Villain RPG

Haiku description:

During a dark night,
three thieves enter a castle.
They steal... the SAGE STONE!

Empowered by this,
they then loot a nearby town.
By stealth or by blood?

You can choose your path.
There's plenty of options here.
Just mind your karma!


Story/Lore/Setting:

Join Brahms and his trio of miscreants as they loot places clean, instigate lots of combat, and cause general mischief. Some towns are too poor or heavily guarded to be good targets while others will serve as stepping stones for your grand plot. Plenty of dungeons to dive into or ignore. Menace a rival party of heroes or explore the depth of secrets hiding below and above. Plenty of other games are parodied and nothing is really taken too seriously.


Features:

• 20 playable characters

• 254 maps

• cheat codes

• consequence

• Crime

• hard mode

• JRPG combat

• list of NPCs met/slain/etc

• minigames

• playable on RG351 handheld devices

• puzzles

• random encounter heat bar

• random NPC placements & events in towns

• rig a tournament

• save almost anywhere

• scoreboards

• secrets everywhere

• skills from levels, trees, trainers, and enemies

• stealth segments

• weather

• weird/unfortunate things

Fight against (a/an):

• abstract chromatic creatures

• botanomancer (requires code 90210)

• clunky UI

• death itself (phychopomp)

• Demi-fiend with a stock of demons

• escalating fights in a combat tower

• half the monster manual

• joke enemies aplenty

• mimic

• most of the default stock RTP monsters

• party members

• rival heroes

• rival villains

• tournament of competitors in a single elim bracket

• townsfolk young and old, fresh and veteran, maybe

• valkyrie with einherijar

• vampire (at least 3)

Content advisory warnings: Nasty themes ensue. Specifics listed below.

DMCA warning: Samples from Childen of Bodom, Metallica, or Siege of Avalon might get your VOD copyright struck, partially muted, or could add ads.

Flashing lights warning: Sudden flashes can occur and some battle effects are a bit much. Recommended to be played in a decently lit room.

Fullscreen warning: This game launches in fullscreen which has an awful aspect ratio and might cause issues with the midi music. I suggest pressing to toggle to windowed mode then to 2x size it.

Gender equality warning: The entire party is either male or non-binary.

Installer warning: Your antivirus is probably not going to like this ancient installer exe. You can't even paste an install path and have to click through the folder tree.

Intellectual property warning: Characters, music, sprites, tilesets, basically everything under the sun has been lifted from other games.

Inventory sort warning: All items are sorted by item ID. You may have to scroll past unusable items to find other battle items and logical grouping isn't really a thing.

Loud audio warning: The game is loud from frame 1 so be sure to not have your headphones turned to max. Some SFX/BGM is a bit too loud at times.

Midi music warning: Most audio in this relies on your OS's midi sound font. Results may vary. Sometimes the music goes wonky and notes are off key for whatever reason.

Missable content warning: Huge amounts of dialog and several scenes and even party members cannot all be seen on the same run. Even with repeat play-throughs, some content is just too hidden or obscure.

Murder option warning: If you would choose to ransack a zone, you can check/murder/ignore most folk.

Narrative warning: The team is all about the loot and scoot and isn't involved in an overarching epic quest to save the world. Narration and direction are at a minimum.

Nasty bugs warning: The game-breaking bugs I was able to find were squashed but there is an absolute chance of other minor bugs still existing. I may patch out the nastier ones that get reported.

No tutorialization warning: If you do not intuit the rules, you may be slain. NPCs that explain mechanics of the game are hidden in secret pocket dimensions or are already engaged in a combat arena.

Piracy warning: This game was made in Don Miguel's awesome version of RM2K which is probably highly illegal etc. The official steam version has frame-rate issues, so I never switched over.

Pixel gore warning: Some bits are gratuitous; most times there isn't a cadaver and pool but other times there is a battlefield of a dozen of doomed dudes.

Readability warning: I decided to go with transparent text boxes and blue text for item pickups which turned out to be bad for watery/blue zones. There are some other color/contrast issues going on too.

Suspicious balancing warning: Some items, skills, and possibly even characters will not up to be up to par with others. Some encounters will have lopsided rewards or a sudden difficulty spike.

Teen-aged writing warning: Some dialog was rewritten to be less awful but most has gone unchanged over the decades. Everyone is bound to find something offensive.

Typos warning: These were progressively slain but are still numerous.

Wav music warning: Are you ready for a 6MB track? Prepare for extreme compression and the bulk of the overall file-size.

Weird characters warning: Most characters were created from ideas posted to a 20 year old forum thread. These kinds of characters might not fly by today's standards but weren't cut. Watch out for drunks, stoners, Stalin, fin collectors, *ists, racial stereotypes, people that type in all-caps, people that substitute letters with numbers and punctuation, people that are the sprite of one character and the portrait of another, and other such troublemakers.

List of characters based-on/submitted-by people: Acrofales, Agent, Aqua, Arrow Dodger, Azzkicker, Balron, Baru, BigFan, BLinD-RawR, Bobby Ghostly, Botanomancer, Brahms, BuddyLee, Budmandude, Carmilla, Carnage, Chacron, Chester, Chill, Chilleh, Chillysword, Dalia, DarkPlasmaBall, David, DiabloGamerz, Dlareme, Dominic, Dorkdav, Duffman, Edxecutor, Escalus, Exolix (987666), Ezolloki, Fat Bastard, Footman, Gage, GAME !3OI, General Bob, Geth, Grongler the Executioner, IntoTheWow, Jacone, Jammno, Josh, Jowy, Kaz, Kkor, Kyamu, Liquid`Drone, Liquid`Zephyr, Lorant Ham, Mabaricko, Manifesto7, Morino, MysteryMeat1, Nemesis, Niax, Nique, Nitrous, Noober, Novanix, Nyx, NöéVèmbēr, Pathikar, Peef, Phoenix Flame, Prince Kaz, Protrox, Protrozz, Queen, RaGe, REDRUM, Redstalin, Rekrul, Roc, Rokonosa, SENTRYIII, ShadowFang, Skully, Slio, Snake, Stealth, Terrorific, Trozz, Tsujin, UndeadCheese, Venom, Vexx, Warbringer, Wixxow, XDUDE, Yobby, Zealotlee


In memory of a good friend who had helped work on the game 20 years ago...

Good luck; have fun.

Trailer: