The Tower of KYLE

Intro

"The Tower of Kyle" is a turn-based RPG developed by BladeThePieEater using RPG Maker VX Ace that features a single dungeon with multiple floors filled with rats, faeries, and dragons oh my!.



Though the reason our intrepid heroes are taking them on is paper thin to say the least.

Story

You play as Ryze, Ardain, and Istar as they climb a mysterious tower in search of sweet loot. That's really all there is to why your there. Your not seeking a fortune to save the family farm like "Stone Wolf" or undertaking dangerous tasks on behalf of the kingdom to avoid being put to death from a crime you may or may not have committed. Your simply a group of young adventures trying to make it "BIG" like Gene Starwind. And while the journey can be its own reward sometime. This game doesn't have particularly fun combat or fun characters to make a long game work. Thankfully this game is rather short at around 90 minutes to complete everything. Even if your super stingy with your items and reduce your wizard to slapping things with a book. Which I suppose would be a lot scarier if his old, dusty tomes acted like my vase in "Phantom Brave".


Note: I've dedicated a lot of hours to item fusion to make my vase this strong.

To make matters worse me the game doesn't start to lay down any potentially interesting thread beats until the very end of the game with our adventures claiming a cursed sword with the intent of taking it home to purify it. A task that may or may not happen in the sequel since the player is free to stick with that plan or have one of the party members run off with the sword in order to protect someone they owe a lot from probably getting cursed by it. Though, I'll admit the biggest issue for the end for me is that it serves as sequel bait for a game that may never materialize. After all, I've seen a lot of games that end with cliffhangers never actually get a follow up since the developer lost interest.

Gameplay

Combat wise the game is a turn-based RPG where the player's equipment at least partially influences what skills they have access to. You also gain a couple through level up as well, but you'll probably be using the starting skills and the equipped skills a lot more since you basically need to kill everything that moves in this game to level up enough to gain access to skills like Toxic Tip. If anything your real bread and butter in this game will be your starting skills and the few skills you get from your gear.

The main reason those skills are useful is they can modify what an enemy is weak to and in this game much like Pokémon hitting an enemies elemental weakness allows you to inflict massive amounts of damage. So it's really helpful to change that weakness to something your elemental weapons can exploit with their basic attack. Especially if your stingy like me since it only consumes TP to make an enemy vulnerable to an elemental type. As a result it's very easy to save all of your mana recovery potions for later or in my case to basically get through the game with using only one.

Which is kind of funny in retrospect since the game is pretty generous when it comes to giving the player items. As such there isn't that much need to be super conservative when it comes to using items in this game, but I wouldn't advise using them haphazardly either since some of them are useful for the final boss fight.

If anything my biggest issue with this game is that combat ranges from middling to very easy. Probably because the game gives the player so many options that that various enemies you run across really aren't able to keep up with the player. After all, you can change gear in the middle of a fight as well in order to give yourself a tactical advantage. That advantage being able to exploit the various elemental weaknesses of the enemies you'll run across. Albeit that system can't be fully taken advantage of until you've collected all of the elemental weapons in this game.

Graphics & Sound

As far as I recall the game relies entirely on the RTP for these elements. As such the game doesn't have any sort of unique vibe that separates it from the dozens of other games that were made entirely with the use of the RTP for RPG Maker VX Ace. About the only upside I can offer here is that at least the default music for the floors change as you advance upwards every now and again. Which might also be a downside since it's pretty weird for the background music in a dungeon to shift for merely advancing up or down a flight of stairs.

Conclusion

"The Tower of Kyle" is a mixed bag in my opinion. The characters for the most part are rather flat in this game with what little life they do have coming into play way too late to matter. And while the game does give you a lot of options for exploiting your enemies in battle. It also means those enemies are unable to fully adapt and make combat feel particularly challenging. As a result fights in this game tend to be something most normal people would want to avoid. I on the other hand hunted down every enemy I could, but I'm a self admitted murder hobo who was willing to grind to max level in "Final Fantasy XII" before I recruited Fran and Balthier. So I'm more than willing to subject myself to boring fights in the name of getting stronger. As such, I really can't recommend this game unless you've beaten all of the better turn-based RPGs on this site like "Devil Hunter: Seeker of Power" or "Demon Hunter".