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

Astral Takers
KEMCO Winter-Spring Sales 2026 #12. Played in 2026. Published by Vanguard.

The two apprentices to the empire’s master summoner discover a strange amnesiac girl who has some sort of connection to the spirits. When they learn that the Emperor wants her executed, they rebel and flee with her to try to find her origins and special powers.

This is another game by KEMCO’s new developer Vanguard, and basically everything I said about their game Dragon Takers applies here too. It’s the same engine, and I think a bunch of the same RPGMaker-like enemy graphics. The dungeon setup is the same; generally short and straightforward dungeons without any special puzzles or quirks, and a healing tile at the beginning and the end. This game does have gold and you buy equipment, so that’s a noteworthy difference. Still no sidequests or meaningful backtracking—it’s a straight line of plot. The “talking heads” style of cutscenes is the same, though the characters in this feel a bit less like somebody’s fetish art and more like generic anime. There is IAP nestled away in the Options menu, where you can buy damage, EXP or Gold boosters for $4 each. (These are not necessary.) Oh, and you can run from battles now, too!

The biggest change is that they don’t have you stealing abilities from enemies, you just get additional summoned spirits as characters (otherwise identical to human characters including the equipment they use) at various story points. That’s actually to the game’s detriment, because the “collect-em-all” skill gimmick actually was pretty entertaining. Being able to swap through the eventual eight characters during battles is vaguely strategic; you can rotate your team to deal physical or magical damage of the different elements, depending what the enemy is weak to.

The dialogue translations aren’t too bad; and everybody’s favorite insult is “Dastard!” which kinda works? The translation makes a real hash out of the mythology, because for much of the game it’s not super-clear how the summoned creatures and spirits and drakes and monsters all connect to each other (or don’t).

But that’s okay, because it turns out this is the future of the previous game and the same world as Dragon Takers: Helio and Liana had a daughter (Aurora, the strange amnesiac girl who was frozen in time beneath the capital) and you get to meet their ghosts. Later, you encounter a village of swordsmen founded by Louise. And it turns out that the Empire was founded and is ruled by the Subjugator, a minion of the original destroyer who was defeated by the drakes and spirits in antiquity. The characters save the princess, defeat the Subjugator, free the powers of the drakes and spirits, and everyone lives happily ever after.

There’s a postgame “epilogue” that lets you return to all the previous areas of the game and seems to have at least one available sidequest, but I was really bored with the battle system by that point and didn’t care if there was any more material.

Overall: It’s not terrible, but it’s mediocre. They fixed a few things from Dragon Takers but removed the collectathon aspect that made the grinding more tolerable. Honestly, I’m not super-impressed with Vanguard as a developer following these two games.
 
Learning that they farm out development to a host of smaller developers does explain a lot; like LJN back in the day; albeit with a somewhat higher hit rate
 
Raging Loop
KEMCO Fall-Winter Sales 2026 #1. Played in 2026. Published by DWANGO.

Haruaki, a down-and-out twentysomething gets lost riding his motorbike in rural Japan and a mysterious convenience store clerk points him to a strange village. He becomes trapped there as a mist rolls in and monsters emerge, killing anyone who doesn’t follow the village’s arcane rules. Fortunately, dying just resets him back to the beginning of his journey, “Groundhog Day” style. He’ll get to the bottom of all this eventually.

This was an oddity in the KEMCO collection, a horror visual novel made by the developer dwango, who I haven’t seen before. I was only able to get this to run on my “tablet of lies” running an old version of Android. While it gives the illusion of not being on rails, it absolutely is—you need to reach each “bad end” to get a key to unlock choices earlier that then let you avoid it. There are a number of mystery spots where you’ll only be able to unlock them in the last quarter of the game. (Really, it’s not much of a “game” at all—it’s a story that occasionally requires a little guesswork. You can’t really fail at anything and most of the “wrong” choices are required anyway.)

The translation, for the record, is very good. A bunch of the clues and discussion points are dependent on tricks of Japanese writing, so it explains them to you like a translator would. There’s no effort to move the story to anywhere other than Japan (which is good—it wouldn’t make sense) or otherwise localize it.

The plot is a convoluted excuse to get a small settlement of people to play Feast of the Yomi-Purge, a variant of the game known in various places as “Werewolf” or “Mafia”: Each night, someone will die, because two of the players are werewolves and the rest are humans, and the werewolves are going to slowly kill all the humans. Each day, everyone gets to debate and then hang one person. (This version has special rules, that one person can tell each day if someone is or isn’t a werewolf, one can protect a specific person for one night, one can tell if the person they hanged was a werewolf, etc.) Then you watch the story unfold as the villagers play this game—or would, except that despite spending so much time on this premise, the “rules” are never fully obeyed and inevitably they get killed for an assortment of other reasons. But then once you reach the first “real” ending, you get the key that lets you change the loop from the very start and go down a completely different version of the story.

The first cycle involves you being left out of the game and watching the villagers all die. The second one has you playing the game, and with your help the humans win—but at the last minute one of the survivors goes crazy and kills everyone. In the third cycle, you’re a wolf, and you winning ends the world. Of course, in each of the three cycles there’s also a girl who becomes a romantic interest. This is kind of over-written (as is often the case with visual novels), but it does do some very interesting musing on the fact that people need to be really messed-up to murder their friends and family, and what psychology might accumulate during that process. Also, it’s mildly entertaining that while the game doesn’t have an inventory system, after the first full loop the main character starts taking advantage of the fact he visits a convenience store at the very beginning of the loop and always happens to have necessary items on hand.

Once you finish the third cycle, you can go back and unlock the truth about the various characters, and then use that accumulated knowledge to enable a final, perfect loop: Chiemi (first cycle girl) is also looping and has been at it longer than you; the loops changed suddenly when new people were introduced into them, and you’re one of those. Haru was traumatized as a child and may or may not be possessed by the “Badger”, an old god of the mountains who was subsumed into the current mythos. Rikako is the evil mistress of the spider-goddess; she’s the one actually controlling the loops and trying to destroy humanity. (Haruaki defeats her because he’s been lying about his name the whole time; and apparently Meiko the mystery child helped somehow, but you only learn that in Revelations Mode.) The Old Man is a serial killer who isn’t actually senile and has been working for the ruling family from the rich village; who orchestrated the entire series of events using cameras, costumes, electronic locks, anesthetics, trained dogs, and a propensity for brutal murder. That’s right: The evil spider-goddess creating a timeloop to cause enough human sacrifice to create a humanity-destroying monster was real; but the mountain gods and their Feast game were all a lie created to keep the villagers poor and paranoid. Oh, and the convenience store clerk, who is also the magic sheep you see every time you loop, is actually Haruaki’s ex. In the end, Haruaki reveals that he’s an author and that’s one of his pen names when Chiemi hunts him down to be with him.

I played through the full story, which unlocks “Revelation Mode”, where you can go through a second time and get extra scenes and side characters’ thoughts. I didn’t feel it necessary to go through the game again.

Overall: I think this went on a little too long and was a little too over-written (and frankly got a bit up its own ass with musing about god in the final sequence) but it was clever and it kept my interest, as I wanted to see where the story was going.
 
Overrogue
KEMCO Winter-Spring Sales 2026 #13. Played in 2026. Published by EXE-Create.

The demon overlord’s weakling son has been coerced into joining the tournament to become the next overlord by his familiar and two women who glom onto him: The one who wants to marry him and be the queen, and the one who is greed and wants control over the treasury. Turns out they have a mysterious backstory and so does he, all tied to the human warrior who appears with a talking sword and starts causing trouble among the contestants.

This is another EXE-Create “deckbuilder roguelike” game, with the same bones as Novel Rogue, but they change the gameplay loop in a significant way: You acquire new cards from a gatcha systems (explicitly called that!) and you get the currency to use the gatcha system by running dungeons. You also are very clearly supposed to collect the IAP currency in-game and spend it on the various “cheats” before using it to also play the gatcha game. Otherwise, it’s more of collecting unlocked cards through Battles, Events, Treasures and Card Shops as you move along the game board-like dungeon floors. There are eventually five deck themes unlocked (and you need to use the gatcha mechanism to fill out and upgrade all of them), though for repeat dungeons and the final dungeon you can use whichever ones you want.

In between dungeon runs, there’s your base (that eventually grows into a town) and the castle town, where you can do sidequests that are either running errands/hunting down certain characters; or require dungeon runs with special conditions to compete. The former are kind of tedious but the latter can take some sting out of grinding. There’s no equipment, consumables, or anything like that outside of the card system and the only shops in town are identical to the IAP shop from the menu.

There is, in fact, a lot of game on this game. You need to do a LOT of dungeon runs to complete it, not even counting failed runs or extra runs for grinding. I give them credit that the plot keeps going through all of that, with different competing factions rising and falling in prominence and an entire plotline with the human holy knight running around. That said, while the plot is cute, there are very few surprises and these barely count as spoilers:
The honorable rivals all eventually fall in line, the human knight causes chaos but you kick his butt, the companion who wants to marry you turns out to secretly be a human princess (and the characters do effectively get together in the end), and yes, Sael becomes the next Overlord.

Overall: You need to love the gameplay mechanic of doing dungeon runs with randomized card decks; if you don’t enjoy the basic game loop, you won’t enjoy the game despite the plot being fairly strong. I liked this variation better than Novel Rogue, but I’m just as happy they didn’t make a third one of these.
 
Knights of Greyfang
KEMCO Winter-Spring Sales 2026 #14. Played in 2026. Published by EXE-Create.

In this world, there are two creator deities; one made humans and one made monsters, and the two groups fight for control of the eight holy temples and various territory. The humans got an advantage when their king became a Vampire and learned to pass on that power to others; and used it to take most of the territory from the monsters. But then the king and queen disappeared and a powerful new monster general appeared. Can the princess and her chosen knights stand up against the monstrous power of Lord Englebert?

The three main human characters are Vampires, and in this world that means humans empowered to fight better by using magical bats to get blood from “Blooders”, human companions who come along to power them up. I cannot begin to say how much cooler the whole thing would have come off if the translators had just used “Blood Knight” instead of “Blooder.” This trio (a princess, her attendant the witch, and one of the lower-ranked up-and-coming knights who is nominally the main character) happen to have an amnesiac man whose blood regenerates abnormally quickly and who wields a mysterious “blood sword” drop into their lap. (It’s interesting that it’s the common “three girls/one guy” team but the guy is kind of an afterthought, mostly there to be an extra attacker and fuel the main characters’ limit breaks.) Much of the game is spent traveling to the various towns trying to figure out where the king and queen disappeared to, while re-taking the temples from the monsters.

This is a good example of the standard newer EXE-Create game, well-compared to Ghost Sync as it has a proper world map and distinct dungeons. There’s no garden, but it’s got the daily roulette and daily quests for IAP and the usual two-dozen sidequests given by grumbling townspeople. I found it was best to spend your IAP on “Refill MP after battle” and maybe an XP multiplier; as the storehouses are middling. There are bonuses for filling out the monster encyclopedia, which you wouldn’t know except that there’s an achievement for collecting them. Ah, yes, there are various tiers of achievements. And there’s an arena with multiple levels, and high-level bonus bosses that unlock near the endgame.

There are unique skills for each character that you learn with points that accumulate as the characters gain levels. There are also four sets of elemental magic that all of the characters learn over time; the bat they have equipped gives a big bonus to the learning rate of one magic type (kind of like the Asdivine magic system). There’s a weapon gatcha system and you can merge old weapons and armor to power-up new ones. You get a boat really late in the game, and there are islands around the map with metal, gold, and high-level monsters you can grind to insane levels against.

They get big credit for the dungeons, which each have a theme and a bunch of puzzles. They aren’t particularly taxing puzzles, mind you, but it switches things up and makes them feel distinct. Also, the encounter rate is reasonable (even before you change it at the monster statues in each dungeon) and the difficulty is pretty consistent throughout. They’ve also got the entrance/middle/end teleporters and the monster statues that let you adjust encounter rates and summon encounters instantly.

This is actually pretty short, and they clearly stretched the plot with a bunch of extra double-crosses and surprise bosses at the end. It doesn’t even have a “true ending” / postgame sequence. You do get to fight God a bunch of times, though, in classic jrpg fashion.

So, Thoma the Blooder is actually an alternate-universe version of the king who was accidentally brought there through a rift in space-time. That’s because Englebert is actually the king and the monster sorceress is the queen; they were transformed by the monster deity. But when you defeat the monster deity, it’s revealed that the Undead Deity from another dimension was pulling the strings and wanted the war to create lots of dead soldiers for him to turn into evil zombies! But when you defeat him, it turns out the human deity was also evil and wants to kill all the monsters and vampires and most of the humans too. So you join forces with the monster deity and the monster king and seal away the human deity. Then so Thoma can stay with his friends, the restored Vampire king and queen go back to his home dimension in his place to save it from war as well. The princess rules the land, the attendant opens an orphanage, Lise the main character fights the evil that remains in the peaceful world, and Thoma gets to live happily ever after.

Overall: A couple of choices by the translators make this goofier than I think they intended, but it’s a fun romp with the now-standard EXE-Create conventions with a reasonable length and some creativeness. Maybe not top-tier, but upper-tier.
 
Together We Live
KEMCO Fall-Winter Sales 2026 #2. Played in 2026. Published by Water Phoenix.

You wake up in a strange room in a desolate landscape, unable to move; and faced with a strange girl who seems to die and then regenerate over and over. Slowly you make friends with this girl and learn her Purpose, the state of the world, and what’s happened to you.

This was published by KEMCO but developed by Water Phoenix, whose entire output seems to be two visual novels. This is a relatively short (~3 hours) visual novel with no choices or gameplay at all. A person named Kyoya wakes up in a strange room with a girl with some sort of monstrous power or curse: She keeps dying in horrific ways, but then re-forms and revives. He can’t move at all, so he convinces the girl—who begins with no name other than “Human”—to carry him as she travels. She reveals that humanity is gone; they’ve killed every living thing on this earth, and a Creator left her there to atone for it by experiencing the deaths of all the creatures that once lived there. He names her Asogiri and teaches her about the world he remembers.

There isn’t much else to discuss that isn’t a plot spoiler. It’s a spec-fic examination of loneliness and finding meaning in a horrible task that, itself, might be meaningless. It’s an interesting story that, like many visual novels, is mildly overwritten and insufficiently illustrated, but that’s more my own issues with the genre than this specifically. And the translation is great; like Raging Loop it understands that it’s a story written with Japanese sensibilities and translates those ideas well rather than trying to replace and localize them. (And at the end of the day it’s a fairly Christianity-inspired story, examining the idea of redemption-through-suffering when there’s no feedback or reinforcement from any higher power. Asogiri is Jesus but even moreso she’s a bodhisattva, endlessly reincarnating to help shepherd the rest of the living into Nirvana.) Does the science always make sense? Absolutely not. There are giant holes in the worldbuilding, but that’s not the point.

Kyoya can’t move because he’s a brain in a jar on a broken robot body; and he “sleeps” at nightfall because he’s powered by a solar cell. He actually travels with her for millennia as Asogiri completes her Purpose, with her shutting him down by leaving him the dark periodically. Eventually Asogiri experiences every death except one: Kyoya’s. And she must kill him to complete her Purpose and escape a cycle of suffering and dying every few days as her body breaks down between regenerations. The ending is nebulous, but it might involve her ascending to heaven with her task completed.

There could definitely be a term paper to be written from this. I’m not going to write it, but I can see the bones of it clearly.

Overall: An interesting philosophical spec-fic story that is varying levels of horrifying depending on how much you think about it. It might be worth your three hours for a buck.
 
Frane: Dragon’s Odyssey
KEMCO Fall-Winter Sales 2026 #3. Played in 2026. Published by EXE-Create.

A pair of “Angel Tribe” members (maybe they’re dragons? Unclear!) sent down to earth by Zeus to find a rogue angel before she breaks something (and also the Demon Tribe is doing something, but that part’s also not clear).

The translation isn’t Engrish, the individual lines are fine (not amazing, but respectable) but the plot is awkward and hackneyed and it seems very likely that details are getting lost and/or mistranslated. The first major scene on earth involves a priest of some strange religion offering to remove monsters from the town mine if the townsfolk give up a young virgin. The characters go to clear out the mine themselves, fight a giant rat that’s just protecting its babies and fail to actually defeat the monsters, but the evil priest relents anyway inexplicably. Then they wander around until a sick guy appears at their house and they have to do find him medicine in the desert. Does this all seem vaguely incoherent? That’s because it is. Also, at no point is anyone or anything called “Frane”.

But that’s okay, because the real sticking point is the gameplay, and wow, this one is pretty bad (which probably is related to it having a lower Play Store rating than pretty much every other KEMCO game). It’s a top-down action-rpg where you have two characters, one with a tiny-range physical attack and one with a hard-to-aim magical attack. Enemies sometimes get a “lock on” box when you get close, but that doesn’t guarantee that you’ll actually hit them. The physical character has an HP value that decreases as he takes hits. The magical character has an MP value that doesn’t ever seem to move.

Some enemies are weak to physical and some to magic (…or possibly fire vs. ice elementals? It’s not clear and every weapon/spell appears to have one or the other elemental affinity), though it’s unclear if they just take little damage or take no damage from the other. How do the various attacks/charging/special moves work? No idea, there’s no tutorial, you can just figure it out. And the enemies can really swarm you, respawning endlessly and leaping up in difficulty as you go down the levels of the first dungeon. Which means you need to carefully grind on enemies you can handle within that one dungeon. (Also, enemies give almost no gold; if you have money it’s because you found it in a chest. Which means, in turn, consumable items are precious. Your only healing during the grinding session will be the free refill when you gain a level.)

The Android version of the game doesn’t recognize a controller; you have to play with touchscreen controls. And they’re worse than most touchscreen controls, periodically sending you moving in the wrong direction when you try to take small steps. And remember again that this is an action-rpg, so your reflexes and ability to mash the attack button really matters as you’re getting swarmed. On the plus side, because of that I learned that the Odin default overlay comes with the ability to map virtual buttons onscreen (including the virtual analog stick) to the actual buttons. I may make use of that replaying the Rideon-made KEMCO games, which also didn’t have controller mapping.

Apparently there are a zillion sidequests in this game! There’s a cooking system for consumables; a crafting system for equipment; a romance gift-giving system for various NPCs; a series of lost pets, secret chests, and hidden talking cats; a town-development system; and a full list of special titles you can get for engaging in all of them. I played for more than two hours (…and died a LOT, even on Easy mode) and barely engaged in any of these, then gave up because the main play loop was such a pain and the story was a mess.

Overall: Sometimes I’m REALLY glad to get a game for only a buck! This game had some potential but the lousy controls and gameplay loop plus the mildly-incoherent plot meant I wasn’t interested in struggling through it to find the better parts.
 
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