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Fallen Legacy: A Night to Forget

  • ZPE
  • 05/03/2010 11:57 AM
  • 2162 views
Eden Legacy: A Knight of Eden is a completed game made in RPG Maker 2000 by sbester, something that's quite rare these days on the RPG Maker scene.

The game starts off with an ambiguous opening, you are presented with the naming screen then a wall of text pops up which seems to be frozen in place for sometime. You can actually open up the menu by pressing X but that does nothing. It was only after 30 seconds or so did I realise that this part was actually on auto-drive which meant you just sat back and enjoyed the nice static letters on the screen.

Ok so once you start the game, you start off in a house similar to the Pokémon games but this time you have become a man (despite still looking like a 10-year old - although the game does mention something about that...). Leaving the story (what little of it) aside, I move on.


The boy who becomes a man who becomes a hero etc etc.


Graphics are obviously in black and white but they do not seem to 'fit' in properly. The mixture of sprites used from various games do not go well in my opinion. It was something I overlooked when I was playing it though.

Mapping is not done so well. Again, I felt the Link's Awakening maps did not go well with the sprites. There were far too many spatial issues (for example, empty plots of lands) and I felt the inside of buildings were too big and did not correlate with the size of the buildings from the outside. There were also map passing errors like the usual roof tile not being set right and walking over chest and barrels. Overall, the mapping was okay but certainly nothing to ride home about.

Battles are fought in the traditional RPG turn-based front view although there were no enemies to be seen on screen, just some text to roll out what was happening. This, I felt was something that dragged the game down another level as it was just a bore to play through. No matter how nostalgic a game may feel, there is no excuse for dire gaming elements. Kentona's Hero's Realm manages to do this well as do the other recent 8-bit RM games. There was still some sort of hard-to-see animation going on in the left-hand side although I thought it was just a graphical glitch.

Balance-wise, battles are quite challenging and the energy system helps to change things around ever so slightly. Random battles are expected in this type of game and so is grinding but this is not possible in the first dungeon as you are not allowed to leave rendering the first healing spot (in your hometown) useless. On a plus side, there were no random battles on the huge world map.


Lots of dead people there which adds to the atmosphere of this game. Notice the sky background making it seem as though the town is floating in the sky.


The character progressively acquires new skills as more experience is gained and this adds more non-linearity to the game which is always welcome.

Now we reach the part about the music. There was apparently no music in one version but it seems as though it's been fixed by sbester. However, the promise of it being 'the greatest soundtrack ever' was very far-fetched. Some of the tune were high-pitched and very annoying which resulted in me muting the game, maybe other have a better appreciation for sbester's favourite genre, Melodic Death Metal but count me out.

So to wrap up this game. This game failed to live up to expectations. It makes a false start with the lazy intro and struggles to keep it's head above water. It definitely lost my interest within the 1/2 hour I played it and I suspect many others have or will do the same. The Deluxe Edition of this game looks better but if it inherits the same core issues then there is very little point in playing that too.

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Thanks for playing, and I'm sorry it didn't live up to your expectations. Perhaps the Deluxe Edition will be more fitting, as it does away with many of the minimalistic elements you didn't like (such as no enemy graphics, and I believe the graphical awkwardness is less noticeable with the addition of colour).

I think the major problem you mentioned here, although a bit vaguely, is the idea that grinding isn't an option in the first dungeon as you have a limited supply of healing items and no way back to town. Bugs kept me from allowing you to go back to town, unfortunately, although I'm still trying to fix it in time for the Deluxe release. At level 6 you are given the option of a heal spell which basically allows for smoother gameplay, so it is really only half of the first dungeon that you will run into that problem. I've been pondering this since the very conception of the game, but no matter how I try to hack it, giving the healing spell any earlier just doesn't feel right to me as it takes all the challenge out of the first area.

Anyway, if there are any other suggestions you have for the Deluxe version ti would be much appreciated!
I'd also like to point out that once you get the hang of it and get a rhythm down, the first dungeon really isn't all that hard. Challenging, yes, but it can be done. Once you level up, you don't have to conserve energy quite as often, which also helps.

However, the game will definitely not be for everybody. Either you will like it or hate right from the beginning, as the game carries the same style and tone throughout its entirety. The overworld map was a bit large, but with no enemies on the overworld until late into the game you can easily cross it from one point to another. It's more of a hack and slash dungeon crawler, another thing that I particulary enjoyed. In the end, it was simple, fun, and short, all the things I enjoy about an oldschool RPG.
Yeah, I'm glad these two reviews balance out the way they do. Together they draw a pretty accurate picture of what you're getting into when you play it. I do hope that the Deluxe Edition does draw some new fans though, as the "no monster graphics" and the black and white aspects are sure to have turned some people off (someone said it hurt their eyes, I hope to hell I haven't given anybody a seizure).

My testers suggested I advertise it as a "rogue-like" dungeon crawler, which I probably should have done. My aim is to improve the formula for the next one and hopefully implement some new features that will appeal to a wider audience (of course, without compromising the fun factor for existing fans).
Eden is nothing like a roguelike. don't advertise it as one, would only piss off people who like playing roguelikes.

This review addresses the problem I've had with it since day one: your dungeons are boring! way too spread out, nothing but narrow chasm after narrow chasm, random battle after random battle. nothing interesting at all. no puzzles, no variety, no depth, no interesting mechanics to wade through. if you're going for some gameboy simple classic, whatever, dont let me cramp your style, but i'm telling you, man to man, that it is boring as hell, and frankly, has very little similarity to the 'lite' style of gameboy RPGs.

this isn't me flaming your game, it's just me re-iterating what i've been trying to tell you.. and that is, your dungeon design is severely problematic, and is really what you should be working on improving, not upgrading from a 4-color palette.
Corfaisus
"It's frustrating because - as much as Corf is otherwise an irredeemable person - his 2k/3 mapping is on point." ~ psy_wombats
7874
I feel that (for me anyway) if the world map was cut down to roughly a 200x200 to 300x300, this would still give the world a grandiose presence while making it easier to navigate and cut down on the empty space. By empty space, I mean that I was able to find, on at least one occasion, where the screen is nothing but the clear white land tile. Seeing as how your range of vision in all Rm2k/3 games are 20x15, that's 300 tiles in that one rectangle with nothing to break it up, or landmark to build on. This was my main thing that made me believe that the game could have been twice as great, and let's face it, approachable, if taken into effect.

Having played through it (I had to cheat, I'm sorry), I found that the Teleporter item was VERY useful in going straight to a place, but should be completely unable to be used in town instead of what it is set to now, as the second I reemerged at the world map, it brought up the menu for the teleporter, which made for a fairly unpleasant trek back to the Sanctuary to get to the upper world.

There were other small errors that I ran into, but probably because of having to Ctrl+walk through. One that I thought was fairly strange was getting the "CHERUB". After obtaining it, while leaving the other item in its original spot, I spoke to the old man, and he congratulated me on finding -both- items and used them to allow me to teleport to that "upper world" (I forgot what it was called, but it seemed to be in space).

If it isn't too late for the deluxe version, I would strongly suggest taking into consideration any request to make the world map smaller. I would take the time to make a world map myself, but I can't guarantee my reliability, as I may end up "falling off the face of the earth" before I finish. I would like very much to see these games succeed, and I would assist in any way if requested, should that not mean an absolute revamp of the original work.
I really do appreciate the helpful criticism guys. The reason I made the dungeons so straight forward is so that I could show progression through the series, which I realize does hurt the game... but it does allow me to become more innovative as I move along in the sequels. The aim was always to make this one as primitive as possible, which I knew from the start would turn quite a few people off. But like all my games, it was just to be an experiment, one that I could build off of in subsequent games.

I agree that the world map is too big, and I tried to fix it by eliminating the random encounters on it. Since it'd take to long to make it smaller, and I'm really not so keen on the chance of making more bugs for it, I'll have to consider it a failure on my part. I scaled it down some for the sequel, but it is a very different kind of "world" map and will give a very different feel to the game.

And thanks for those bugs, Corfaisus! I'll look into them immediately!
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