• Add Review
  • Subscribe
  • Nominate
  • Submit Media
  • RSS
Set in an unnamed fantasy world, you control the brothers Janos and Horace Blackthorne, along with their lieutenants, Clydas Flowers, Grenn Hightower, and Taena Botley. Together, you are captains and lieutenants of Blackthorne company, a kick-ass, take no-prisoners band of unscrupulous and amoral mercenaries. Blackthorne Company conducts its business with only one rule: get the job done!

The Prototype
In this short adventure, Blackthorne Company is hired to rescue the helpless people of the town of Widow's Watch from an undead necromancer that has returned from beyond the grave to plague them with its army of walking corpses. This is a complete game, not a demo, but it can be completed in less than an hour and contains only one (very involved) battle. While just about everything in the final version is more advanced and more sophisticated, this is very much a "demo" providing a full-scale fifteen character battle.

To Arms! Episode One: Deceive, Despise, and Murder Men

The prologue and the origin episode for the Blackthorne brothers, journey back to a time before the formation of Blackthorne Company, when Janos and Horace were bonded men who had sworn fealty to the kingdom of Rydony and its ruling family, the House Lychester. Janos is the captain of the guards at the Castle Ryn, while Horace is the court wizard. But the series of deception, betrayals, and murders that follow will shatter their quiet lives of loyal service forever.

To generate the names for minor characters in To Arms!, I basically scrambled the first and last names from George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire as a kind of random name generator, since I quite like his naming conventions. The game also contains some intentional homages to Game of Thrones. To Arms! also shares some standard western fantasy tropes with ASoIaF, in the same way that 90% of other games on this site share standard jRPG tropes with each other and with most jRPGs. In general much too much has been made of this whole thing, but that's another story for another day.

For more information on To Arms! (the main series, not the prototype), please see the attached pages.

Latest Blog

Music. Music? Music!

New composer acquired...may have us an OST after all.

More details to come.

Posts

Max McGee
with sorrow down past the fence
9159
Well in the much-larger-game-with-the-same-characters I see this being a part of in my mind (maybe I will make that game, maybe not) the Stormcrows are a rival company of mercenaries and there is a lot of bad blood between them and the Blackthorne boys and girls.
I finally loaded this up and played 15 mins (which is a lot of time these days!). I managed to make a party and leave the Inn. I haven't fought anything yet.

Here are my first impressions:
-The intro area was a little too bereft of backstory. I kinda wanted to putz around town and talk to people and get a general feeling as to why I should care
-Band of the Hawk from Berserk. Also, I'm pretty Casca is one of your generals :)
-With 10 open slots and 9 class choices, it was just too easy to select 1 of each and then double up on something. That kind of ratio really didn't encourage experimentation (for me, anyway). Either need more slots or fewer class choices OR more class choices than there are slots. Both situations would have forced me to actually think about my class choices and learn about them before I just blindly made a party.
-This game is worth the download just to see the EPIC CATERPILLAR
Max McGee
with sorrow down past the fence
9159
That's an interesting point about the slots...I hadn't thought of it that way. If this becomes a full game I will probably add more unit types (and also include a gentle progression from five units to fifteen).

The guys located to the right (your lieutenants) will tell you all about your class choices by the way.

And I am a big fan of berserk although I didn't make any connection between Casca and that random faceset I stole from Fire Emblem until exactly now!
Max McGee
with sorrow down past the fence
9159
This could do with a review.
LouisCyphre
can't make a bad game if you don't finish any games
4523
This, like almost every other game in the "Strategy RPG" catagory, is mislabeled. This game is reminiscent of FFT, Tactics Ogre, and Fire Emblem only in its tone. There is no tactical movement here.

<petpeeve"HEY GUYS ITS AN RPG WITH STRATERGY SO ITS SRPG"</petpeeve>
Max McGee
with sorrow down past the fence
9159
I see your point, but I think that tactics != movement. I stand by my labeling.
Max McGee
with sorrow down past the fence
9159
In other news, w00t 100 Downloads. : )
DE
*click to edit*
1313
I played it again and completely obliterated the enemy. I lost one Healing Sister to a stray spell, but revived her immediately with a War Priest.

I took: 2x Knight, 2x Engineer, 2x Arcanon, 2x Healing Sister, 2x War Priest. With the rest of the money I bought the best heavy armor available.

Aleister Crowley had the chance to act during 4 turns AT MOST. Most of the time he was dazed due to constant barrage of Catapult fire and Shield Bash.
Max McGee
with sorrow down past the fence
9159
Gonna rebalance both those abilities in the full game.
Max McGee
with sorrow down past the fence
9159
I get the error extracting it...sometimes...but not all the time...and I have no idea why. I've had the same problem with some of my other VX games too. And I had my girlfriend try to download the game and she had the same problem unpacking.

So...I am kind of at a loss.
The RMXP & RMVX installation executables are just self-extracting CAB archives.

So, you can use any program that can extract CAB archives, like WinRar or 7-Zip, to unpack them.
Max McGee
with sorrow down past the fence
9159
Yeah I know that. But the fact that they are self-extracting means that they don't need to be manually opened in WinRAR, no? I mean it begins extracting fine, it just crashes with an error towards the end...sometimes.
That's why I suggested using WinRar to manually extract them.
To see if the crash still occurs when using a different extraction method.
Max McGee
with sorrow down past the fence
9159
gotcha. the only problem is I can't REPRODUCE the error reliably. sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't.

I will have my girlfriend and/or F-G try this, I definitely know they're experiencing the same error.
Kill two birds with one stone and make F-G your girlfriend.
LouisCyphre
can't make a bad game if you don't finish any games
4523
comment=25636
Kill two birds with one stone and make F-G your girlfriend.
Max McGee
with sorrow down past the fence
9159
I ALMOST MADE THAT JOKE WHEN I MADE THAT POST.

Well actually I was going to say (who I assure you are NOT actually the same person) but still...basically the same joke.
...but I get the credit because I said it first.