Landy Land

Little Wing Guy plays Landy Land an RM2000 game made by Healy. Complete and final version.

Why should you play this game?
- Exploration is well rewarded. You can find extra skills, optional bosses and secret areas.
- No hand holding or drawn out opening scenes. You hit New Game and you’re playing straight away.
- Light hearted atmosphere and amusing dialogue.

Why should you give it a miss?
- It’s a very short game, if you’re after a meaty RPG experience look elsewhere.
- Random encounters set to a rather high rate and battles are not particularly interesting.
- It’s RTP in every sense of the word, and is in dire need of better play testing (spelling mistakes and other inconsistencies)



A lot has changed in my life in the past year and I now have to do plenty of communing on the train to London - and it’s bloody boring. So I’ve decided to become one of those idiots that sits on a busy train, takes up a whole table even though they don’t need to and pretend to do work on my laptop. I’m pretty sure the illusion is shattered when someone walks past and sees me playing Landy Land, but it makes me feel important nonetheless. I look for games on RMN I can play in short bursts and this game did the trick. You can pretty much download this game, unzip it, hit new game and be controlling the main character in under a minute total if you’re quick enough. I can’t name many RPG games that you can do that with. Landy Land is an incredibly light hearted comedy RPG, and it’s a refreshing change from what I usually gravitate towards - above all it’s pretty easy to dive into, but it doesn’t stay that way for long I’m afraid. I completed the game in roughly an hour and a half, and like you might expect for a game of this length the plot is more focused on the short and humorous character interactions. The more you examine and explore the richer the experience. There is a story here, but its paper thin. Entirely too much of the plot is referencing places and people we’ll never see or events that happened before the game began. If you read all the characters bio on the game page, there’s some meaty information that isn’t in the game at all. There are points in the game where interacting with certain objects will reveal a bit more, but definitely not enough. The main character Landy is often labelled as mischievous but all evidence is off screen and has no impact on the current events. Without spoiling anything, the main antagonist is Landy’s brother, Dandy (there’s a very imaginative naming theme if you couldn’t tell) and there’s a lot of fun to be had with that pairing as they clearly have a past. I think the game is at its strongest when they’re both on screen together, antagonising each other. It’s not overly clear to me exactly where their sibling rivalry comes from however, or what he actually hopes to achieve in the end. It’s mentioned that Dandy’s plan is “incredibly stupid even for him” and they basically gloss over why but the motivation is a cop out. I suppose in some ways that is the whole point, this is a very short and simple adventure - the fate of the world is hardly at stake. The ending compliments the tone of the game, so in that sense it worked.



I took note of a few storytelling tropes this game gracefully evades. There are no “invisible walls” so to speak. If you want to go somewhere, you go there. If you want to do something, you do it. No areas are blocked off, and you can go to new areas before you’re supposed to if you so desired. There’s no character popping up telling you can’t progress for some arbitrary reason (except for Andy if you haven’t spoken to Mandy yet, fucking hell this naming theme though). In fact, if a character does chime in to tell you that you can’t do something then you’re always faced with a prompt to listen to them, or just do it anyway - the game will let you get away with anything. When Professor Oak tells Red he can’t ride his bike, he quietly accepts it. If Professor Oak told Landy she can’t ride her bike, she would laugh in his face, whip out a motorcycle from thin air and leave him in a cloud of dust.



I didn’t enjoy the battles in this game. It didn’t take long before I actively avoided as many fights as possible as they suffer from quite a few problems. Although you have two out of your three party members from practically the very start to play with, their skills have some issues. Landy has a healing skill, and Fire Strike a single target damaging skill. Fire Strike costs 10 MP to use which is half of your MP at level 1, meaning you can use the skill twice and you’re out. I was fooled into thinking with such a high cost it would be a very powerful spell, or at the very least one shot any regular enemies - but of course, I was very wrong. It does barely any additional damage, and the MP increase from levelling is minimal, so throughout the game it’s a fairly useless skill. Landy can only learn new abilities by reading battle magazines (a feature I did like very much when taken alone) not by levelling up, so if you don’t do enough exploration you unfortunately limit yourself to two very subpar skills. Mandy; the other party member you start with is a White Mage, so she only learns healing and buffing abilities (by the traditional way of levelling up). I didn’t mind that initially but if no support is needed then you just mindlessly mash the attack button with her, and very rapidly her early abilities are outclassed by the later ones by simply being the same spell but a more powerful version of it. It certainly would have been nice to get some sort of variety so it didn’t feel like half the ability list was complete padding. The final party member is all about full magic damage, so even though each party member does fill a single role most of the skills fall into one of two categories; predicable or unnecessary.

So the skills aren’t particularly well balanced, and this carries over to general battle balance as well. The difficulty curve isn’t a steady increase; it does a fucking loop de loop and spirals out into space. I found that if you just naturally precede though the game, you’ll be about level 2 or 3 by the end of the first dungeon. Sounds reasonable am I right? This is no way near strong enough to take on the boss. You need to be at least level 6 or 7 and go back to town to stock up on some of the more expensive equipment. Since you have to grind to beat the boss, you’re then completely over levelled and absolutely annihilate anything that dares to walk in your line of sight for the rest of the game. This first boss was clearly made by the developer, but the regular enemies weren’t, so you get this strange juxtaposition where it feels like for one battle you stop playing the RTP and play a different game. Having to take the time to grind out some experience and money isn’t a problem; you’re not wasting your time because there is some optional fights in the dungeon that dish out a massive chunk of experience easily. The problem is once you have grinded, the experience for the rest of the game is effectively ruined. Grinding is fine when you want to do it; Landy Land doesn’t give you much of a choice. I’m sure there’s some god like player out there that can do a level 1 speed run, but that’s not me - and neither is it the general target audience for an RTP comedy game.



I absolutely love to sleep. Seriously it’s my favourite pass time. On the weekends I don’t get out of my pit until gone 11am. I think I love my bed more than I love my own mother. The only time I don’t like sleeping is in RPG games, I think it’s the most annoying and useless status ailment ever invented. Let’s just say that Landy Land doesn’t break the mould. The early encounters have bat enemies that put you to sleep unrelentingly. I don’t why its bats, it just is, and all that’s actually happening are elongated battles without any added risk. Oh no! I’m taking 1 HP of damage and I can’t move this turn, alert the church elders! I don’t want to criticize you for using a standard and well known RPG ailment, but status ailments in this game are not utilised to the fullest. When you get into the first dungeon all you really want to do is beat some monsters to a bloody pulp, I find a status ailment that prevents you from doing that to be a controversial choice. You could have jazzed sleep up to make it a bit more interesting too. For example, you could also lower defence while you’re afflicted so if you take a hit while you’re asleep it’s really going to hurt! That’ll make me want to cure sleep as quick as possible rather than just wait it out every time. MP in this game is expensive to cast, so I want the reward for using it to feel justified.



You’ve seen the screenshots, you know this is an RTP game, and you know whether that’s your thing or not. I’ve known people to shy away from games that use it (as sad as that is) and it mostly sticks to it throughout. I can look past the RTP because I’m such a gracious man, but what I struggle to look past is the unfortunate use of the RTP. Namely, my biggest gripe here is the music. Healy has used Field 4 for the battle theme...a sped up version of it. Just let that sink in. Sure, I have days where I’m quite partial to a bit of Cyber City, but Field 4 is the undeniably best song on the RTP. It’s not up for debate. I dance to Field 4 at 3am in my bedroom while I contemplate my life decisions - it’s perfect as it is. You don’t increase the tempo. You don’t decrease the tempo. I’m pretty sure you can get banished from RMN for just the thought of it. It’s disgusting how this generation of ruffians treat this classic ancient tune! Okay, okay! All jokes aside, I do genuinely think the music in this game is poorly implemented. I probably suffer from the fact that I am far too versed in the RTP music, so I’m more likely to notice but I finally it distractingly jarring and noticeable if you edit it. Here’s an important life lesson for all you kiddies out there; changing the tempo of a song doesn’t change the song, it only changes the tempo (what a shocking turn of events). Healy uses my precious Field 4 for the battle theme sped up - which arguably works, and then uses it for the Game over theme as well but sped right down. Decisions like that don’t make sense to me. I don’t find the RTP to be resource heavy but if you’re going to use it, you may as well take advantage of what’s available. Guess what? There are three game over themes to use in the RTP.

There are some features that I wasn’t expecting to find and ones that certainly grabbed my interest. It mainly comes down to optional content and rewards for exploration. For starters, you can pretty much examine everything. It’s usually a generic one-liner so don’t expect some deep world building (plus I don’t expect anyone would write unique text for 30 identical flower pots) but if you keep it up you’re definitely rewarded for it. I appreciate features like that. You quickly learn that battle encounters are random and not visible on the map, and as a RPG Maker staple the encounter rate is set annoyingly too high. In the first dungeon however, you’ll notice three skeleton monsters looking for a fight. The three Skeletons are technically optional bosses. They wander around the first dungeon, and you can fight them for a nice healthy helping of juicy experience and some items, or you can walk right past them and have no clue what they do or why they’ll there. I do think in the grand scheme of things it’s intended that you ideally fight them, but you don’t need to, and you don’t have to. Like a lot in this game, it’s left purely up to you. There’s really no handholding here, and it’s completely possible to miss all this extra content, optional bosses and some very helpful abilities and items. Except for the two default ones, Landy learns the rest of her abilities by finding Battle Magazines scattered around the world. Whenever you seen a book shelf you immediately want to examine it. As I said, you can examine everything, so you already know that you’re going to get either a new ability or get something interesting to read - out of everything you can interact with, bookshelves always offer something different and unique. You can tell Healy let creativity flow here, and it’s obviously going to be a lot easier to write text about a bookshelf so I’m glad this route was taken, it could have been so easy to slip into the habit of “this is a wooden book shelf”.

There’s even (at least one scene) that has dialogue that changes based on the players experience. On my original play through I noticed a NPC in the first dungeon down a path I didn’t take. At the end of the dungeon, this is referenced which prompted me to reload an earlier save and do it differently. Not only did the dialogue change in the same scene to reflect that, I also discovered a whole new area (essentially a town) I initially missed - and the game would have let me. That’s really cool. I mean, how many people are even going to notice? I’m a stickler for little details like that, and while it is incredibly likely that Healy prays every night before bed “I sure hope Little Wing Guy plays my game and finds it” I don’t think that many other people besides me would ever notice that - but that doesn’t make me wonder why it’s included, it makes me feel glad I discovered it. It doesn’t change the outcome of the scene, but it’s a little Easter egg that took minimal effort and shows that potentially different players can have a different experience. There are essentially two dungeons in the entire game, both with optional areas, and bosses. I truly loved the idea. These little flashes of brilliance promise so much more than what is delivered.

However, in a lot of ways the game feels like it was plucked right off the shelf. I didn’t open up the game in the editor, but I wouldn’t at all be surprised if everything in the database was left as the default stats and settings. I’m not going to go as far as to call the game lazy - but for a game (that I assume) is going full comedy, there’s plenty of missed opportunities to inject it’s personality into more aspects. To be fair some of that does come with the restriction of using RPG Maker 2000. For example; the description box for item and skills are pretty limiting in this engine, but based on the amount of space that was actually used, it wouldn’t have been impossible to add some extra flair with unique item names and explanations. Even the enemies are almost entirely the basic RTP sprites with the standard names and predictable attacks. One feature of RPG Maker 2000 that could have used to the creators advantage is that when you create a skill there’s a piece of text you can choose to fill in that will display a message when it’s used in battle. You can use it to describe what the enemy is doing, the characters reaction, or perhaps a quote the character is saying when they use it - Landy Land does this, but for only for a rare select few battles Healy had to create for storyline purposes. I would have liked a lot more quirky items, enemies and skills with stupid puns. The enemies that were created for this game actually feel like they were created for this game! The Skeleton generals you encounter in the tower have personality that carries both in and outside of battle. You don’t get that with “Premade RTP Slime”. Yes, the RTP has charm I won’t deny that, but ultimately I think you hit the ceiling pretty quickly. No one will remember this was a game made by Healy, we’ll simply remember it as another RTP comedy game to add to the pile - if you want that, that’s fine; but for a game released in 2016, some conscious effort to put your own stamp on it wouldn’t have gone a miss. I think comedy games like this flourish much better when the creator puts more of themselves into it.



After I completed this game I was convinced it was created for some sort of event or had some sort of imposed time limit. I searched the game page, the creator’s achievements and history to find out, but I couldn’t find any evidence that is was. I wouldn’t judge the game any differently as my enjoyment would be exactly the same regardless, but it would have given me some insight. My conclusion is that Healy made an effort to get this game out within a self imposed time frame. As a developer it’s so easy to think “I’m going to delay it, because with a bit more time I can do this...” so I massively appreciate this game exists - as so many games are doomed to wander the database forever. While I completely support that mentality, the final result is always going to be a game that suffers. While this is a complete package, the end result is like a worn hand-me-down coat from your older brother than you never wanted. Sure, you can wear this hand-me-down, but why would you? When can just wear a nice new one? ... I guess if you had a mother like mine she’d force you to wear it, but that’s beside the point.