Legends of Perren: Task of Malice

Legend of Perren - Task of Malice is a Rm2k game made for an event, the RMN 10th Anniversary Retro Game Jam. Made in 9 days, it's clearly an homage to the old glorious Rmk2000 games we all loved and played in the past.... Well at least I did that! But even if you just like retro Jrpg-style games, you surely understand what I mean.

The game begins as a story told by an old man to his nephew: It's the legend of a Reaper, a young servant of death that is the Malice of the game title. She wields the powers of of cold, wind, and darkness, and she will be the chosen hero that has to save the world collecting the Four Elemental Artifacts.
Hm this is a rather ordinary story, but the protagonist isn't a classic hero at all! And also the other party members are really bizarre: we have a slime (that cannot equip normal items or weapons, of course), an energetic battle angel with powerful attacks and a reluctant token asian healer.

This is the usual old style jrpg adventure, of course: the first task will be finding a boat to explore the large archipelago, then collect the elemental talismans, and in the meantime form a party to face the various dangerous creatures of the world.


Oh yeah, I am heartless, but being a servant of Death be happy that I just took the money!

The game used almost exclusively Rtp for charsets, facesets, music and sounds. There are some minor edita, like the protagonist face and sprite, but that's all. This would not be too bad for the most part, unfortunately maps are really basic, often too large and with little details. This is a problem that could have been solved despite the short time required to make this game by making smaller (even 50%) but more detailed and crowded maps.
Dungeons are a bit better, since probably these are just caves and tunnels, but each has also some particular puzzle or menace, be it the lava in the fire dungeon, the gate in the water dungeon or the puzzle in the earth dungeon. One is reachable only by boat, another only by questione, but al of them have infamous mimics, strong monsters disguised as chests (that luckily possess good loot!). Nothing particularly complex, but more than I imagined!

Let's speak about the gameplay, well this means combat: the setup is classical front view battleground with no battlers and classical rtp effects. Encounters are random but luckily difficulty is quite low, and if you have trouble you can easily grind at the nearest dungeon (this is useful especially when you get the last character that starts as 1st level so she's quite useless until she gets some levels).
Remember to stock healing items because the healer is the last party member that you will obtain!

Besides combat there are also some very simple activities like some little puzzles and quests (enter a serie of numbers, find the items and give them to those who asked for them and so on) and some of these are totally optional and lets you earn some particularly powerful items. Likewise there is the possibility to work as a bounty hunter to earn more money fighting and defeating some criminals, if you want.

As I wrote before game is quite easy despite the random combat encounters: you can save anywhere and you will become pretty powerful in a short time, so that you can focus on the humorous dialogues and adventures of the four strange adventurers. I liked some features, like the possibility to improve the characters in different ways: for example checking the various statues of the Goddess, or reaping the souls of the deceased (Malice only) or talking to Slimes (our friendly slime only, of course), and I also liked that each character is different both for personality and skills.


Subquest completed! See? Always help half-naked girls when you can!

The game is this: you can explore some optional areas and fight some secret bosses, but there isn't much besides the main quest. The game is linear and I admit that at a certain point, after collecting three artifacts and all the companions, I had not input on how to find the fire dungeon. I don't know, maybe I lost one important piece of information, but you have to speak with a particular person in a particular tavern, and even if he was mentioned I don't recall anyone revealing position! I almost stopped playing until by chance I spoke with this guy several times until I was able to start the final part of the game! But yes, besides this little problem I did not find any other mistake: game is rathere simple but amusing (even if there are a couple of typos like ""just north of thistown", but yes just a couple).

Verdict
This game is a comedic adventure/parody of the jrpg genre, there are funny dialogues and easy combat encounters, optional subquests and basic dungeons.
The graphic are the weakest part of the game but the rest is ok, especially since this was made in about a week. Dialogues are entertaining and the easy combat can be probably appreciated by inexperienced players. But if you are an expert player you can instead try to find and solve all the optional quests and tasks.

3.5 because of the lively humor and characters, pity for the little flaws and rough executions, this could have been probably a lot better with a two more days of work.