SPELLSHARD: THE BLACK CROWN OF HORGOTH, AND OTHER UNEXPECTEDLY GREAT RETRO GAMES

So a thread on the Talking Time forums about great RPG Maker games that came out this year lead to somebody mentioning a certain old-school freeware JRPG called Spellsword: The Black Crown of Horgoth. I thought I'd check it out, and lo and behold it turned out to be one of the best games I've played this year.



From the three or so hours I've played, Spellsword looks to be a cross of the early NES Final Fantasy games with a bit of Dragon Quest. You choose a party of four from eight classes, wander around from dungeon to dungeon hunting down Lords of Ruin and fighting in challenging but generally fair battles. It's pretty fun, and while I'm nowhere close to completing it, it looks like there's a lot of game in here. There's also quite a bit of dialogue, but thankfully the game knows when to shut up and the quality of the dialogue itself is infinitely better than the threadbare stuff of the games Spellsword is emulating. The game looks to have been made in OHRRPGCE, but this is easily the most polished game I've seen in the engine.

Also, did you notice the lightsaber in the logo? Supposedly you unlock greater technology the more Lords of Ruin you defeat, leading to multiple class upgrades that lead to new abilities using sealed technology. I haven't gotten that far yet, but it certainly sounds like it'd be pretty interesting! At any rate I'm surprised that I've never heard of this game before, since while it's admittedly low-tech it certainly compares to any of the better RPG Maker games I've seen made in the past few years.

You can pick it up here if you're interested! If you go to the creator's site there's another game called Dungeonmen I haven't played around too much with, but looks to be an equally fascinating hybrid of Final Fantasy with Wizardry. Any thoughts on the game? Or have you stumbled across any freeware retro games recently on the net that blew you away by how good they were?