Echoes of Aetheria

Having both played the Deadly Sin series and Skyborn I was quite excited to play EoA and picked it up on it's very release date.

Plot
The game jumps right into a big and vast city where a marriage is to take place. Our young and eager knight-hero Lucian is there to take place as a bodyguard of sorts. It all goes out of proportions when unknown kidnappers grabs the princess and escapes. Who takes up the fight against these kidnappers? That's right, our guy Lucian! On his quest he stumbles upon Ingrid, another character whom Lucian shares a dramatic past with, but she's not quite aware or doesn't remember it. From there the plot thickens as political schemes and ancient legends come true, while Luian and his crew is in the middle of all of this - It makes for an quite entertaining journey!

Characters
What harmonic has done good with his games is character development - Even so in Echoes of Aetheria. Like mentioned on the game's front page the game is not just a story about a "legendary journey to defeat an evil overlord", it's a story about people. Every single one of the characters come from different places, have different cultures, social status etc. This results in both dramatic discussions and ridiculously funny misunderstandings.

Music
The music in the game has an orchestral sound to it, which is nice at some points of the game - But I feel that maybe sometimes the game would benefit from having personal character themes.

Gameplay
This is where it gets hot! The battle system in this game is amazing! The Ogre Battle & FF Tactics inspired system works so neat for RPG Maker. It isn't a tactics game where it takes 10 minutes to finish a battle, which I personally appreciate since I don't have the patience for it! The system is neat along with the skills the characters can learn, the animations are also on point! I would really like to see more games utilize this battle-system commercial or not, this would motivate a lot of people to develop more tactic based games.

Mapping
Like in Deadly Sin & Skyborn the mapping more or less consists of biiiig maps with a lot of beautiful scenery, treasures and enemies! This is mostly a good thing, it makes it easier to prepare for a new dungeon. I really loved the Boss Key treasure thingy, that was brilliant! I must admit, the game became amazingly easy when Ingrid got her special gun from the second dungeon or so and one-hitted everything. But again - Nice concept! Good puzzles along the dungeons as well! The only thing is that it can become a drag sometimes to do the same old "dungeon buildup". I loved the battle which resembled the Fort Condor fight from FF7, which gave a different kind of dungeon perspective.

Sum
All in all this game is truly marvelous and should be a game to take inspiration from. The story, mapping, character development are all on a higher level - Which makes it understandable it's commercial. If you're interested to see how good the Rpg Maker engine can be utilized, try this one out!