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Elsa, a Death Knight working in the mainland, returns home to Helena's Kingdom to "save" it from monsters...But all is not as it seems.
For one, the monsters don't attack people; they just make themselves a nuisance. And they will only fight females.
Join Elsa as she sets out to defeat all the monsters on the island and discover what is it that the monsters are planning.


-Made for the VX Ace Lite cook off contest.
-Boss rush gameplay. All enemies are powerful one-time encounters.
-No grinding for items or experience. Each of the four powerful bosses unlocks a new level and items are freely replenished.
-Choose from 10 supporting party members, each with a unique skill set and mechanics.
-3 different endings and various new game unlockables..
-Humorous characters and lighthearted storyline.
-Complete game takes around two hours (Seeing only one ending. You mileage may also vary).
-Online achievements.
-This game is part of the Arum universe.


The game was made in a two week deadline for the VC Ace Lite cook off contest.
Being made within the Lite limitations, there were a lot of things we could not pull off smoothly, because there is no script support, only ten events per map, twenty maps total, and a bunch of other stuff.
Please keep that in mind when playing, since many of the things that may come to mind as odd gameplay choices are not us, but Lite being a complete evil bastard XD
Update! The recent version has been revamped a bit and we removed the ace limitations (as well as adding a few extras) so that's taken care of. Enjoy ;3

Lastly: please, please give us your feedback!
What bosses did you find harder? What was your best team? Did you get all the endings? And if so, which was your favourite?
(When talking about endings or plot events, please put the text within a spoiler and put a warning before it. They’re supposed to be a surprise ;3)

Latest Blog

The Grumpy Knight Rerelease

Very big update, let me give you the change log first:
 
New Features
  • Added a difficulty feature, the old difficulty is now Normal mode
  • The new boss is unaffected by difficulty
  • Dash toggle, no longer need to hold down Shift or equivilent
  • Added online achievements and character usage statistics


Character/Skill Changes
  • 1 new playable character, he can be recruited after you've recruited the Princess
  • Outside of battle summon bulter will restock all items fully.
  • Skills are now disabled when unusable rather than hidden
  • Elsa's rune system has been reworked
  • All runes now take 2 turns to recharge individually rather than collectively
  • E.g. Elsa has 4 Ice Runes, she uses Ice Cannon leaving her with 0. In 2 turns she will get them all
  • Blood Fountain's healing has been reduced from 100% to 60%
  • The quantities of runes on Elsa's weapons have been changed.
  • Elsa now has 5 rings she can equip to boost the power/effects of her skills.
  • The previous plot ring is now equippable.
  • Ruby's skills are no longer usable if they'll have no effect
  • Evvy's thorns can now kill enemies
  • When Evvy has a tree planted the healing bonus has been increased by 10 to 30
  • Garron's Barkspawn's passive chance has been increased to 10% (from 5%)
  • Argos's skills have been re-envisioned while sticking to the Healing Tank concept.
  • Elias's Phantom Blow skill now uses MAG instead of ATK


Boss Changes
  • Mumi now heals at the correct frequency
  • Trap chest fight is capped at 7 turns


New Game Unlockables
  • After seeing the intro once you will be given the option to skip it in future playthroughs
  • Completing the game once will let you remove Elsa from the battle party
  • Completing the game will let you start with the Shadow Scythe
  • Beating the new super boss will let you start with the ring of Death
  • Completing the game with the true ending unlocks the option to start at level 4.
  • Completing the game with the joke ending unlocks a mysterious new booster.


Minor Changes
  • Sped up animation speed
  • Popups have been changed
  • The shop guard now keeps outdated weapons in stock, you know for completionists.


Bug Fixes
  • Queen now levels you up correctly (again *shakes fist at Indrah*)


Anyway the biggest new feature is the addition of online support. You can find out more at:
http://rpgmakeronline.org/

If you're interested in the character usage statistic you can find them here:
http://rpgmakeronline.org/index.php?p=tgk
(though so far they'll be based only off tester data)
  • Completed
  • Fomar0153
    Indra
  • Scinaya (Lovely Artist)
  • RPG Maker VX Ace
  • RPG
  • 02/18/2013 01:04 AM
  • 05/14/2021 11:57 AM
  • 02/17/2013
  • 217927
  • 58
  • 3233

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Hi, even more late to the party. As I said on the Sunken Spire page, I played this afterwards.

Gameplay...

...was overall pretty fun, and I liked the focus on singular encounters, but like Sunken Spire it was really easy and unbalanced, even on hard mode. Evvy and Alan were particularly gamebreaking. Evvy was immensely useful because indirect healing and damage seem like the most effective strategies; there's nothing enemies can really do to counter them, and they continue working even if everyone's incapacitated. (Elias is also useful because of this.) If you set up enough thorns, all you have to do is wait and the enemy will die eventually. Meanwhile Alan is practically invincible if he guards every turn, and at level 2 he can keep attacking even if he does that. Then at level 3 he gets amazing offense too! I honestly don't see how the hard mode final boss is possible without him.

Everyone else was pretty meh. I was sentimental towards Tira Misu since she was the first party member I got, but her need to replenish her stocks slows her down too much and she's way too fragile to make up for it. Ruby just doesn't seem very useful in general because she burns out too quickly and recharges too slowly, which runs counter to a system that incentivizes building up EX before unleashing strong attacks. Argos is in the wrong game. I never even used the royals, though Albert might be a possible substitute for Alan if you need defense I guess? Victoria just seems like a poor man's Elias, though, since her indirect damage can't accumulate. Garron is the only other one who's really decent and I used him a few times (that stun attack is particularly good), but with only three party slots he just can't compete with Evvy, Elias, and Alan.

The EX system was...hm. I presume you did it to discourage turtling and accelerate the pace of combat, which I'm generally in favor of, but I worry you might have overdone it. It kind of turns battles into a binary thing; everyone grows in power so quickly that either the fight is over almost as soon as it begins, or you're screwed because the enemies will oneshot you before you can strike back by virtue of their having more health. And there's no way to manage it outside of Carmen and Garron, and Carmen's skill never seemed to work for me. I think this would have worked better if you didn't have healing and gave the heroes comparable hit points to the monsters, or if the values didn't climb quite so fast. Or if you weren't constrained by the godawful default battle system and players could actually react to attacks properly instead of choosing someone to heal at random and praying they picked right grharaghgh why did Enterbrain ever think that was a good idea.

The zombie dragon was clever, though. I love it when RPGs do stuff that lets you use the full party like that. Even still, I beat him on hard mode before he was even halfway through my reserves.


Storywise:
Kiiiinda uncomfortable that you used the bog-standard "ice queen who thinks she's independent but finds ~true love~ after all" cliche. But, despite the trope's inherent issues, I think you handled it well: The focus is solidly on it being her choice, you have a man in the same situation, and it only happens if the player actually works towards a believable relationship rather than housewifery being her destiny. Plus her career still takes precedence over her relationship, making Gideon more of a "bonus prize", which is good because that's usually how the gender-flipped version works. But...it's still pretty awkward to have the whole story be about people trying to force her into marriage, her expressing disgust at the idea, and then realizing that's what she wants anyway. I get that people like true love stories and all, but as an aromantic person it's just unrelatable and cliche to me, no matter how technically well-written.

Elsa's character was also a lot more shallow than she was in Sunken Spire, even if that does make sense. In SS I felt she had more nuance to her; she was still the boisterous tough guy with a soft side, but I thought she was more confident and comfortable with herself -- just more mature in general, and having her soft side be motherly rather than romantic was a sensible outgrowth of that that's a bit different that what we normally see in the archetype. Here, her snarky side is just so incredibly over-the-top that she sounds like a child trying to compensate for her insecurities, which makes the contrast with her blushing girlfriend side even starker and weirder, like it's a completely different side of her rather than a logical facet of her personality. Well...the date scenes were actually pretty good, but the resolution where they're both blushing daintily and stumbling over their words was a bit much. It's possible that was the point, and taken together with SS it does make sense as a character progression, but I still felt she was weaker here.

Also, bratty princess + wise prince is similarly awkward, but I suppose it is counterbalanced by idiot king/competent queen. Still, might have worked better if Elias was a woman, to avoid the "willful emotional girl has to be kept in line by a man" implication, even if it was slight. (I did love the contrast in their equipment descriptions, though.)


But overall, pretty good. I liked the shadow siblings, they were cute. Fighting them all at once for the penultimate boss was cool, and one of the few difficult fights in the game (even though Moumi doesn't work very well in a group).

I noticed quite a few typos, though, as well as a few lines that went over the message box length. The game could have benefited from more proofreading, but given that it was a quick contest entry I can understand some sloppiness. The most awkward was probably "A potato dies horrible" in the result message for the peel skill.

Edit: Hid things behind spoiler boxes to mitigate the walls of text.
I know we rereleased the Grumpy Knight but other than replacing a few evented systems with scripted versions (damage popups) and adding the achievement script we tried to stay true to the contest vision of the game (RPG Maker Lite contest, bunch of restrictions and no scripts) hence why it's the default battle system among other things. The characters weren't created equal, some are more flavour than serious but you should largely be able to get through normal with any characters you like.

The Zombie Dragon boss fight is one of my favourites it has always been fun to have bosses use the games systems in unusual ways (see also the Psychic Tree from In Search of Freedom).

Glad you enjoyed it and thanks for the feedback.
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