Mordred's Castle

Hello, knights of the round!
Today we'll storm... Mordred's Castle!
Mordred's Castle is a RPG Maker VX Ace game made by Wesasim in 2013, and the first game made by this author, that was followed by a sequel, Mordred's Castle: Quest for Time. But that's a game for another time, of course!

Mordred's Castle starts with the possibility to name the party members and the queen, but I decided to leave the original names. Queen Guinevere was kidnapped by Mordred the evil knight, and King Arthur has called his friends to go to the rescue. Simple, isn't it?


HELPPP!!! There's a huge dragon behind us! (ok the charset is little, but it's really a huge creature! And also unbeatable, I think!)

The game starts with King Arthur, Merlin the Wizard, Gawain the Knight and Nivian (I do not remember anyone with this name from the arthurian legends) at the edge of the forest before Mordred's castle. And what follows is a classic basic rpgmaker adventure: fights enemies in random encounters, bosses in non-avoidable battles, collect loot, spend money to buy equipment from a merchant and so on. Earning levels also means getting new skills, and also expect to mett other classic characters of the arthurian legends, such as Lancelot and Morgan(a), that sometimes may join the party.

The game could have been much better if the enemies would have been more balanced: some are pretty weak (and in some cases pretty cool, like the three headed dogs that can attack three times... others not so interesting, like a horizontal line made of bats of mosquitos flying in perfect formation!) others are totally annoying like the plants that constantly send your character to sleep and 99% of the time it's not possible to escape them! Better reloading the game if you find them! Another problem is the presence of some boss battles in sequence, so save and heal after each battle just to be sure! At least the name of the creatures are in some cases taken from mythology, like the Fomorians and the various fey creatures.

Concerning our characters, Arthur is a classic paladin with decent physical attacks, healing spells and holy powers, Merlin is an elemental mage (also of higher level than the other characters, because you know... he's Merlin!) with a plethora of spells, while Gawain is a brute with powerful attacks and no spells. And Nivian? A mix between these last two, a mediocre elemental mage and a mediocre warrior.
Luckily you can find powerful weapons and armors in the chest scattered around, and remember that enemies can be resistant or weak to some elements, because some of these weapons cause elemental damage (the flame sword, the dark knife and the ice staff, to name some). Mapping is ok, not bad but not really interesting or inspiring and same for sounds and music, because as you can guess this is a 100% RTP game.


Time to face the bad guy! Is this the end of the game? Well play and see, because it's the end of the review!

Final Verdict
Mordred Castle is a rather uninspired game, the dialogues are strange because characters speak in a very modern way, sometimes seeming a parody, but I noticed that the game wants to be serious! But the worst problem is probably combat balancing, bosses are extremely tough and annoying, the final battle is almost impossible, and there isn't a lot of story or enough interesting dialogues to make this game stand out from the rest of the RTP games. There are some interesting ideas, like the green dragon in the forest, but they're few moments and not enough to make this game really enjoyable!