End of Legends

End of Legends reminds me a lot of the games people were making eight to ten years ago. there are odd spelling, text spacing, formatting, spriting and mapping mistakes, and character sets and facesets are jarringly mismatched from a bewildering variety of completely incompatible styles.

however the game seems to have an interesting story, decent mechanics, and its heart in the right place. the creator just needs to slow down and focus on polish, presentation, and production values. i don't expect these things to be perfect, but these days, i do expect better. even by the standards of a decade ago, this game is kind of a mess.

Story & Characters
this game has a rather unique setting, somewhere between the Victorian industrial revolution and the Great War, only with fantasy elements. in the midst of this is something called the Scar, a psychically poisoned, bleak strip of Lovecraftian country that sends everything in it back different: monstrous, undead, insane, or worse. corrupted.

this game seems to have two sets of protagonists, although that may be an illusion caused by the fact that this is a super early demo. you begin as bumbling army scouts biggs and wedge (a final fantasy referencing star wars reference that i'm not sure if i find more charming or tiresome at this point). these characters and their whole shtick and identity is lifted right from another game so it's not terribly original.

without warning and with an out-of-place seeming scrap of narration you're shifted to the young, budding engineer Jalen who lives in the most clean and cheerful Victorian-era boarding house ever. (seriously, do your research, those places were squalid and horrible.) Jalen wants to be an artificier, is sent out by his mom to do some errands for his uncle, meets his matching female childhood friend jalyn, encounters a town square demonstration that foreshadows the upcoming plot, and just generally does very typical "this is the beginning of a JRPG" standard boilerplate stuff. it's all reasonably well executed (exceptions noted below!) and interesting, it just has a strong "i've seen this before" vibe.

then you're switched back to biggs and wedge who meet up with and escort a nameless but high-ranking Captain on her (his?) mission into the perilous scar. the character looked a few taxing random battles later, the demo ends.

Presentation/Pizzazz
really just terrible. every cardinal sin of RPG making is present here, sullying this game's panache. we've got...

* major tileset errors (ceilings used in place of walls, etc.)
* floating pixel sprite errors, like unintended dots dancing above character's heads
* horribly, jarringly mismatched character sets from every possible style, including theodore, RTP, Mack, FF6, several others I didn't even recognize, and some own style thrown in
* horribly jarringly mismatched face sets, including awkwardly MS-paint drawn own style main characters contrasted with supporting characters that are shrunk-down, lo-res screencaps from anime.
* the text is spaced like haiku for some reason, as though the creator was afraid the line break cutoff was
* there's a fair amount of typos and spelling mistakes
* panorama images used as backgrounds look desaturated and stretched because they are both of these things
* battlers use the butt-ugly 2k3 rtp style while enemy monsters use completely different styles--generally higher detail but lower resolution, with ugly, ragged white borders around them.
* menu sounds that are shrill and irritating
* character names ripped straight from final fantasy
* inconsistent, vague, and sloppy item descriptions in the menu

the sound design is consistently less bad than the graphics, and i do have one unabashedly positive thing to say about this category. the battle music was both very high quality and very well suited to this game. if you're only going to get one thing right, that's a good thing for it to be. i'd say the battle music is just about perfect.

Substance & Gameplay
this is where this game actually shines just a little bit. it takes a while to get to the battles and once you get to them you're 90% done with what amounts to a very short demo. however, the creator managed to make a 2k3 battle system that wasn't terribly, obnoxiously, stupidly broken off the bat, and that was a good thing. it also required some degree of strategy beyond space bar mashing, which i like.

basically, you only control the Captain and biggs and wedge (where's Jesse!?) are stronger attackers with muskets who are on autopilot. so literally the Captain never fires a shot if you're playing right, she just yells orders at and occasionally heals the other two. this may sound silly, but it works pretty well. the only problem is that the "TAKE AIM!" order is better than the rest, since it doubles agility. as a pro tip to the creator, agility doesn't just increase accuracy, it is the undisputed "king stat" in rm2k3, so doubling it makes you go twice as fast. having twice as many turns is way more important than marginally increased attack or defense, and certainly more important than increased musket accuracy, which was the stated purpose of the skill. in effect it's more "HASTAGGGGAAAAA" than "take aim".

healing item names and flavor text were appropriate to the setting and the "steampunk" (which had plenty of steam but very little punk)" milieu. i approve.

i know reload systems in 2k3 are tricky, but i think it would be cool if muskets did even more damage, but biggs/wedge had to reload after each shot. i admit it would be hard to event.

the battles seemed a bit punishing, and more health/more healing items/lowered enemy damage would all be appreciated. and if you could either increase the minimum number of steps needed to get in a random battle SUBSTANTIALLY or switch to on-touch encounters, that would be an awesome change too. frequent random battles suck.

summation
as a game, End of Legends seems young, like it's either made by a young creator or a relative neophyte to teh rpg maks. it's got a pretty cool premise and story, it's just everything else that needs some work.

i give this a 2.25 Star score. the current review system does not allow this, so i will round up to 2.5 stars.

play this, give the creator your thoughts, see if they line up with mine.