based on my experience checking links yesterday, maybe they should’ve just stuck to mediafire. i think all but one of the mediafire links i tried still worked where every other hosting site had fallen. it was giving me way fewer issues than the IA, to be honest…
8 Likes
archive.org kept thinking my upload of this was spam but thankfully someone else already did it (with less info, but whatever). the spam filter has been a huge pain in the ass but google has offered me no solution.
you could describe this game as “Elfen Lied does Animorphs” and i think the author at the time would agree with you enthusiastically (nb: i don’t recall it having the “anime-horny” part of that comparison, but who knows. you’ll have to play Akasha Seal for that…). it opens with what can best be described as an rpg maker AMV. your gut reaction to that should tell you whether to play it or not
it’s somewhere on the line between RPG and VN, which i remember made a lot of people who post on rpg maker forums mad. that said, i expect the VN parts to have aged well (through camp) while the custom battle system stuff is only really impressive to someone who uses rpg maker. i guess Reives learned that lesson because afaik everything he’s released since has been a VN
i never played Reives’ breakout hit (To the Moon) but i’ve heard it has problematic representation for autistic girls or something. so as an autistic girl myself i think you should “Destiny Anew” this game instead. it’s praxis or whatever. Quintessence is too stupid to generate discourse about anything (complimentary)
like 2/3 of the games i uploaded yesterday it is “unfinished,” but i think you have to be a little bit sicko to play through all of it anyway. rpg maker games not having endings is basically just a genre marker. they’re tone pieces
7 Likes
Oh fuck yes, that dude’s games are all amazing, all very much made by a guy who just reads tvtropes pages for movies and bases games off them without actually watching any.
8 Likes
is it still effortposting if i haven’t played these yet. whatever
Perseverance: Full Clearance
honestly the only thing i can add to this incredible screenshot is that the game has like ten voice actors
Faith in Feathers
i can’t get over Metatron [Normal] annihilating a bara furry with a jpeg lens flare. i think if anyone’s still alive in a hundred years it’ll be because they’ve accepted this as a canonical biblical text.
Avantasia: The Game
this is an rpg adaptation of a metal opera. global volume control is listed as a feature. something about seeing the text “Visage of the Deity” over a clip-art snowman is really doing it for me. the only trailer is in spanish but there is an english version.
Tales of the Drunken Paladin
i played this game in 2008. what do you mean it got an update in july. i think to really understand how strange this is you need to see what the original portrait for the main character looked like:
if you draw this and then work on your game for another 17 years you have to be a cool person, mathematically speaking. there were a lot of “rpg parody” games back in the day and they usually boiled down to turning toward the camera and reminding you that cliches exist, and that tvtropes is a website that you can read. i’m not saying this game is better than that. i’m just saying it’s outlived it somehow. i still expect most of the jokes not to land but i’ve convinced myself that there’s something here. the trailer music is an inspired choice! just… ignore that one of the skills is named Quadriplegic. it was a different time, three months ago.
Dark Eternal: Dissolution
yknow, initially i was gonna make fun of this game for what i assume is a fake ESRB rating but actually it looks like it rocks. the “first full-length release” thing is… kinda [jerk-off motion] but that’s fine. i don’t think they’re wrong that 16k downloads is a wild number in this context and it makes me wonder how many downloads the original Aveyond got. (does anyone remember Aveyond? …no?)
Naramura’s rpg maker battlers were really widely used but mixing it in with hot topic angels, heavy metal music and three different illegible fonts in the ui is easily the best case for them i’ve seen. did you know that Naramura also made the portrait art for the la mulana remake? if you squint at that screenshot you can see it. maybe this fact is only cool if you already knew who Naramura is.
Paradise Blue
this was in the old rpg maker games spreadsheet and i think i just want to know what made people passionate enough to upload it four times. actually nevermind i want to know about the logistics of this girl’s bralette… thing. are those shoulder straps enchanted? is she using magic?
2 day old apple fritters taste just as good
zip file is helpfully abbreviated to “2doaftjag.” it’s pretty common to take one look at an rpg maker game and know exactly what they were inspired by. it’s just more novel when they’re copying stuff i actually like. i found it in the RMN archive but i’m not surprised at all to learn it was released last year.
Blue Gender
i need to know why it’s called Blue Gender. wait this is a real anime? okay it’s less funny now nevermind
9 Likes
HYBRIS - Pulse of Ruin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJlV-pW1yRs
honestly rpg maker feels almost incidental to how strange this game is. a lot of very deliberate steps were taken against the engine defaults but… in what direction, exactly? the steam reviews are fake but the passion feels real
@Khan reminded me to post this one because he keeps trying to convince me this game is actually “badass”… i think it’s working
7 Likes
like im sorry … the timing at the very beginning with cutting through the dragon… “it’s over!” “DE-VOUR!”… it simply is badass…
also this like naruto OP ass framing on this opening you cant make this up. heavy handed symbolism. this is everything. this is what it is all about.
also yes. that really is the verse on this song. i love it its such a terrible take but the hook completely rips i had to go listen to the song to re-confirm. this band did a song in support of chelsea manning in 2020 before disbanding in 2021 where the single art looks like an obama hope ad. they were releasing all of their stuff for free on their own website. i have to report i think they kinda own sorry everybody. and i have to report this here because where else am i gonna bring these guys up okay thanks
7 Likes
i told haley yesterday that game seems like its from a world where shadow hearts won the rpg wars but then everything went wrong
also im playing a bunch of these games right now and let me tell you, I was missing out in the 2000s god damn. The extremely central european pc game graphics are crazyyy
every single enemy in the first area I fought instantly died to wind magic without fail
6 Likes
plz tell me James’ last name is Cameron i need this to be the case
1 Like
apparently it has an original soundtrack too (outside of the one Muse song lol) which is kind of wild in context, i had immediately assumed the hans zimmer shit was ripped from film scores or something
also because of the multiple sources for assets, a giant robot is smaller than a tree
other people might have issues getting the game to run because of a missing dll file in the original release; it’s not reproducible on my end so i didn’t catch it before. i’ll fix it in the morning. there might be a couple other XP games with this problem specifically… if Quintessence fails to launch for anybody lmk
4 Likes
that Medium article was really cool, thanks for linking it. it’s frustrating (if unsurprising) that these communities have always been so siloed from each other–from what i remember exchanges between sites with different languages were almost entirely limited to code/assets. whenever i hear about an rpg maker game getting a translation i always make sure to give it a try, because the barrier’s so high that whatever makes it over has to be at least some kind of interesting
after following one of the links from there to rpg.blue i’m wondering if i should be trying to save stuff from there as well, but the language barrier is rough. not being able to play any of the stuff i’m archiving definitely takes some of the joy out of it
5 Likes
my favorite part of the bible was when archangel micheal crossed the vibrational boundary to the abandoned space station purgatory to defeat the guardian of the 13th dimension. this is how you cure cancer btw. according to the plot
also metatron appears to be gay-coded(???)
6 Likes
Faith in Feathers is like an entire game spun off the Valkryie Profile screen where you press START to “spiritually concentrate.” It literally starts with an 8 year old boy asking if you believe in angels and then telling you a story that will make you believe in them. God built angels so tough that when they use ATB it’s like slamming the button in pachinko, it’s going so fast you lose track of what’s even going on and there’s fucking full screen spell effects microwaving your brain every five seconds.
5 Likes
im glad they distilled the experience of having a conversation with my schizophrenic father who literally thought he was archangel michael into an rpg maker game
4 Likes
by checking other wayback machine snapshots i found and uploaded a few games i missed
i also spent a few hours fixing compatibility issues with some modern windows PCs and have reuploaded those games. i also managed to upload my own copy of Quintessence with a couple of those fixes
i’d love if someone on a modern windows computer could download Complete Chaos, see if the music plays back, and try my suggested fix in the archive page if it doesn’t. it sucks ass that windows dropped virtual midi support. i fixed it on my end but it was long enough ago that i have no idea if my suggested solution works
3 Likes
those CG cutscenes are fascinating, thanks for linking
3 Likes
Spike Lee’s The Twilight Zone didn’t beat the odds on not being racist (among other things) which is too bad. it almost holds together until it becomes a videogame. many such cases. i got distracted from the non-sequitur animated beach orgy when i noticed the sand was ripped from seiken densetsu 3
i love that half the dialogue in Avantasia is just quoting lyrics from the rock opera like they’re normal things to say in a conversation. and that your morality is listed as a status effect. otherwise this is almost a normal rpg? my favorite part of the rock opera was when they accepted a quest to kill ten bees for 1000 GP.
i think the lyrical dialogue would hold together better with a little more theatrics in the cutscenes. i know they can’t all be the ff6 opera house but you get what i mean
it’s wild to work on anything for seventeen years, but a linear narrative in particular must be a nightmare. imagine being 30 and going back to edit jokes you wrote when you were 13… i wouldn’t want to do it either.
and i know this goes against the spirit of rpg maker but honestly all Tales needs in order to be good is an editor. there are some cool ideas here. the dialogue in random battles is something i’ve wanted in an rpg forever and some of it even lands! until you realize that it’s allowed to repeat, because the first dungeon is an honest-to-god maze… with no way to go back to heal or prompt to save beforehand. and also the racism again. i kinda want to come back to it though so it’s impossible to say if it’s bad or not
Complete Chaos rocks. i watched the trailer and somehow i was still so drawn in by how straight it played the 90s detective/horror story beats that it felt like playing the first 30 minutes of an SMT game if you didn’t know the world was about to end. why did he know that thing was called a Realm Sword… bro you were doing the whole “buddy cop” shtick like five minutes ago! your girlfriend just moved out of your apartment! your apartment that’s decorated with a neon sign that says WEAPONS for some reason… i guess that happened to be in the tileset you were using… like the rpg maker equivalent of running into it at a yard sale
also, excellent taste in MIDIs. the MIDIs really hold the whole thing together, even when it’s threatening to fall apart because you just walked past a guy wearing a scouter from dbz
13 Likes
the spike lee game would have been better if spike was more like AM from i have no mouth and i must scream and less like a 13 year old making a homophobic newgrounds minigame collection. really not bringing the heat for this character at all was disappointing. that being said I did laugh when someone says their favorite movies are Malcolm x and He Got Game
complete chaos was awesome but somehow felt like a game barkley was parodying despite coming out two years later lol I loved that one I feel like I gotta play more. And Denzel Washington actually was in this one!
I also shamefully enjoyed the drunken paladin game
9 Likes