Hi!
Today I will review Rune Rhetoric, a game divided into two parts about two different protagonists. The central theme of this game are the runes, items that some humans can use to channel magic attacks using weapons or other objects. This RPG Maker VX Ace fantasy rpg exists only as a demo that was made by Synonysis (the author of Charon's Sabbath) and released in 2014. Yes, that's ten years ago.

In this setting we start playing as a redhead boy, Dahnzell, a normal person that find himself inside in a strange location with some strange characters that make him fight a demon! Luckily this monster is pretty weak, and Dahnzell is triumphant, but then we learn that it was all just a dream!

Dahnzell lives in a small village helping his father, an artisan, while he dreams to become a knight and a rune user warrior. Anyway his only adventures are some fetch quests, like delivering some boots to a customer and a letter to a knight, a friend of his father that lives in Reme, the capital. This is a pretty simple life, until he comes back and finds that some bandits are going to attack his hometown. Luckily a knight (and rune user) called Cesare is opposing them, so he joins forces and battles the bad guys.


Yes, you can save anytime and anywhere! Do that often as suggested here!

Then this episode ends, and we've another story with protagonist Nero, a prince and duelist of Reme that with the help of one of his soldiers decides to investigate the east part of town. He will have to use a secret exit to avoid the surveillance (strangely his palace is full of an army of maids, while all soldiers are outside to prevent him to leave the place!) and this will lead to some small quests where he'll help some less fortunate citizens, before going back to his room... but nothing will go as planned!

Rune Rhetoric is about one hour long, and pretty classic: the game uses random battle encounters plus some boss fights, the the rune of the title are basically what enables the special attacks of the characters, that power their moves using TPs. The only exception is Dahnzell, that has mana and no TP bar, but this is useless since he possess no runes, and so he has no special attacks. In the end battles aren't that difficult but I found the rate of the encounters pretty high, still escaping, if you choose this option, is apparently always successful.

Graphically I can say that the developer used the RTP assets quite well, mapping is in fact well done and after playing Charon's Sabbath I could expect no less. Anyway there are some custom made assets that do not merge so well with the rest, for the example the custom made portaits of the main protagonists (Dahnzell, Nero and Cesare) that use a simpler drawing style compared to the default RTPs. Anyway at least they're similar to theis charsets. Music is also RTP so I guess there isn't anything really important to say about this.

I should mention that the game includes many interactions and dialogues with all the characters you will find in the game, the only problem is that in the second part of the demo there are several cases in which the sentences are too long for the dialogue window, and they're cut. The game also froze once after exiting the west district from the upper tile of the east exit. Aside for these problems there was no other issue.


Sometimes in this game combat ends with a defeat that doesn't mean death!

Final Verdict
As it is, Rune Rhetoric is a decent demo, probably it would have got a 3/5 ì if it was a complete game (for being an ok RTP classic fantasy rpg and not much else), but to be honest it's clear that this was just a prologue with a sort of tutorial and a first chapter. We do not know anything of the bad guys nor about the plot or the party members except for the two playable characters. The second part is a bit meh, due to the cut sentences and a couple of secondary quests that have little sense (I mean, just "helping people" because... yes! These could have been optional secondary quests) anyway nothing bad.
So this was Rune Rhetoric, a demo of one hour or a little less. Not a lot, but it's ok.