An Earthly Inheritance is a non-traditional RPG created by Deltree (also known as Space Lizard) in RPG Maker 2000 for RMN's 2015 'Golden Age of Gam Mak" event. The project is about fifteen minutes long and serves as both a parody and a deconstruction of the RPG genre.

The player assumes the role of Matt, a poor dirt farmer who is offered a once in a lifetime chance to pull the Sword of Heroes from its resting place. Unfortunately for Matt, he is not the chosen hero; his friend Faraday is. This leaves Matt in the unenviable position of being destined to battle the forces of evil alongside Faraday and his chosen companions while receiving no recognition or respect at all for his deeds. But the mysterious entity called 'Darkness' has a fondness for rejected heroes, and he thinks Matt would make a much better hero than Faraday...



Once you join Faraday's party, you surrender most (but crucially, not all) of your free will and most of the game takes place in an extended cutscene with a few battles as you follow him around the game world. The main thrust of the game revolves around Matt's reaction to the things happening to the group, with you being able to choose his response. In general, you have the option of a meek response and a selfish response, (although a few are thrown in for comic relief) with neither choice coming across as completely 'good' or 'evil' in most cases. The few fights in the game are non-random and mostly filler, used as plot devices rather than intended to challenge the player, which is fine for a project like this.

The first half of the game serves as a sort of parody of standard RPG conventions. And while other games have touched on the whole 'you aren't the hero' story before, this is the only game I know of where you are still a member of the hero's party, forced to take his orders. Thus, the game pokes fun at the lives of the hero's sidekicks as they are forced to awkwardly stand around waiting while the hero browses for new weapons and yell at him when he forgets to buy them something. I'm sort of torn on comedy games as a whole. I think when done well they can be spectacular but in practice there have been very few comedy games on this site I can recommend (Legendary Legend and Neo Jado, though unfortunately neither one is complete at this time), as most people's idea of a comedy game is either to aggressively troll the player or make the adorable sprites say bad words and hope the audience is twelve years old. An Earthly Inheritance goes the route of making fun of genre conventions but doesn't do so in a particularly fresh way and none of the game's jokes got more than a wry smirk out of me, but there was nothing offensively bad here either.

The second half of the game is a lot more interesting. Upon arriving at the foreboding Tower, it becomes clear that Faraday and his allies are mediocre heroes at best, and only Faraday himself seems to value Matt's contributions to the team. Meanwhile, the forces of darkness whisper constantly in Matt's ear, and warn him that a terrible fate awaits him if he refuses to take destiny into his own hands; A warning that seems sincere. Throughout the tower, Matt has the choice of holding his tongue or challenging Faraday's leadership. The responses you give influence the game's climax, where Matt decides who the real hero of the story is. Ironically, it's him either way.

The game has two endings, and while I won't give away what happens, they're both surprisingly poignant in their own way. There's also the option of telling the Chosen One to shove it at the game's outset if Matt would prefer to avoid this whole hornet's nest altogether.

The game does have some severe pacing problems, as you're only given one option to save during the game and the text is filled with a lot of unnecessary pauses that make skipping the dialogue impossible. For a game designed to be played more than once, it's a problem. It even looks like the creator intended for the player to have an opportunity to save near the end of the game, but forgot to actually implement it.

While it is short and un-complex, I enjoyed this little game, and definitely think it's worth giving a playthrough if you enjoy games for their stories, or just like subversive games, though if you're looking for comedy I can't say this is a great choice. Still, as of this writing this game has fewer than 300 downloads and yet five people besides myself have written reviews for it. Clearly, this game is leaving an impression on people. As far as I'm concerned, it's definitely worth a half hour of your time.