So, what is GEAS? It's not an acronym, for one -- I've just stylized it in uppercase like the fullwidth font the game uses. In actuality, it's an Irish word for a taboo or compulsory quest. You might've heard of it before from Dungeons & Dragons.

As a game, GEAS is simultaneously an oldschool NES/GameBoy RPG and an exploration of that era's ideas within a more modern paradigm. It is not a "loveletter" to that generation of games. Though I am old enough to have played them... I didn't! My first RPG was Final Fantasy X-2, which I played for the first time in front of my homophobic grandfather. Truly, an disasterrific adventure. In many ways, I feel that my absence from the NES and subsequent SNES "golden era" of Japanese RPGs allows me a more critical eye with which to dissect their parts.

That's not to say that I dislike those eras! I should hope that is obvious given my choice to create GEAS. As painful as some of the earlier entries are, oldschool DQ and FF games have their merits. I'm also fond of titles like Phantasy Star IV, Suikoden II, and Crystalis that broke ground in storytelling and graphical style.

The RPG genre is endlessly evolving and refining itself, but those ideas are in conflict with each other. Where other genres grow symbiotically between games, the design reasons for RPGs' vestigial parts are ignored or forgotten in favor of new risks or, alternatively, doing things "because that's what RPGs do." It feels special and rare when you actually care about inflicting Poison in Final Fantasy X, when in old DQ and FF games it was typically a major early-game hurdle to leap in those games' wars of attrition. Before FFX's evolution and after the NES era, Poison was a useless status effect in almost every jRPG. That's just a small example -- let's not get into a discussion about battle systems and turn-based vs active time combat, please.

Using my own terms, I would suggest that I am trying to refine the gameplay of that time while evolving the storytelling into something more modern. Don't worry, it's not meta or "glitchy" like is so easy to do in a post-Undertale world, though UT is a good example of what I mean by evolving the storytelling. I'm not really interested in giving away GEAS's goose yet. I will say that the game is queer, and that is an exploration of what it means to be a hero. I'm not limited by cart sizes, so it's easier to gaze at my navel. :)

I hope you enjoy GEAS! I hope to have the first landmass's story complete for the demo. We'll see.