Red Moon

Hello adventurers!
We're back with another complete old Rpgmaker 2003 adventure rpg game made by Pantsman9 (that in the game is called MR. Heneger, but uhm ok) and released complete in 2007. In 2008 and 2009 there was the release of a new version called Red Moon: Remixed, that despite many similitudes it just exist as a demo and has its own page. Pantsman9 also did some other games, but I only pleayed this one.

The game starts in an odd way: Geo is a mage that lives inside a tiny village (three houses) when a demon arrives and says something about his sister before destroying everything and apparently killing lots of peasants, even if later there are no bodies and even more peasants around. An old man suggest Geo to warn the kind and he's joined by Alissa the Healer, his jealous girlfriend and Fanji the Ninja.
The king says that he's too old to help him, but at least he tells Geo that the demon, Malvice, can be defeated using the Four Stones of Power.


Uh, too late! You already start reading this review so you have to finish reading! Then you can still avoid playing the game, of course!

Aaaaand so this is the game: a classic jrpg adventure with a hero that has to search the Stones of Power, exploring the world, fighting enemies in random battles and so on. Classic rpgmaker adventure with a party of four heroes (that start with three characters) that use the classic rpgmaker 2003 combat system with side view and battlers. Nothing new, so expect grinding and exploting glitches like Alissa's "Charge" skill that lets you heal for free, and the 999999 gold reward! En error of course, not a problematic game breaking error, but a welcomed one! Oh and there are some optional sidequests but some have no reward at all so I wonder what's the point of doing them!

Visually the game is a classic RTP-only game. Now, I've nothing against those kind of rpgmaker jrpg adventures, some of them were funny and well made (the Sword and the Fish for example). Others were badly made, but in some cases, take for example Lovely Sword, they're obviously silly parodies that have some reedeming qualities. Unfortunately Red Moon is simply bad: mapping id lazily made, I mean just look at the throne room. Places are huge and empty (put SOMETHING inside these rooms dammit! It's worse than Nightmare in the Elven World!), and probably the best location is the village in the intro, that's not even very good. Well I liked the visual effects used, but that's it.

Then the story, that unfortunately a series of uninspired clichè, party members but npcs in general are just automatons made of pixels that aren't exactly memorable, and I'm sure the player will try to finish the game as soon as possible, not that the ending will be really rewarding, but still this is a complete game where you can reach the ending with some effort, so at least you can finish what you started.


Oh now we finally got the fourth party member... does the game improve? Errrrrr...

Final Verdict
Ok, it's my fault, I saw this game and I tried it hoping it had something in common with other apparently boring and badly mapped jrpgs. But today I wasn't lucky and in fact this game it's a really bland and boring adventure. On the other hand, this isn't really terrible like others I played, I did not find bugs (or maybe I just missed them)... it's playable, but amateurish and forgettable since you won't miss a cool epic story or a nicely finely tuned gameplay.