Demon Legacy

One of the oldest and most celebrated projects on RMN, Demon Legacy is a favorite among many community regulars, and for good reason. However, it may be that this project shows its age these days, as many of the fine innovations that are expected of RM projects nowadays are absent. Can it withstand the test of time the way other masterpieces like A Blurred Line has? This review will contain some spoilers, so reader be warned.

In the distant past, exiled prince Galahanzer faced the insane demigod Khan, and defeated him by unleashing a dangerous and forbidden power. Naturally, this backfired spectacularly and the prince fell under the thrall of the very powers he had sought to defeat. Many years passed and Prince Galahanzer was all but forgotten by history, until a young squire named Slade stumbled upon a diary recounting the tales of the exiled prince and his trials. Unfortunately for Slade, this diary makes him the target of Shadar, a terrifying phantom, and Slade is forced to flee his homeland.

Can Slade survive the machinations of the powers that seek to use them to his own ends? What secrets does the diary hold? Just who is Shadar?....

Balance 2/5:

Battles are standard RM2k3 with no real twists thrown in, although the balancing is quite good, battles are fairly fast-paced and enemies are challenging without being overwhelming. The main problem is skills have very little variety; it is rare to find a skill that isn’t just direct damage, and elemental resistances and weaknesses tend to have very little influence, meaning basically you just always spam your strongest skill every round, as long as you can keep your MP up. This is more the fault of RM2k3 than Nightblade, though. Fortunately, the game is rather light on enemy encounters. Enemy groups are few and on-touch only, with no random fights at all. Additionally I was never forced to grind to defeat difficult enemies as boss battles tended to yield more than enough experience. Money is also plentiful meaning buying healing items is never an issue. The game is even nice enough to let you buy recovery items in most dungeons!

Level Design: 1.5/5:

Easily the worst aspect of this game, although a few dungeons offer puzzles of some sort, many areas rely on just running around hitting switches, or randomly examining every object on the screen hoping it’s a switch. Many events seem poorly programmed, particularly many on-touch events such as spikes tend to trigger more than once when activated. Many dungeons also seem to feature a very large number of empty, otherwise meaningless rooms that simply require me to walk further. Some of these rooms are pretty but they feel unnecessary.

The game also loses points for a large number of tileset passability and transparency errors that are really distracted and drag down the quality of the game. Also, on many occasions you will enter a location only to be teleported to an area facing the other direction, which is a pet peeve of mine. For example, early in the game I entered a forest traveling south, only for the entire forest to proceed northward until I exited, which put me at the south end. Am I just nitpicking? Am I the only one annoyed by this?

This category is saved somewhat by the competent town design, including a very excellently executed slum in the later half of the game that boasts excellent atmosphere.

Characters 4.5/5:

This is where the game truly shines, the entire main cast is extremely well-developed, managing to fulfill basic stereotypical roles, such as noble young squire or badass bounty hunter, without being ruled by them beyond redemption. The cast are real people with fairly real conflicts, and they don’t always get along, and it often falls on beleaguered protagonist Slade to hold his party together against common enemies.

However, while Slade may be the protagonist of this game, the real star of this show is Shadar, the mysterious, nigh-omnipotent anti-villain. More than merely an obstacle for the heroes to overcome, Shadar is deeply involved with both the main story and the history of the world, and a considerable portion of the story is devoted to developing and exploring his motives and history, slowly unraveling the intriguing mystery of just who this mysterious figure is beneath the hood. In a community where villains are often sadly lacking in soul and wit, I would easily rank Shadar as one of the most effective villains I have ever seen in an amateur project, though sadly the other villains in the game, who eventually steal the spotlight, were far less interesting. Sadly, I could not give this category a 5/5 because the dialogue is plagued by many, many spelling errors that can ruin a lot of otherwise dramatic scenes.

Storyline 2/5:

While this story features great characters, the main narrative suffers from some nearly disastrous flaws. While the pacing is excellent, the game is severely lacking in direction at certain points. For example, at the very beginning of the game I was in a castle where I was told my mother was looking for me. A thorough search of the castle yielded no mother, at which point I wandered into a random forest for no reason. Upon emerging from that forest I found I was in my hometown and that this was where my mother was the whole time. Frustrating to say the least.

Another problem is plot points tend to randomly disappear for no reason. The diary which serves as the catalyst for the game’s initial conflict is all but forgotten about an hour later and hardly mentioned again. This was particularly disappointing because reading the diary allowed me to play Prince Galahanzer’s adventures firsthand, and the missing pages of the diary hinted that finding more would allow me to play more such scenes later on. The fact that this never panned out was a major let down.

Music and Sound 2/5:

This was one of the few games I have played where the sound actually annoyed me. Not just because all the sounds are ripped form various FF games, but because the same few sound effects are used for nearly everything. The “cast a spell” sound effect is the same as the “enemy dies’ sound effect, which lead to a lot of confusion on my part when I couldn’t tell what hearing that sound meant. Sound isn’t just to be cool, it is an audio clue for the player to help them know what’s going on.

Aside from the sound, the music draws from a very, very diverse library of commercial games, most of which set the stage very well and are pleasant to listen to. This is before the time when using commercial music was taboo so I won’t be too harsh here. However, using the “Magus’ Castle” theme to do an epic pan of what is essentially Magus’ castle made me very sad.

Overall 3.5/5

This game sadly has not aged quite as well as other games from it’s era, and is further hurt by a number of annoying glitches and typos. However, the game does have a few saving graces, including it’s truly epic and memorable villain, which alone grants this game a place among the great projects of RMN.