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An original post apocalyptic adventure!

Burning Grail is a rather original use of the Rpgmaker2003 engine:
It's a linear adventure with an interesting combat system and a story that borrows quite a bit from Fallout, anyway let's begin:

The Good
First, I liked the graphics used: it's the typical Rmk styled charsets but there are lot of edits and little animations, in combat they also wield and use different weapons and mapping is good even if... more on this on the "ok" part.
Graphics are coherent and well rapresent the post-apocalyptic enviroments. You won't find field of flowers or things out of place, and that's good considering that it's hard finding the best resources when the Rmk tilesets were created for fantasy and sci-fi settings. Well maybe I'd have made the mutants a bit more "monstrous" instead of having them just as green men, but that's me!
Music is mainly ripped, but the Jagged Alliance 2 tune is perfect for this kind of setting and Luis Armstrong too!).

I liked the gameplay, and I'm talking about combat, of course.
Combat is side view, with sprites that use the same charsets of the rest of the game (so no huge enemy sprites and/or the old 1st person layout) but with two interesting gimmicks: the first is that when we attack we spend one weapon bullet (causing damage, some are obviously more powerful than others, even if the damage is randomized, but clearly a bazooka does always more damage than a handgun!) or we attack unarmed if you do not want to spare some ammo (but damage is low in this case). Since you will also find medikits and other healing and revive items, clearly the idea is to spend wisely the resources, since there are no shops and everything will be scavenged or found on the bodies of the opponents.


Bang! You are dead!

The second interesting thing is that you do not level up, instead you earn skill points (everyone in the party gets the same quantity) that can be used to increase their resistance to damage, life points, unarmed damage, speed, and so on. You can for example specialize one of the character in healing, and make him your medic (in fact he can be used to spend the medikits to heal others). The only problem in this is that the game is rather short, so you won't have many possibilities but it's ok... and since I said ok...

The Ok
As I just said the game is rather short but it's not bad. Well some part of the story (that I won't spoil) are interesting, and some revelations are good, others were a bit... forced!

The second thing is that there's not great exploration, not only the game is linear, but you also move from one screen to the other: each screen gives you the exits and the items you can interact with, so you can't move around freely. But yeah, it's ok, I won't complain even if I do not know if everyone will like this limitations.

Regarding the difficulty I found Easy to be' really easy instead, while Normal was instead hard. Especially fighting bosses.

A last thing that I say was "ok" were the other gameplay parts like the puzzle or the diving section. Nothing bad or difficult, but not exceptional too (I would have made the car move a bit faster). I admit that I hoped they were short since I was yearning for more combat and dialogues! But yes... the game is short.


The terrible Ogregun is here!

The Bad
Well the game is very short (and fast)! And it's so linear that you probabily won't play it more than once. This is one problem. The second is that the ending is... well ok, I found some choices a bit odd. No well, ridiculous, but hey that's my opinion, clearly. In the end there are just few little flaws in this game and they do not detract from the enjoyment, so nothing much.

The Verdict
The Burning Grail is an interesting experiment: while I am not too found of linearity and lack of exploration and I missed the possibility to explore every map looking for supplies and interactive items, at the same time I appreciated a lot the idea of making something new and different from the usual Jrpg.

So the vote is a 4 for this game: short, but original and well done!