Anthony

Good day, especially to those who are named Anthony!
This Anthony is a Rpgmaker2000 game made by Bandito (also author of
Final Fantasy Legacy a game that seems to be still in the works), and it was the first game from this developer, made in 2005 and re-released in 2009... but only as a demo since later the project was unfortunately cancelled. A curious note is that the real title of the project is "Final Paradise", maybe the original title of this game. Another issue I found is that while this game included RTPs (as written in the main page) it still lacks some files like "pirates" and "objecte" (in Charsets) that may lead to crash if you do not have them.

The game will start in media res with our protagonist, a one-armed swordsman called Anthony, searching for a witch. It seems that the white haired witch is someone that Anthony trusted, but she killed everyone in his village and now he is pursuing her together with a little kid, Nabetse, and young but skilled martial artist (later trained as a mage too!).
The adventure begins with a couple of curscenes and two battles against the witch, where there isn't much to do since no one of our characters has some kind of special attacks, then they shipwreck on an island and the witch-hunt begins again...


That looked to good to be true. Heh!

Anthony is a classic fantasy adventure game, with a main character obsessed with vengeance and armed with big swords (one of these is... the Buster Sword itself!) with a supporting kid with cool powers (he can even make clones of himself and destroy the enemies... yes, that attack is both spectacular and powerful). Despite using Rpgmaker 2000 we'll find custom made animated attacks (like in the good old Legion Saga II, made in 2002) and wandering enemies instead of the old boring random encounters. The game also uses savepoints to limit our save-scumming tendencies. Eheheheh.

For the rest is the usual: explore dungeons battling some enemies, find loot, fight a boss, restock in town and repeat. All good? Well there are some nice really aspects and others that are not so nice. First there are some cool ideas, like the previously mentioned animations, monsters and feral best that do not leave money but body parts that can be sold, the music, bosses with more phases and free automatic healing before and after boss battles, a cameo of the developer Bandito together with Don Miguel (!).


There are SOME demons roaming in the wilderness...

Unfortunately there are also some bad things, for example many little obligatory quests that involve lots of backtracking. Some boss battles also require some grinding, otherwise you won't survive aaaaand no, the shops do not offer a lot to help us (just some basic items) and the use of save points do not makes things easier.

The story is nothing special, our dynamic duo while searching for the witch takes on various quests during their travels, like looking for missing cats, rescuing a Pokemon trainer from some bandits and assisting two girls... the real problem is that most of the time you will have to find out what you're supposed to do, because the game sometimes won't explain that you have to talk with someone in particular to unlock the next part of the story, and it happens that's someone you may have already talken to. The lack of direction is a problem here.


Here Nabetse uses his multiplication attack on Don Miguel!

Graphically the the game is a mixed bag: the game uses RefMap some good edits and nice battle backgrounds, I also liked the demon sprites used for the opponents, but if we look at mapping... well that's a half disaster: there are some areas where there are black walls, the building are small outside and enormouse and empty inside, and each room is at least as large as the whole screen, moreover sometimes the height of the walls and of the passage is different, and there are no frames. Outdoor areas are just a little better, unfortunately they still look unrealistic narrow corridors, and are ABSOLUTELY OVERCROWDED by monsters. But this is not all, there are apparently areas with random encountars and/or invisible opponents (and there are also come invisible roadblocks), while some monsters are standing stationary on the high grass, where we cannot walk. And if the houses exterior and interiors don't look remotely similar, the same is for the map: judging from the world map we are on a tiny island with a single town, then we enter the forest and BAM! Suddenly there are villages here and there! And the weapon shop in the third town does not seem to work as intended. Sigh.


Well I'd rather not! Sorry I have to end this review...

Final Verdict
Anthony/Final Paradise could have been another enjoyable rm2k demo, since it's quite long, unfortunately some issues make it less than average: I can tolerate some mediocre (slow) cutscenes and the bad mapping, but the lack of directions of some parts (like when a generic "let's go to fight..." should technically indicate we have to search for a particular opponent to make the story progress... WHO? WHERE?) made me waste a lot of time in walking through big empty maps. Sigh.