YAMATA NO OROCHI'S PROFILE

There's tons of really cool SRPG Maker games that have been made. Unfortunately, most of them seem to be in Japanese...and from what I can tell, the kinds of games that can be made in that engine are limited to Fire Emblem clones of some kind. So if you want something more along the lines of a Final Fantasy Tactics, you're out of luck.

If you're interested in seeing some examples though, here are some cool Japanese SRPG Studio games I've found:

Magical Girl: New Theory: http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/shinsetsu-mahou-shoujo/
This one's like Madoka meets Super Robot Wars, but an 80 hr strategy game.

Silvania Saga: https://www.freem.ne.jp/win/game/12097
Very competent-looking Fire Emblem clone

Dramatic Road: http://nermy.uijin.com/ref/DR.html
This one looks like a high school delinquent story w/ motorcycles in it! Pretty rad. I don't actually know if this one's made in SRPG Studio, but I wouldn't be surprised

So a thread on the Talking Time forums about great RPG Maker games that came out this year lead to somebody mentioning a certain old-school freeware JRPG called Spellsword: The Black Crown of Horgoth. I thought I'd check it out, and lo and behold it turned out to be one of the best games I've played this year.



From the three or so hours I've played, Spellsword looks to be a cross of the early NES Final Fantasy games with a bit of Dragon Quest. You choose a party of four from eight classes, wander around from dungeon to dungeon hunting down Lords of Ruin and fighting in challenging but generally fair battles. It's pretty fun, and while I'm nowhere close to completing it, it looks like there's a lot of game in here. There's also quite a bit of dialogue, but thankfully the game knows when to shut up and the quality of the dialogue itself is infinitely better than the threadbare stuff of the games Spellsword is emulating. The game looks to have been made in OHRRPGCE, but this is easily the most polished game I've seen in the engine.

Also, did you notice the lightsaber in the logo? Supposedly you unlock greater technology the more Lords of Ruin you defeat, leading to multiple class upgrades that lead to new abilities using sealed technology. I haven't gotten that far yet, but it certainly sounds like it'd be pretty interesting! At any rate I'm surprised that I've never heard of this game before, since while it's admittedly low-tech it certainly compares to any of the better RPG Maker games I've seen made in the past few years.

You can pick it up here if you're interested! If you go to the creator's site there's another game called Dungeonmen I haven't played around too much with, but looks to be an equally fascinating hybrid of Final Fantasy with Wizardry. Any thoughts on the game? Or have you stumbled across any freeware retro games recently on the net that blew you away by how good they were?

author=sbester
I'm an absolute Gundam fanatic, but the new one doesn't look so great (and 00 left a really bad taste in my mouth).

I think you're talking about Gundam AGE? Supposedly it's the best Gundam has been since Turn A, or at least that's what I've heard from the blogosphere. Gundam Unicorn is supposedly pretty good too, if you like old-school Universal Century stuff.

Also stop giving me reasons to watch Kaiji, everybody! I am too weighted down with stuff as it is. (heard it's pretty awesome though)

author=mellytan
heh i actually unfollowed tim rogers on twitter because he was marketing this game so obnoxiously as a big deal and i couldnt deal with another "hey listen hey listen hey listen ziggraut is grat" tweet.

i mean im sure its decent but jeez

Yeah, putting an article about the creation of Ziggurat on Action Button.net was probably pushing it. But posting a review of the same on Action Button as well? And another article on Insert Credit? It is pretty obnoxious, I'll give you that

author=Yellow Magic
EDIT: Whoops, I thought this was a topic about recommending iOS games, my bad. You should still all play Ghost Trick though. ;(

Recommending awesome iOS games in this thread is perfectly fine, especially if they are as quirky/awesome as Ghost Trick. Or as good or better than Ziggurat, for that matter.

Basically you are a soldier standing on a mountain. You may or may not be the last human alive. Alien robots attack you from below. You shoot them with your gun until you die.

There's more to it than that, obviously. You move your finger across the bottom of the screen to aim your gun in an arc. Hold down your finger and the gun charges, but hold it down too long and the charge reduces, forcing you to charge another shot. Charged shots go in a straight line, while weak shots are affected by gravity and fall in parabolas. Also, the heads of the robots are constantly growing and shrinking. If you hit a robot when it's head is at its largest with a charged shot, you set off a chain reaction that destroys many, many robots. Fail to do so and the robot is knocked away, but does not explode, forcing you to scramble for crowd control.

The review press has been treating it as an "infinite" game like Canabalt, but the creators claim that there's actually nine or so hours of content packed into the thing, with an actual ending and everything. Of course the game is hard enough that I will probably never see the ending in my lifetime, but whatever!

There are pretty good reviews of this game here and here. I dunno, I don't want to oversell it, but it's pretty cool, alright? The controls take a bit of getting used to, but once you figure everything out, it's like a light switch turns on in your head and it's awesome.