Loremaster: Rise of Kalibur

Little Wing Guy plays Loremaster: The Rise of Kalibur an Rm2k3 game made by Immortal Dreamer. Demo Version 1.

Why should you play this game?
- Great pacing and a good variety of different areas are explored.
- Battles are balanced quite well and the encounter rate is just right.
- The download is very small and the games boasts original music!

Why should you give it a miss?
- Nothing new to see here, in both gameplay and plot.
- The game just feels lazy, cutscenes are completely blunt or not present.
- Most places are bland with no interesting NPCs.

Review:

In Loremaster you play as the protagonist Jeremy and his best friend Steff. I don’t know what the main storyline is exactly. The demo is quite short and you are treated to far more dungeon time than you are talking to NPCs in towns or between party members. From what I can gather, a man named The Master wants to over throw the king of the land so he can rule it himself. He’s currently attacking the city of Secile, the destination of our heroes, but rather funnily, none of the neighbouring towns or our heroes seem to care all that much. A lot of this feels like familiar territory, it‘s a bit cliché and the creator knows it. The Master is only present in the laughably bad opening scene, the dialogue was fine but the Master just stands there facing a chair the entire time, it‘s weird. The attitude of both of our heroes throughout is: “We’ll talk about it later”. Even when they reach a safe place to finally talk things over, guess what? They’ll talk about it later! Both of our characters seem like they’ve got some sort of personality in them, but they don’t voice they’re feelings strong enough or the cutscene wants to end before they get show us who they are. Jeremy appears more relaxed and perhaps a bit lazy, whereas Steff is the best friend type, dragged along; probably secretly loving the protagonist until some sort of princess comes into the mix to form a love triangle scenario. Most of the time it doesn’t matter who is talking, a point is usually established and that’s all. The game never goes out of it’s what to say: “The world works like this and Steff hates this”.

The most redeemable feature is the general pacing. You’re entire journey moves along well and you’re on the world map wondering around before you know it. No area over stays it’s welcome and just before the demo ends, it looks like an interesting event is about to unfold.



However, most of the places in the demo are nothing special in terms of design and aesthetics. The first town is great, there are people and trees dotted around, houses look like houses and nothing is to close or far away from each other. Interiors are also well made with a couple of treasure chests hidden around but nearly every single door you come across is locked, which makes me very sad, why have them there in the first place? NPCs in the towns are utter rubbish “Hello how are you?” asks one NPC, another NPC is asleep. Mind blowing. For the purpose of the review I did speak to every single one I came across and they are all a massive waste of an opportunity. Try and shove a bit of information in there man! Give us an item or perhaps Jeremy could respond, or make them interactive in some way. I’m not asking for all of them to do be amazing, just give me something worth doing other than buy items and leave. When you get to the world map and beyond, nothing is ugly or horrid to look at here either, but everything is rather open, bland and unimpressive, there are lots of long straight walls in natural areas and the creator is way too afraid to use grass and dirt tiles, in some places there are big spaces of absolutely nothing. Dungeons seem to lack any atmosphere whatsoever, and for graphic junkies there’s nothing cool added. No sound effects, no overlays, no tints and no nature. These are not incredibly important and I don’t want to sound like the graphic whore I am, but maybe there could be something going on to catch our eye instead of another walk in generic cave #1.

However, it’s not all bad. The music choices are appropriate and I believe there are some original tunes in there too. The battle backgrounds are made from the actual chipset of the dungeon, rather than just some picture and the battle characters are actually editted from the character sets and they animate very nicely (except for Steff’s WTF victory pose, I‘ll give you £10 if you can tell me what she’s doing). It shows clear effort and both a plus in my book. There’s a couple of times where you need to jump across bridges and a neat little indictor pops up in the corner showing you when you can do it, when games don’t do this I’ve been stupid enough to get stuck in what looks like a dead end.

Battles in this game are okay, they definitely keep your attention. Enemies in the first cave dungeon are balanced just right so that you’ll need to occasionally take a more defensive approach, you won‘t be scratching your head but one things for sure, there’s no auto-battle here. You’ll get through maybe two battles before you have to start taking control. Treasure chests give appropriate items, which is great because annoyingly there is no shop in the first town, you must survive on what you find. There’s a forest directly after the cave which is a walk in the park in comparison though, it’s a rather small dungeon but it does have new groups of enemies which unfortunately pose no threat for your level 5+ party. Most enemies use standard damage attacks as do you, I received a few items and skills for curing status abnormalities but as far as I could tell the only enemy to inflict anything upon me was the boss, who only inflicted Mute. Battles didn’t grab my attention immediately though. Skills are learnt only by levelling up, Jeremy starts with one incredibly basic “stronger that standard attack” skill. Steff doesn’t get her first healing spell until a level up, and she never receives a damage or status inflicting spell throughout the demo. She does have a analyze ability but it is so lazily done (showing only HP) and glitches, scanning multiple times if you try to use it, it’s not worth wasting a turn. Finally, just to point out, battles are random encounters, nothing wrong with that in my book especially if it’s set on a lower encounter rate, which is it; so battles were always welcomed.

Oh and I have to mention this. For some reason, that I cannot fathom, Steff’s weapon of choice is a shovel. There’s no hint of her being a gardener, she’s shows no interest in gardening; there’s no rhyme or reason why she‘d choose that to go on an big magic and danger-filled adventure! Maybe they’ll dig toilet trenches with it when they’re camping in the woods, or maybe Jeremy can dig her a grave once she is mauled to death after she attempts to defend herself with a garden shovel of all things! Despite her retarded thought process, she’s a surprising good asset to the party. She’s got some attack power in her, which at least stops her from being generic healer girl, although she does learn only white magic.



There was a couple of noteworthy ideas floating about in the game. Unfortunately most are not implemented well at all. The names of people and places are highlighted in a different colour to catch your eye, and it does, names stick in your head; and I always knew what they were referring to. However it wasn’t always necessary. Every NPC in the first village would talk like this. “Hello Jeremy! How’s your mother Jeremy!?” In some cutscenes, messages boxes close on their own, I don’t recall one closing before I could read everything but I want cutscenes to move at my pace. In other cutscenes you can’t close the message box until a few seconds have passed. Consistency please? I can’t see how any of it was practical in any sense of the word.

One of my biggest gripes with the game was how lazy it felt at times. I don’t know what it was exactly, but it seemed that the creator wanted to move the pace along swiftly and left things out, places that could and should have had cutscenes or more attention, did not. It just made the game feel lazy. For example, the first dungeon of the game has zero dialogue or exchanges between our two new characters, until the boss fight right at the end and it‘s very brief too. At one point there’s a dark hole in the ground you have to jump down in order to continue on, and Steff doesn’t even pop out to say anything, this clearly could be dangerous and they don’t discuss it. There’s a little animation (which is really cool actually) where they are falling fast and far down this hole but there’s no scream or “this is crazy Jeremy”, they just fall, quietly. At this early point in the game we have absolutely nothing to go on plot-wise, except our two characters, who talk like this:

“What was that thing?”
“I don’t know, we have to hurry”
“Ok”

“Wow, what is this place? It’s huge.”
“I’m tired, be quiet”
“Fine”

There’s also a rock pushing puzzle, and I use the term puzzle loosely. It’s like no thought went into it at all, he just copy-pasted a bunch of rocks around and called it a day. On the way back through the rock puzzle, there’s no way to get through without being forced to push one rock through a singe file hallway. Even when you approach the puzzle, there’s no “we can push these rocks” cutscene triggered, even though the same rock sprites were already littered around the cave in areas before, but could not be pushed. A final complaint I had with the game was save points. Now the game doesn’t let you save anywhere, which is not unusual for an RPG, but bizarrely you cannot save on the world map and there are not as many save points as I would have hoped, they’re put in the correct places (e.g. before a boss fight) but I felt like one or two more could have been placed, I like to save often, so I could be alone on that though.

Conclusion:

It’s hard to recommend this game. It doesn’t really excel in any one area, it’s got a lot of faults and at times it feels really lazy and rushed. A few things stand out and prevent it from being a total disaster, but in it’s current state; I’d say don’t bother and wait for the next release if there ever is one. It’s irritating how easily this game could be improved though, nothing needs to be completely re-made and, everything implemented in this game can be great with a bit of time and energy. This project will be great if you want it to be.

SCORE NOT AVAILABLE, AS IT IS ONLY A DEMO.