The Blight

Hellooooo, adventurers!
What's The Blight? A complete game made by the brazilian developer Monkeydesu with RPG Maker VX Ace, and it is the first game from this author, released in 2013. This game is an interesting twist on your typical rpgmaker game.

In The Blight we start selecting the difficulty that will determine how much time we have to stop the Blight. Then we start naming our alter ego, the predestined knight hero (default name: Marcus) that has to save the Kingdom of Aertietia that every fifty years has to face... the Blight! This is the epitome of evil and the protagonist's mission is to create a powerful squad that will defeat this menace.


Ok, the Blight is The Enemy, still the lands are dangerous, especially if travelling alone! That's why you need party members!

Now, do not expect a classic rpgmaker game since The Blight plays more like a boardgame: there are random variables that determine the events that happen, but this is not all: time is running out! The difficulty in fact determines the number of days we have to prepare and look for heroes, and every day is made of three turns and each activity need to spend a turn: fighting a battle, visiting a city district, visiting the Tree of Life (that's a restore point, like the inns in classic rpgmaker games, except that's free) and so on.

The characters you can find scattered around the world are several (I remember finding seven different allies) and each starts with a skill and gets another at level 10, but that's it since this is a timed minigame, not a full fledged rpg. These heroes have also a very simple background that explain why the propose to follow Marcus (that can recruit them or refuse), but do not expect them to be little more than archetypes!

Visually the game is simple but well done: all assets are RTPs (from tilesets to monsters, charsets and facesets) but despite the average look of these assets you may have already seen one thousand times mapping is well done, even if there are no dungeons in the traditional sense, because the action takes place on the game board, that is the world map (that's the classical fantasy world with various continents and islands, desert and snowy areas) with all its visitable points of interest (but remember that visiting locations cost turns!). That's it.


To save the world you have to explore it! Let's sail to unknown lands!

Final Verdict
I'm impressed because for a first game The Blight is quite interesting and original: while the pictures may let you think that this is a classic, average rpgmaker game, it's not! The timed mini-adventure with random events is a pleasing little game different from many others you may have played, because it takes some old classic rpg features (like battles and wandering the main map) but uses them in a different way. That's clever, clearly it also shows that this is a first game since some more refinement (still there are not great flaws or problems of note) and additions could have made this game into a classic, anyway it's still a pleasant surprise. Well done!