Guild Raider!

Hello adventurers... and uhm raiders!
Here I am with another old good classic Rm2k game, and this time it's Guild Raider! (exclamation mark included) first created in 2009 (as a demo), and then released in 2011 in its complete version by psy_wombats. The game is a classic rpgmaker dungeon delving adventure but with some interesting aspects, that we'll see later. First, the plot!

The game is rather lightearted and does not talk about epic battles against darkness, Demon Princes or other bad guys. No, the game is about sixteen adventurers that are hired by the great sage Aven to recover some ancient relics inside an old sealed dungeon. The place has 6 levels and there are about 77 realics, called Magi, hidden there, but do not worry you do not need to collect each of them, even if the winner is the team that will find most of them.


Yes! Let's go and let's hope to survive the terrible creatures of the deep!

Obviously the place was sealed because it's full of monsters, traps and other not-so-pleasant things, but there is also some rivalry among the various party of heroes, that, unsurprisingly considering that this is an rpgmaker game, consist of four characters each (16 adventurers = 4 parties of 4 characters, obviously!). The protagonist, our alter ego is Malu the optimistic leader (and caster) assisted by the tough but dumb Gordon, the snarky sorcerer Diaghilev and the silent and deadly Rathmyer. Anyway we get to customize our team choosing the race and class/specialty for each of them (there are three races and each one has three classes/specializations: Gordon can be a simple solid warrior or a mage-knight for example).

Then we have the rival teams, that will provide opposition but also join forces in some cases (so yes, we get more characters to use!): for example we have Guy's team that's a parody of a typical Dungeons&Dragons party, Miles' team that is made of a group of good hearted but incompetent people, and finally Tobit's Team, a group of competent bastards. Don't expect evolution or character growth, but a lot of amusing and funny moments (Glorfindel the Elf is probably the best and funniest character).


This game includes dungeons infested by undeads, werewolves and other creatures. Hey, but that's a switch! I wonder what it does!

Ok, so that's the story and characters, but what about the game? As said before we select race (human, mutant or baron... that's basically a "tough guy") and class (that determines the set of abilities). Each characters has various sets of armors and weapons that can be equipped (remember not to equip the wrong weapon otherwise you won't be able to get and the skill you are supposed to use!), anyway the game difficulty is prety low (also level/rank goes up to 10 so no need to grind at all) so do not worry too much. Oh and you can also equip the various Magi, the artifacts you may find around, instead of selling them, and they can provide different effects. Cool!
What alse? Well, no random encounters but wandering monsters that can be avoided (a real good addition to Rm2k base system) and the possibility to save anywhere (always appreciated!).

Regarding the assets used, music is pretty good, it's a good 16-bit-styled soundtrack that fits the game and its atmosphere perfectly, while sounds seems to be Rtps. The visuals use a good array of various assets that goes from Rtps to edits to some tiles that I do not recognize, but ok, they're nice and still feels different from the ones you may have seen in other games. Oddly the combat screen does not use backgrounds or battlers, but just the normal tilesets and charsets (that are also used to replace the traditional facesets during dialogues). It's an... ok choice! Oh, and concerning mapping, I believe that the dungeons are really well designed (ok, it's just dungeons but they're interesting at least): there are secret passageways, barriers that can be rotated using switches and other gimmicks. I also liked that you will have to switch between two groups, and this is pretty cool I think!


Battles consist in using the right skills against the opposition!

Final Verdict
Guild Raider! is a pretty fun game, with a simple but entertaining story and cool characters, whose only flaw is the easy difficulty... and the presence of typos. Not a terrible problem isn't it? The game makes good use of the rpgmaker 2000 system, it's a game of the right length and also different from others you may have played. Simple and fun, I liked it!