Legend of Shadows

Hello!
Legend of Shadows, yeah this is the title of the game I will review today, and I will immediately tell you that this 2022 title made by Francis1768 with RPG Maker MV is a real CLASSIC fantasy rpgmaker jrpg. Oh yes, one of these old styled game with random encounters, dungeons with save points, a world map that instead lets you save anywhere, and a good number of recruitable characters that you may select (by visiting the hub/base of the adventurers) to create your favourite party!

Combat? Classic, with some characters like the protagonist Lavin that unleash special moves using TPs and magic users that spend mana points to cast elemental magic and so on. You start with exactly zero abilities but you earn them levelling up. What did I say before? Classic!


The game begins (after a prologue section) with a moment of angst! Bastard, you brasar!!! (I admit this part made me laugh because all is destroyed but the king is still sitting on his throne saying "what happened?")

Now the story... that is NOT classic! Oh yeah, this time we do not play as the classical young apprentice adventurer, but as an experienced hero: ten years ago the samurai Lavin and his friends saved the world from the demons that opened a gate to the human world from their dimension. They were defeated, the gate was closed and Lavin became famous as the Demon Samurai. But... BUT there is still a demon around (ok, to tell the truth more than one, but sssh! This is a spoiler!), well it looks like that a half-human/half-demon guy named Brasar is still on this dimension, probably due to his human heritage. So the king of Graycot decides to enlist the Demon Samurai to assist Rahne the Berserk, whose mission is to execute the half-demon through a plan that looks a bit convoluted. Anyway all fails and now Lavin and Rahne have to search for four magic crystals (there are ALWAYS magic crystals in fantasy jrpgs! No exceptions!) that this Brasar wants to take and do... something terrible for the human population!

Gosh! So what? Time to collect new allies (both new recruits and Lavin's old buddies from the war) and stars exploring dungeons, fighting demons and monsters to save the world. I wrote this before, this is classic! And if you like the genre, well you're ready for a great adventure that took me around 7 hours to complete.

Now, I like classic combat, especially when you have many party members to collect and then select to create your team by choosing your favourite combination, even if there are some parts that for story reasons some characters won't be available. I do not want to spoil but a particular part reminded me of FFVI, and that's to say that originality is not really a strong point of this game, but all the rest is pretty good as long ad you can enjoy a simple classic tale of heroes.


This dragon is a boss but as you can see he's suffering. Will Brini's attack kill him for good?

Visually the game is pretty good: I like the menu screen with the walking protagonist (that changes during the course of the game) a simple scene that's also used in other parts, mapping is adequate, nothing really original but still pretty well done, I mean dungeons are classic gauntlets with a linear path and some dead ends where you can get extra loot, towns are simple, average rpgmaker jrpg-style... still I did not find errors so it's ok even if it's not something really memorable (the use of RTPs does not help, also some places like the sewers seems a bit out of place due to the use of tilesets made for modern settings). There are also some odd things like for example the presence of a dead body in the room of the first tavern in Graycot(despite the owner saying that she "fixed one room to let customer stay". Uhm yeah, you didn't even remove a dead body!).
On the other hand I liked the opponent sprites that aren't just animated but also possess different poses depending on their health level, so even if their hitpoints aren't indicated you can still have an idea of their conditions and see when they are severly wounded/nearly dead.

Music is ok, I did not recognize the themes, and this is probably a good thing but I admit I am not an expert. Only issue is that sometimes music is really louder than sound effects (such as Brasar's laugh).

The game is unfortunately marred by some typos and dialogue errors, plus some sentences that make little sense (such as something like "I do not know where the magical crystals are, but I know where one of them is!". WHAT?) but probably the author's language isn't english so I can understand this problem.


WAIT! Where is Lavin? What happened and why the party leader is this white haired Ren guy? Well play and see!

Final Verdict
Legend of Shadows is a love letter to the classic "final fantasies" and similar jrpg games, a largely linear story where you can still travel freely around the world on a ship or explore an optional dungeon, but the story is the classic tale of heroes versus evil whose aim is to fight evil and create a better world. Not a complex plot, nothing new, and this both for what concerns story and gameplay. Overall this is a good game, made with care, but I know that some players are tired of random encounters and dungeons with save points where you may have to repeat an entire section if you die (random enemies aren't that hard to beat, but bosses can be really tough! As they should be).

Despite some little flaws and lack of originality this is still a pretty fun game to play if you like party based jrpgs, very classic from the beginning to the end, but at least it has a nice cast of various playable characters and a balanced difficulty. Nothing new, but nothing bad.