A Maned Lioness

Intro

"A Maned Lioness" is a short, turn-based RPG developed by AtiyaTheSeeker using RPG Maker VX Ace that was an entry in an event simply known as A Rainbow of Positivity. An event that was held back in 2019 and is intended to celebrate pride month which required developers to create games whose main character was a member of LGBT+ community or focused on LGBT+ as a theme. And I'll get to how the developer covered this requirement in the story section.

Story
Summary

You play as Raziya, a transgender lioness, whose a student of both martial arts and the arcane. Albeit her mastery of the arcane arts is rather limited considering her library of spells can be counted on one hand with more than one digit left over. At any rate, this game's story is about Raziya recording her coming out story in her journal. An event that Raziya approached with a lot of apprehension since her previous attempts had gone bad.



But if she's ever going to become a truly accepted member of Dawn's Light she'll need to stop hiding who she truly is. After all, everyone can tell she's hiding something and really don't appreciate her attempts to divert their attention from the topic considering she's a terrible liar, but before she can worry about revealing herself to everyone else she's been tasked with recovering a fancy rapier that was stolen by bandits. After all, she's the only person around that can take names and kick some serious $## for miles.

Strengths and Weakness

Oddly enough I'd argue the story's greatest strength and weakness are one of the same in this game's case. That issue being just how many emotional beats this game has. These beats can either appeal to you or make the player feel like they are drowning in a sea of overflowing sap. In fact, one of the reasons I held off on reviewing this game for so long is the sheer amount of sap in this game started to annoy me even if I could understand why Raziya was both apprehensive about telling others about herself as well as overjoyed about being accepted by the rest of the community as the young lioness she is.

Thankfully the game was more enjoyable for me during my most recent playthrough. This is because I already knew the major plot beats so I could easily just skim through some of the more emotional moments if I felt they were getting to be too much for my personal tastes.

Gameplay

While this game is short and contains only four battles. Those battles for the most part don't boil down to merely spamming your ignite skill which launches a deadly fireball at your enemies that is tinged with soul energy and than running back to the church for free healing. In fact, if you attempt that on the first fight in this game you will lose every time. You'll either be forced to buy a health potion in order to heal yourself in the middle of the battle so you'll have enough health to take down the second goblin before you die. You'll need to buy yourself some better armor so you can tank hits a bit better and then use the focus command which allows the player to both guard and regenerate a bit of health and magic points. Or you'll need to gamble on a smiting drought and then attempt to rush the goblins in order to win.

The fights after the initial one are a bit easier since the second required fight is against a single goblin. So it's pretty easy to overwhelm that one and that fight should give you enough experience to level up which should make the optional fight against the blue goblin and his pet a lot easier. After that you have the final boss whose pretty easy to deal with if your willing to spend your money on a pair of smiting droughts so you can make it easier to endure his attacks while increasing the damage output of your ignite skill. Though it'll still take three or four mighty fireballs to defeat the werewolf.

Graphics

Graphically the game makes use of tilesets, sprites, and battlers created by others developers instead of using the RTP for RPG Maker VX Ace. So this game definitely has a unique visual flavor from a lot of other free games on this site that were created with RPG Maker VX Ace. For the curious the graphical assets in this game were largely created by The Mighty Palm and Avee.

Sound

Sound wise the game also stands out by using a combination of sound effects and background music that are either free to use or part of purchasable pack. Even so the game's soundtrack is still rather forgettable in my opinion, but I only tend to remember tracks that I would enjoy outside of hearing them play in the background of a game like "My Comrade" from Disgaea, "My Glasses are Addicted" from Mana Kehmia, or "Kiri no Mukou ni Tsunagaru Sekai" from Atelier Iris.

Minor Bug

If you talk to Khloe from the side your breakfast will be a helping side of wall apparently. I guess our main character is secretly part termite as well.

Thankfully she only moves to the side during the cut scene so this doesn't cause a game ending bug, but it's still something I feel is worth mentioning even if it isn't that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things.

Conclusion

"A Maned Lioness" is a short, emotional ride that's worth a quick look in my opinion. After all, it only takes about 40 minutes to beat this game from start to finish. And that's if you go out of your way to talk to all of the villagers instead of trying to simply blitz through the story as quickly as possible, but be warned this might be a bit too sappy for some.