Adventurers 1.

Hello adventurers!
Once in a while I dive into my old obscure games collection to bring out reviews of some games you can still play today... if you want (you can avoid them if you believe you would not enjoy, otherwise I'd be happy to have re-discovered a little gem)!

Anyway let's start with this Adventurers 1., made by dotdotdot with RpgMaker 2003 and released in 2018 as the first part of a trilogy. The game is basically a stand alone rpg adventure, except for the bizarre epilogue that feels like a port-credit scene since happens after the end of the story.

The story begins in a quite odd way: the protagonist is Floyd the Knight, that wakes up inside a forest without any hint about he arrived there. But hey, this is not important, since it won't be mentioned for the rest of the adventure... that begins with our friend encountering a merchant and his wife that had a problem with a carriage. Ehm, well the carriage did not even exist because the developer did not have a sprite for it, and this IS what the merchant actually SAYS! Uhm nevermind! So Floyd escorts the woman to the city and battles some bandits while we listen to Back in Black by AC/DC. When we reach the city the music change to All Stars by Smash Mouth but uh ok, this is not a game you should take seriously, especially when Floyd suggest to an old man to work as a... SAVE POINT! But hey WHY? In this game you can save anytime so there isn't even need of savepoints!


Well Christmas was few weeks ago, so I guess someone forgot to put away the tree!

Anyway... Floyd is enlisted by the king that sends him to retrieve a magical amulet stolen from the castle by a mysterious thief with a dark armor and long hair. And this is the quest that will start a wild chase and will end with Floyid confronting the thief, but not before being joined by two old friends (chilhood friends? Maybe, this is never explained!), an axe wielding monk (that cannot heal but can just cast a protection spell) and a young pyromancer wizard.

Concerning the gameplay, after the first introductive part, the game becomes a chain of linear quests plus some optional subquests. These are pretty simple, and consists in finding missing pets, looking for hidden treasures, helping a beggar or eliminating every minotaur in the forest. Not every deed will net a reward, mind this! The good thing is that the game does not use random battles but avoidable enemies and unavoidable enemies that instead block the path to the next area, in any case no infinite battles, even if when you have to fight row after row of orcs the things becomes annoying (in fact Alec the wizard gets angry and blast everything after a while, during that part!).

Battles are fought in the classic way, with characters using mana to power their special skills, but starting with very few attacks: Floyd the Knight has a standard normal attack that hits several times (uses two swords) and later leans a single strong hit, while Peter the Monk/Priest/whatever has just a protect-all spell and a mediocre single attack. Alec is probably the most useful character, he cannot use armors but he's the fastest party member, starts with two spells and later learns other two fire attacks after some events. Oh, remember that the Magic and Standard Attack for him only are in switched order! Uhm and speaking about commands, I also saw that there is no Defend option... weird!


Alec can use only fire spells... but it's SUPER effective! BURN BABY BURN!

Anyway besides battles there are also some puzzles and tasks like a classic boulders/crates pushing enigma, a simple jumoing maze, a minefield and an annoying game in which you have to walk a precise path. A false step means restarting and you have no clue of the correct path, you have only the footprints to indicate what you did right. So yeah, it's a trial and error. Sigh.

Visually the game uses classic rpgmaker assets, Rtps mixed with edits and rips from different sources, unfortunately battlers, facesets (that are badly contourned) and charsets for most characters do not match at all (our protagonist has the charset of an armored warrior, and the battler of a samurai wearing a kimono!), and mapping is in most cases pretty bad! The only decent areas are probably some outdoors, but the problem is that there is often no correlation between subsequent maps, you can find a forest divided into different areas, each made with a different styled chipset! No wayyyy! And besides of this most maps are ugly! THE ONLY thing that is good is how revisiting some zones will show us that something has changed, inhabitants are doing different activities and the dialogues weren't the same. That was good.

Music is... weird. Ok this is a parody game, but there are some songs that are fitting and others that are totally out, moreover there are some parts when there is no music. And it's weird because that happens in locations that normally have a theme, but when re-visited they do not (for example in the forest while looking for the legendary hero)!


Not only battles, the game includes some puzzles, but this was really annoying!

Final Verdict
Adventurers 1. is not a terrible game, clearly it's not a game that you can take seriously: there is humor about classic rpgmaker tropes and reference to other games (Portal, Amnesia that is ), besides a series of wacky situations. The graphics are mediocre and the writing has some typos, but this is not the main problem that I have with this game: the greatest issue is that this is a plethora of situations loosely connected without a real coherent plot and lots of things are left unexplained (and everything is immediately accepted by the characters): where did the protagonist meet his friends? Why he was sleeping inside a forest? And there are many other questions left, that weren't probably going to be explained in the following episodes. It's obvious that the party members are real life inserts (of the dev's friends) and this is somehow confirmed by what happens in the ending, even if AGAIN never is explained, everything is accepted!

Uhm despite this the game is still enjoyable, an ok rpgmaker 2k3 game, surely not a memorable one, but it was done for fun and may be fun to some players that are rm2k3 aficionados. I am one of these players, still this is a 2.5/5 due to some errors (bad mapping, boring battles, and concerning writing, it's obvious that the developer isn't a native speaker, but the problems are also about pacing and the randomness of the sequence of events happening).