equipment and also vendortrash. (I do find it interesting that they have lots of power-boosters you can spend the IAP on to make the game easier, but there’s also an Easy mode that you can just set the game to. Like, why pay extra for cheats to play on “Impossible” mode when that’s basically just Easy with extra steps?)

Even moreso than many of EXE-Create’s games, this one feels pieced together out of standard assets. There’s no world map; the conceit is that you’re traveling by wagon between areas (and in practice the fast-travel system is very convenient), and the dungeon is just one long stretch that respawns chests. That said, the dungeon is kind of nonsensical in that each layer is a different biome for no particular reason, and you end up needing to do more (three-floor) areas multiple times because you can only warp to the beginning of each one, but often need to do things like pass through the final area to reach the next floor once you have the appropriate guild rank to do so. Chests refill with random items, but the floor layouts are always the same, so it doesn’t even qualify as “roguelike.”

There’s also a strange design decision that the dungeons have damage floors and one-way floors, but immediately after you discover them you’re given walking modes that cancel them. So the only difficulty from those floors is that you have to switch from fast-walking to the appropriate other speed long enough to cross. I’m not sure why this is there at all—maybe you were originally intended to get the other walking speeds much later?

This feels like a parody of Isekai and LitRPG tropes hobbled by the translation. Like the fact that you’re constantly needing to do guild promotion exams to raise your rank when everyone acknowledges you’re a legendary hero and the fate of the world is at stake. (Or the fact that your schlubby salaryman hero is gifted with amazing powers no-one else has and also happens to know the Overlord’s secrets from his time one Earth.) I suspect a bunch of that is lost in clunky word choices and lack of complete tone; also the fact they chose “Passive” as the catch-all word for special abilities (even ones that are clearly activated!) is weird. They could have called them Abilities or Talents or Mysticiations and I think it would have worked better.

Overall: Middle-tier; eminently playable and with a perfectly cromulent plot that I suspect could have been something really clever with a better translation.
 
Asdivine Cross
KEMCO Winter-Spring Sales 2026 #2. Played in 2026. Published by EXE-Create.

A member of The Watchers, a robin hood-esque band of thieves, gets caught (because his rival in the group is a dick) and ends up meeting the princess, who was tricked and replaced with a double right before her parents mysteriously died. Turns out the scheme to take over the kingdom is just the tip of the iceberg, because the Shadow Deity is up to something.

A bit older and a bit simpler than the more recent EXE-Create titles, this one also hits you with some tutorials right off the bat. There’s light, dark, and void magic (each character gets one and can equip accessories for the others) and a combo/limit break system (that’s needlessly complex and resets to zero any time a character dies). It’s got the weapon gatcha/enhancement system but relatively little else.

The game is pretty breezy, and I’m wondering if some design decisions were because it was too breezy: You need to revisit several annoying dungeons too many times; there are long overworld forest paths between where you can park the ship/airship and the later dungeons; and the warp item is needlessly hard to come by. Some dungeons are two screens with a few hidden items; others are insanely long and full of twists. There are items hidden behind one-way tiles that I couldn’t figure out how to get, because no item or spell seems to let you negate those tiles.

The economy of the game completely falls apart very quickly, especially if you engage with the IAP at all (the Warehouse Keys get you great weapons for everyone that you can just keep upgrading until the endgame), but that’s not even necessary, because you find plenty of weapon upgrades in dungeons and there stop being new towns/shops at about the halfway point. And that’s your last armor upgrade until the final dungeon—unless you want lots of mid-tier items, there’s nothing else to buy. The final dungeon also offers bonus bosses you can fight for special unique weapons…that have no attached abilities and are worse than the weapons you’ve been continuously upgrading.

There are postgame dungeons/true ending/IAP content that I didn’t bother with; the final dungeon is unnecessarily long and the final boss is an irritating difficulty spike because she’s a gimmick boss (she’s in the back row behind two minions, if the minions die she heals and blasts you for massive damage and then immediately revives them; so you can’t use normal attacks or multi-target attacks effectively at all). I had my fill by that point.

Your third character (the weird girl, as opposed to the naive girl and the stoic girl) is established very quickly to have a weird fetish for getting smacked around, and I’m not sure what to make of that. The characters all basically have one gimmick that they do all game that never really sees any growth. Naïve girl tries to hug weird girl, weird girl calls someone a dunderhead, stoic girl makes a snide comment. The side-scenes that affect your “trust level” with each character feel thrown in and immaterial. Also, the early plot hinges on one character having shape-shifting powers, which she immediately forgets and never come up again. I’m not sure anything will ever beat the Light Deity shouting MEOWZERS! in the first game; and certainly nothing here does.

(And Maidame Curie shows up, but at least it’s only for a relatively minor part of the game and some bonus/optional content.)

The Shadow Deity isn’t evil; he was being framed by the Light Deity who wants to destroy and replace humanity, which you only learn after you defeat him and seal him away. (The Deities are also on a cycle of death/reincarnation, so these aren’t the same ones as previous games.) So then you have to go beat the Light Deity, too. When you seal them both your characters have to take their places.

Overall: Middling. This is fine, it’s straightforward, it’s playable; but it’s unbalanced, there’s nothing particularly special to it, and the plot and characters are very one-note.
 
Beowulf said:
Isekai Rondo
KEMCO Winter-Spring Sales 2026 #1. Played in 2026. Published by EXE-Create.

When he’s killed in modern-day Japan, Shaw is reincarnated in a dead man’s body in a fantasy world, and is forced to learn the ins and outs of it very quickly. Fortunately, after a false start, he manages to meet up with a legendary hero and join a proper guild so he can conquer the Dungeon and defeat the Overlord.
Click to expand...

Huh, like you said a lot of the parts of this one sound interesting, but a lot of other parts... don't.
 
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