Red Moon: Remixed

Intro

"Red Moon: Remixed" is a RPG that was being developed by pantsman9 that was meant to be an improved version of one of his earliest games "Red Moon". Unfortunately this attempt at a recreation died not once but twice. The first attempt was released as part of the Release Something! IV event. An event so old that it predates the start of the past event list. Though, I suppose if I go digging around through the forums I could find a little more about it, but I assume it was similar to other release something events where people asked to release anything from a game to new music.

Apparently pantsman9 became dissatisfied with that attempt at recreating one of his early projects and released a small alpha demo for a new rebuild attempt in July of 2009, but I don't think that version is even worth talking about since it has so little content to explore that I question why pantsman9 even released it. Seriously the latest build for this remake is a demo with just a handful of maps you can explore that is utterly devoid of NPCs or enemies to fight. In fact, the alpha build is so early in development that only the title screen has any music and it's a track that's from the RTP for RPG Maker 2003.

Story

You play as Aero, a mage, whose village gets wiped out right at the start of the game by a strange beast. There are a few survivors and a pair of them to decide to join Aero in asking the king what can be done about this beast that calls forth unholy lightning. Unfortunately the king really doesn't have any immediate plans for dealing with this threat and suggests Aero and company might be able to take it out if they collect a bunch of elemental orbs first. So the party sets out to collect the first of these orbs in a fiery cave to the North of the king's castle.

A task made a bit more difficult than necessary in my opinion since the party starts out super poor and can't afford any armor or weapon upgrades before beginning this task. A design choice that seems really odd, but thankfully the person testing our worthiness at the cave decides to be generous by gifting the player with a few water scrolls to deal with the guard dog of the underworld.

Though after you've obtained the first orb there is little left to do beyond ask the king for your next task, but that task is impossible to carry out since the area your directed towards hasn't been completed yet and never will be.

Gameplay

Combat wise the game features the default combat system that comes with RPG Maker 2003. In fact, the only real surprise here is that only one of your starting characters has access to a spell and that's your cleric. And as previously mentioned we begin this adventure with zero coins to our name. Thankfully this isn't as big of a deal as it could be since the only boss fight in this game includes a bit where the player is given a pair of water scrolls for free in order to make the fight easier. Though, I still recommend healing before the fight since the cerberus doles out way more damage than you can heal.

Outside of the boss battle you'll mostly be fighting slimes, but you'll sometimes run into underlings that are more powerful than the game's only boss on the world map. If that happens my recommendation is to simply run away since there's no point in spending a bunch of time on throwing ineffective punches and kicks at them.

Graphics

Graphically the game is mostly RTP with a few assets that appear to be lifted from official games or other sources. And while there isn't anything inherently wrong with the default assets. They really aren't go to wow or amaze anyone either.



On the other hand the decision to use two different colors of ceiling tiles on this roof is giving me a headache.

Sound

In terms of background music and sound effects the game relies entirely upon the RTP for RPG Maker 2003. And much like the graphical parts of that resource package. There isn't anything inherently wrong with those sound tracks or sound effects, but anyone whose spent a lot of time playing old school RPG Maker 2003 games will probably find the RTP boring to listen to since they've heard it way too much over the years.

Conclusion

In all honesty there isn't much reason to check out either of these demos in my opinion. This is partially because neither of these demos will probably go through the process of becoming fully realized games. And partially because there isn't anything of particular interest in either demo in my opinion that would warrant checking it out. At least "Razor City Frenzy -Protologue-" by cachi01 featured an original combat system. These demos in comparison are utterly lacking in terms of anything unique that would serve as inspiration for another project.