I'll post the best Rpg maker game of all time where both its sales & its ratings reflect it.
SYMPHONY OF WAR
It's my favorite and it barely even looks or feels like a rmaker game.
The gameplay itself feels more like a hybrid of Fire Emblem & Ogre Battle with the gameplay being much closer
to Ogre Battle, than even that of Unicorn Overlord. Which didn't play much like Ogre Battle at all. Overlord basically created its own genre and nothing else within the gaming landscape plays anything like Unicorn Overlord. The coliseum alone had me playing that game for hundreds of hours after beating it.
Unicorn Overlord was my fave game of last year though. I bought the special edition on Switch, have about 500 hours in it and I plan to eventually buy the PS5 version.
Symphony of War actually takes place in the same shared setting of Legacies of Dondoran & Deadly Sin
Symphony of War's aggro system is based off of the combat system that he designed for Deadly Sin except in SOW, the aggro system is applied to the Fire Emblem style battle map, rather than the individual combat skirmishes which have their own rule system that's based off of the formation system from Ogre battle but it's much more in depth than the formation systems used in the Ogre games.
I never played the original Deadly Sin but I can vouch for Deadly Sin 2
(I played it way back when it was free, before it was ever on Steam.) if you just want to play a more traditonal Jrpg instead of the strategy wargame Symphony of War.
DS2 is prob the closest I've seen to a Final Fantasy 6 style rpg made with rpg maker.
Great art & great music but zero replay value. Symphony of War has great aart & music but also has near infinite replay value if you buy the dlc which allows you to toggle the difficulty settings into your own customized mode.
You can fight against mirror versions of yourselves and infinity zombie armies which completely changes how the game is played. The story stays the same no matter what but the actual play mechanics are almost as varied as a fighting game due to how the difficulty sliders & toggles work.
What's funny about Dancing Dragon games, is that this guy was basically a reject among the rpg maker community. A lot of that community's most influential members (like that one dude who made those shitty but popular wannabe Silent Hill rpg maker games. He was the main guy insulting Dancing Dragon when I've never seen a game of that Silent Hill dude's that didn't delve within their subject beyond surface level. He made a game called Eldritch and it was about as puddle deep into Lovecraft as your typical LLovecraf vidya gaem.) would constantly insult Dancing Dragon's games as generic or mediocre that only stand out because of the gfx & music. He always gets clowned on for his writing style, but I really don't see anything wrong with the way he writes. He just has a very Christian-influenced writing style which you don't really see much of in the modern era so imo his writing style stands out for being one of the few who still bases their writing off of a Christian-Catholic Good vs Evil mindset. His plots revolve around keeping the faith in the Gods no matter how much it looks like that evil is winning.
Considering that his games are always fantasy based, I think its only fitting that most of his games are written around some 1980s perception of Christianity that just freely mixes christcuck doctrines into one giant slop (even the title of the game implies a connection to Book of Enoch but it really has nothing to do with Book of Enoch.) that makes for an interesting game.
It's funny to me because who the fuck even are his critics? I can't even remember their names but I do recall seeing them talk trash to him all the time but you look at Dancing Dragon now.
I don't think anyone else has made a Rpg Maker game on the level of popularity that Dancing Dragon has, nor has anyone made one as high quality as Symphony of War.
EDIT: I just figured it out. One of Dancing Dragon's main critics was the guy who made Backstage.
Backstage recently came to steam last year.
Backstage is another one of those games that was probably good during its era, but I've always hated it.
It has this weird auto combat system and the story delves deep into that psychological analytical
horror bullshit that's inspired by Silent Hill 2.
His other game at his Itchio page, "Lunar Tear" looks legit good though. I don't know why he didn't decide to sell that on Steam.
https://invisibleinc.itch.io/lunar-tear
Of course, I'm going to be interested in anything that somewhat resembles Phantasy Star.
A game that I thought was pretty fun is Splatterhouse Rpg
http://splat2k3.illmosis.net/
https://splatterhouse.kontek.net/2k3screens.html
It's Sega Genesis Splatterhouse games, as a freeroam open hub world horror rpg game and it really does feel like a horror game since only Rick is immortal. The rest of the humans that you can recruit will permadie if you're not careful and their zombie remains will follow & haunt you throughout the game.
I can think of some rpg maker games that were good during its era like Legion Saga a Suikoden wannabe which you can still get on Steam (but ain't worth it. It was only good back then coz it was free.)
https://crowbarska.itch.io/legion-saga
I can't find the steam page so here's the itchio page.
Or Alter Aila
https://www.rpgmakerarchive.net/2016/03 ... 3-rmn.html
which at the time was light years ahead of what anyone was doing within the rpg maker sphere (If you ignore the stuff that I was doing and you should since I never released anything. Shit I was doing though is so ahead of its time that it looks modern when compared to modern rm maker games. My design goal is to make something that doesn't even look or feel like a rm game. My current build looks even less like a rpg maker game.)
Ara Fell is another decent one which is also sold on Steam now.
Which again, I liked Ara Fell way back when it was free. I don't know if I'd actually pay for it.
I do like Deadly Sin 2 enough to buy it, and I did but it really has 0 replay value like most Jrpgs from the 16 bit era.
My personal 2nd fave after Splatterhouse is Hero's Realm
http://kentona.freehostia.com/
which is basically just Dragon Quest 3 & Final Fantasy 6 mashed together into a game
and it does a great job of creating a big open world-ish game that's an ode to the classics.
It has a skill system that resembles D&D which allows you to pick locks & shit. Hero's Realm feels like an official game, which is prob the best compliment that you could reserve for a rpg maker game.
I got up to the part where you get to play as all 4 or 5 of your parties at the same time but I quit the game by then because there was just so much going on. It had as much gameplay as a real game, which is rare for rpg maker games since for most rpg maker devs, the actual gameplay is just an afterthought.
I consider Symphony of War & Fear & Hunger Termina on their own level, distinct from other rpg maker games.
Krizzx wrote: ↑Fri Feb 07, 2025 12:59 am
I've come across a few awesome fucking games that were made using RPG makers in the past few years. I can't begin to tell you how much I fucking hate RPG maker games. Even more than shit made in Unreal Engine. Everything is so cookie cutter and effortless most of the time.
The problem with unreal is that the games cost $70 - $120 to buy & play, plus tax for what amounts to a game that's little more than an asset flip of default assets. The shift to unreal is because it's cheaper than building your own in-house engine and modern programming staff is populated with fucking retarded Indians who barely speak or read English, and don't even know how to program their own engine anyway so we're stuck with the unreal asset flips because the modern work force doesn't have the ability to work with anything else.
Most Rpg maker games are made by barely literate monkeys who have a monkey see monkey do philosophy to game making. They saw a game they like do it, so they try to imitate it but don't understand how to.
The other half of Rpg Maker designers are literate but view game design as just another form of passive art like a movie. Novel is mostly passive, but I'd argue that novels are closer to video games because in both cases (or at least for most videogames, you can not progress with the narrative without the reader's own choice to individually read & comprehend the words that they've read to paint a moving picture within the canvas of their mind.
Soyny Cinematic video games and most movies do the exact opposite of this where interaction with the medium is extremely passive.
This 'literate' half of rpg maker game design will often have great visual & aural aesthetics but at the price of an actual playable game because these types generally don't understand or care about what a video game is.
Fear & Hunger is one of the few where the story is just as interesting & as esoteric as its own gameplay.
I swear that Termina seems to be referencing Junji Ito, most specifically Remina. Kinda like how the original game is referencing Golden Age Griffith from Berserk & The Eclipse. That Griffith character is also in Termina I think. I never made it that far though. I'm so used to normal shitty rpgs that don't even react to what you're doing, that over half of the cast gets killed before I make it to the 3rd day because Termina actually does calculate what you're doing & it reminds you that it's constantly watching you by punishing you through the deaths of the other survivors.
I talked about this game in the original forums, but I actually hate it. It's way too RNG based.
The sequel Termina, is one of the best Rpg maker games I ever played.
Every single aspect of its gameplay reflects a choice & consequences mindset and even the characters that you choose to play as have completely different play mechanics & strategies that they rely on.
Even the combat system is awesome. I often say that there's only 4 games out there that play like Resident Evil 4.
Resident Evil 4 Classic, Resident Evil 5, Godhand & .........
Fear & Hunger Termina, lol!
This is what a lot of RE4 haters don't understand about the greatness of RE4.
I don't understand how anyone can play RE4 classic and not understand just how tactical RE4's combat is.
The entirety of RE4's combat revolves around crowd management and you manage the crowd partly by the gun you use and where you choose to shoot your opponent. It's one of those games where simply going for the head isn't always the best option. Shit I'd argue that going for a head shot is a last ditch option, unless it's a gun that can pierce heads. In that case, try to blow up as many heads as you can. The most optimal position to shoot is slightly below the knee cap and above the shin. Once you master that, you can slow down enemies to where they fall on their knees leaving you enough room to navigate around them. go after the enemies behind them or initiate a melee attack prompt which functions as a crowd control AOE move. This shit even works flawlessly in the RE4 remake. I actually hated playing that game until I realized that the slightly below knee cap tactic still works in RE4 remake. (Re4 remake made the headshots fairly useless)
Why does crowd control matter so much in Fear and Hunger? Well on the surface it looks like you're only fighting 2 to 3 monsters at a time but you're actually fighting off an entire crowd of at least 10 enemies and that's for nearly every fight.
The rpg maker system can only spawn about 9 to 10 enemies per battle and that includes enemies who suddenly enter combat once certain conditions are met.
What Fear & Hunger does is register every single limb as an enemy combatant which creates this Resident Evil 4-like combat system where you shoot the legs to slow down the enemy shoot the arms to disarm the weapons of the enemy or go for the head shot or body to kill the opponent. Going for the body kill can instantly kill the enemy but their usually retaliate and attack you with their arms, legs & head right as they're falling to their death.
Fear & Hunger Termina feels far more strategic than your typical real time Survival Horror game. Not only do you have to worry about resource & ammo conservation like a real time survival horror, you're actually forced into battle due to the rpg maker origins so you can't just forever run away like a bitch. Fear & Hunger forces you to be confronted by your fears.
LOL the enemies will literally fucking rape you.
One of those crazy Farmer guys throat-fucked my mechanic chick (and she started to spit out or was choking on cum or something. She was incapacitated and couldn't move.) so the Jojo Mafia character I was playing as punched him in the dick and exploded it lol!
It's not just combat that revolves around choice & consequences but even the actions of your actual gameplay will completely change the story of the game.
I always recruit the mechanic babe in every playthrough.
When I first played Termina, I would always recruit mechanic bitch and then I'd try to look for the Jap dude because I assumed that if I found him quick enough, that I could spare him from getting his head cut off by the crazy Terrifer clown.
Speaking of that damn Terrifier clown. When I first played it, I got inside the main city where you need to go into a sewer just to reach it. Within that city near the church where the troon's daddy is a preacher at (I think.)
You'll get ambushed by the Terrifier clown. My badass Jojo guy & Mechanic babe were already armed to the teeth so we fucking kicked his ass, only for that fucking clown to randomly pull out a gun (after it looked like he was dead or weakened.) and then he one-hit killed my mechanic babe. BOOM! He shot her dead on the spot. I was like FUCK! and I started a new game because I was like the only playable survivor left not including the handicapped girl who can't join you if you let the Jap die since the Jap is the one who delivers her wheelchair to her.
I already saw Terrifier 1 before playing the game (the girl in that movie who gets shot over & over was really hot.) but I'm so used to rpg maker games being so low effort that I wasn't them to go all the way with its homages to horror movies & anime.
That's the level of interaction & thought that Termina put into this game. Your actions always effect something that happens later on in the game.
First of all is Wooden Ocean. It was super obscure until a relatively popular YouTuber made a video about it which is why it's only pretty obscure now. Not to put too fine a point on it, I've known about it for a couple years based on a random recommendation on 4chan that I'll forever be grateful for. Kinda hard to sum up. It's a meta fantasy rpg that's actually a gnostic science-fiction story but really it's an allegory for the creative process. It's hard to talk about what makes it good without giving away too much and maybe I already have but it's very fun. It has a labyrinthine level design and labyrinthine plotting. It's one of the few games that does a "meta" twist well. Mainly because it doesn't expect you to be particularly surprised by it. You'll probably figure it out before the protagonist does, it knows you probably will and a great part of the game is concerned with the "Well, what now?" that comes after it. It never falls into the cliche's you'd expect from that kind of premise.
That game has an interesting graphic style. What I like about a lot of these weird rpg maker games, is that the ones that have stories worth talking about, are usually the type of stories that you no longer see in gaming anymore after gaming got taken over by non-gaming financers.
Shadow Hearts is probably the last one I know of that didn't base its plot around popular anime or movies. At least the first 3 didn't (Koudelka, SH1, Covenant)
Shadowhearts 3 is animu as fuck but at least the art & music is still interesting. The music is the one aspect of the series that stayed weird throughout each game.
You named Fear and Hunger so the logical other series to name is Black Souls. It's a dark fantasy reigmagining of fairy tales, in case of the first one and Alice in Wonderland, in case of the second one with some mechanics inspired by the Dark Souls series and also it's, kind of, a porn game. And yes, I know all of that sounds really edgy and cringe but it's surprisingly better than it sounds. The way it uses fairy tale motives is sort of the thing I'd expect Yoko Taro to do if he wasn't a poser. And it's a lot better designed than a lot of the actual Dark Souls game in terms of actual game making.
All good horror has sexual elements like Alien, Hellraiser 1 & 2, and the Hellraiser 1 Reboot. (One of the only times that a horror reboot was actually good and marked the return of LEVIATHAN!)
I also include outright porn in this like Kite or Mezzo Forte. Much of Japan's live action 1980s & 1990s horror was basically just porn.
I posted both posters of the movie Organ, because I'm not sure which movie poster looks cooler.
This is the type of artistic style that Jap games used to use back when Jap game developers were Gen X & Boomers and based a lot of their works off of the hard lives they had as children shortly after the end of WW2.
Seeing the pics of that Black Soul game though. Goddamn it is cringe. It uses that moe blob style of anime. I was expecting a horror anime artstyle like Angel Cop or Ninja Scroll.
Elaborate more on Yoko Taro. I'm not that familiar with his games. The resident Taro fan amongst us doesn't want to post here.
I've only played two of Taro's games. Drakengard which is one of the worst games that I ever had the misfortune of playing and Nier Automata. A game that I try really hard to love but I can't. The game is so fucking boring & the writing is just anime noise imo. It's nothing like Shadowhearts or Classic Persona where you can clearly tell that they're both highly influenced by occultism & you'll gain more from the game's narratives if you're falmilar with what they're refrencing. Automata had that typical Anime writing style when they have surface level references to Western philosophy but in reality it's just anime melo drama about the tragic lives of anime dolls.
The only reason I kept Nier Automata (when my normal reaction to a shit game is to sell it.) is because 2B is fucking hot and I'll play that game every once in awhile just to admire her finely sculpted ass. (after pressing the suicide button since you can't actually see her butt unless you kill yourself.)
I bought Nier Automata and Tactics Ogre Reborn around the same time. Within that time frame, I've played through Tactics Ogre Reborn twice. I have not gotten passed a single playthrough of Nier Automata. I never even made it that far either because even the combat is kinda shitty.
I mean sure, Automata's combat is good when compared to crap like Witcher 3 but it's shit when compared to Bloodborne (which is mostly carried by its level design) or Ninja Gaiden 2.
I'll post the best Rpg maker game of all time where both its sales & its ratings reflect it.
SYMPHONY OF WAR
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1488200/Symphony_of_War_The_Nephilim_Saga/
It's my favorite and it barely even looks or feels like a rmaker game.
The gameplay itself feels more like a hybrid of Fire Emblem & Ogre Battle with the gameplay being much closer
to Ogre Battle, than even that of Unicorn Overlord. Which didn't play much like Ogre Battle at all. Overlord basically created its own genre and nothing else within the gaming landscape plays anything like Unicorn Overlord. The coliseum alone had me playing that game for hundreds of hours after beating it.
Unicorn Overlord was my fave game of last year though. I bought the special edition on Switch, have about 500 hours in it and I plan to eventually buy the PS5 version.
Symphony of War actually takes place in the same shared setting of Legacies of Dondoran & Deadly Sin
https://store.steampowered.com/app/285420/Deadly_Sin_2/
Symphony of War's aggro system is based off of the combat system that he designed for Deadly Sin except in SOW, the aggro system is applied to the Fire Emblem style battle map, rather than the individual combat skirmishes which have their own rule system that's based off of the formation system from Ogre battle but it's much more in depth than the formation systems used in the Ogre games.
I never played the original Deadly Sin but I can vouch for Deadly Sin 2
(I played it way back when it was free, before it was ever on Steam.) if you just want to play a more traditonal Jrpg instead of the strategy wargame Symphony of War.
DS2 is prob the closest I've seen to a Final Fantasy 6 style rpg made with rpg maker.
Great art & great music but zero replay value. Symphony of War has great aart & music but also has near infinite replay value if you buy the dlc which allows you to toggle the difficulty settings into your own customized mode.
You can fight against mirror versions of yourselves and infinity zombie armies which completely changes how the game is played. The story stays the same no matter what but the actual play mechanics are almost as varied as a fighting game due to how the difficulty sliders & toggles work.
What's funny about Dancing Dragon games, is that this guy was basically a reject among the rpg maker community. A lot of that community's most influential members (like that one dude who made those shitty but popular wannabe Silent Hill rpg maker games. He was the main guy insulting Dancing Dragon when I've never seen a game of that Silent Hill dude's that didn't delve within their subject beyond surface level. He made a game called Eldritch and it was about as puddle deep into Lovecraft as your typical LLovecraf vidya gaem.) would constantly insult Dancing Dragon's games as generic or mediocre that only stand out because of the gfx & music. He always gets clowned on for his writing style, but I really don't see anything wrong with the way he writes. He just has a very Christian-influenced writing style which you don't really see much of in the modern era so imo his writing style stands out for being one of the few who still bases their writing off of a Christian-Catholic Good vs Evil mindset. His plots revolve around keeping the faith in the Gods no matter how much it looks like that evil is winning.
Considering that his games are always fantasy based, I think its only fitting that most of his games are written around some 1980s perception of Christianity that just freely mixes christcuck doctrines into one giant slop (even the title of the game implies a connection to Book of Enoch but it really has nothing to do with Book of Enoch.) that makes for an interesting game.
It's funny to me because who the fuck even are his critics? I can't even remember their names but I do recall seeing them talk trash to him all the time but you look at Dancing Dragon now.
I don't think anyone else has made a Rpg Maker game on the level of popularity that Dancing Dragon has, nor has anyone made one as high quality as Symphony of War.
[b]EDIT:[/b] I just figured it out. One of Dancing Dragon's main critics was the guy who made Backstage.
Backstage recently came to steam last year.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2687830/Backstage_Murdered_Sleep/
Backstage is another one of those games that was probably good during its era, but I've always hated it.
It has this weird auto combat system and the story delves deep into that psychological analytical
horror bullshit that's inspired by Silent Hill 2.
His other game at his Itchio page, "Lunar Tear" looks legit good though. I don't know why he didn't decide to sell that on Steam.
https://invisibleinc.itch.io/lunar-tear
Of course, I'm going to be interested in anything that somewhat resembles Phantasy Star.
A game that I thought was pretty fun is Splatterhouse Rpg
http://splat2k3.illmosis.net/
https://splatterhouse.kontek.net/2k3screens.html
It's Sega Genesis Splatterhouse games, as a freeroam open hub world horror rpg game and it really does feel like a horror game since only Rick is immortal. The rest of the humans that you can recruit will permadie if you're not careful and their zombie remains will follow & haunt you throughout the game.
I can think of some rpg maker games that were good during its era like Legion Saga a Suikoden wannabe which you can still get on Steam (but ain't worth it. It was only good back then coz it was free.)
https://crowbarska.itch.io/legion-saga
I can't find the steam page so here's the itchio page.
Or Alter Aila
https://www.rpgmakerarchive.net/2016/03/archive-alter-aila-genesis-rm2k3-rmn.html
which at the time was light years ahead of what anyone was doing within the rpg maker sphere (If you ignore the stuff that I was doing and you should since I never released anything. Shit I was doing though is so ahead of its time that it looks modern when compared to modern rm maker games. My design goal is to make something that doesn't even look or feel like a rm game. My current build looks even less like a rpg maker game.)
Ara Fell is another decent one which is also sold on Steam now.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/440540/Ara_Fell_Enhanced_Edition/
Which again, I liked Ara Fell way back when it was free. I don't know if I'd actually pay for it.
I do like Deadly Sin 2 enough to buy it, and I did but it really has 0 replay value like most Jrpgs from the 16 bit era.
My personal 2nd fave after Splatterhouse is Hero's Realm
http://kentona.freehostia.com/
which is basically just Dragon Quest 3 & Final Fantasy 6 mashed together into a game
and it does a great job of creating a big open world-ish game that's an ode to the classics.
It has a skill system that resembles D&D which allows you to pick locks & shit. Hero's Realm feels like an official game, which is prob the best compliment that you could reserve for a rpg maker game.
I got up to the part where you get to play as all 4 or 5 of your parties at the same time but I quit the game by then because there was just so much going on. It had as much gameplay as a real game, which is rare for rpg maker games since for most rpg maker devs, the actual gameplay is just an afterthought.
I consider Symphony of War & Fear & Hunger Termina on their own level, distinct from other rpg maker games.
[quote=Krizzx post_id=4788 time=1738889948 user_id=56]
I've come across a few awesome fucking games that were made using RPG makers in the past few years. I can't begin to tell you how much I fucking hate RPG maker games. Even more than shit made in Unreal Engine. Everything is so cookie cutter and effortless most of the time.[/quote]
The problem with unreal is that the games cost $70 - $120 to buy & play, plus tax for what amounts to a game that's little more than an asset flip of default assets. The shift to unreal is because it's cheaper than building your own in-house engine and modern programming staff is populated with fucking retarded Indians who barely speak or read English, and don't even know how to program their own engine anyway so we're stuck with the unreal asset flips because the modern work force doesn't have the ability to work with anything else.
Most Rpg maker games are made by barely literate monkeys who have a monkey see monkey do philosophy to game making. They saw a game they like do it, so they try to imitate it but don't understand how to.
The other half of Rpg Maker designers are literate but view game design as just another form of passive art like a movie. Novel is mostly passive, but I'd argue that novels are closer to video games because in both cases (or at least for most videogames, you can not progress with the narrative without the reader's own choice to individually read & comprehend the words that they've read to paint a moving picture within the canvas of their mind.
Soyny Cinematic video games and most movies do the exact opposite of this where interaction with the medium is extremely passive.
This 'literate' half of rpg maker game design will often have great visual & aural aesthetics but at the price of an actual playable game because these types generally don't understand or care about what a video game is.
Fear & Hunger is one of the few where the story is just as interesting & as esoteric as its own gameplay.
I swear that Termina seems to be referencing Junji Ito, most specifically Remina. Kinda like how the original game is referencing Golden Age Griffith from Berserk & The Eclipse. That Griffith character is also in Termina I think. I never made it that far though. I'm so used to normal shitty rpgs that don't even react to what you're doing, that over half of the cast gets killed before I make it to the 3rd day because Termina actually does calculate what you're doing & it reminds you that it's constantly watching you by punishing you through the deaths of the other survivors.
I talked about this game in the original forums, but I actually hate it. It's way too RNG based.
The sequel Termina, is one of the best Rpg maker games I ever played.
Every single aspect of its gameplay reflects a choice & consequences mindset and even the characters that you choose to play as have completely different play mechanics & strategies that they rely on.
Even the combat system is awesome. I often say that there's only 4 games out there that play like Resident Evil 4.
Resident Evil 4 Classic, Resident Evil 5, Godhand & .........
Fear & Hunger Termina, lol!
This is what a lot of RE4 haters don't understand about the greatness of RE4.
I don't understand how anyone can play RE4 classic and not understand just how tactical RE4's combat is.
The entirety of RE4's combat revolves around crowd management and you manage the crowd partly by the gun you use and where you choose to shoot your opponent. It's one of those games where simply going for the head isn't always the best option. Shit I'd argue that going for a head shot is a last ditch option, unless it's a gun that can pierce heads. In that case, try to blow up as many heads as you can. The most optimal position to shoot is slightly below the knee cap and above the shin. Once you master that, you can slow down enemies to where they fall on their knees leaving you enough room to navigate around them. go after the enemies behind them or initiate a melee attack prompt which functions as a crowd control AOE move. This shit even works flawlessly in the RE4 remake. I actually hated playing that game until I realized that the slightly below knee cap tactic still works in RE4 remake. (Re4 remake made the headshots fairly useless)
Why does crowd control matter so much in Fear and Hunger? Well on the surface it looks like you're only fighting 2 to 3 monsters at a time but you're actually fighting off an entire crowd of at least 10 enemies and that's for nearly every fight.
The rpg maker system can only spawn about 9 to 10 enemies per battle and that includes enemies who suddenly enter combat once certain conditions are met.
What Fear & Hunger does is register every single limb as an enemy combatant which creates this Resident Evil 4-like combat system where you shoot the legs to slow down the enemy shoot the arms to disarm the weapons of the enemy or go for the head shot or body to kill the opponent. Going for the body kill can instantly kill the enemy but their usually retaliate and attack you with their arms, legs & head right as they're falling to their death.
Fear & Hunger Termina feels far more strategic than your typical real time Survival Horror game. Not only do you have to worry about resource & ammo conservation like a real time survival horror, you're actually forced into battle due to the rpg maker origins so you can't just forever run away like a bitch. Fear & Hunger forces you to be confronted by your fears.
LOL the enemies will literally fucking rape you.
One of those crazy Farmer guys throat-fucked my mechanic chick (and she started to spit out or was choking on cum or something. She was incapacitated and couldn't move.) so the Jojo Mafia character I was playing as punched him in the dick and exploded it lol!
It's not just combat that revolves around choice & consequences but even the actions of your actual gameplay will completely change the story of the game.
I always recruit the mechanic babe in every playthrough.
When I first played Termina, I would always recruit mechanic bitch and then I'd try to look for the Jap dude because I assumed that if I found him quick enough, that I could spare him from getting his head cut off by the crazy Terrifer clown.
Speaking of that damn Terrifier clown. When I first played it, I got inside the main city where you need to go into a sewer just to reach it. Within that city near the church where the troon's daddy is a preacher at (I think.)
You'll get ambushed by the Terrifier clown. My badass Jojo guy & Mechanic babe were already armed to the teeth so we fucking kicked his ass, only for that fucking clown to randomly pull out a gun (after it looked like he was dead or weakened.) and then he one-hit killed my mechanic babe. BOOM! He shot her dead on the spot. I was like FUCK! and I started a new game because I was like the only playable survivor left not including the handicapped girl who can't join you if you let the Jap die since the Jap is the one who delivers her wheelchair to her.
I already saw Terrifier 1 before playing the game (the girl in that movie who gets shot over & over was really hot.) but I'm so used to rpg maker games being so low effort that I wasn't them to go all the way with its homages to horror movies & anime.
That's the level of interaction & thought that Termina put into this game. Your actions always effect something that happens later on in the game.
[quote]
First of all is Wooden Ocean. It was super obscure until a relatively popular YouTuber made a video about it which is why it's only pretty obscure now. Not to put too fine a point on it, I've known about it for a couple years based on a random recommendation on 4chan that I'll forever be grateful for. Kinda hard to sum up. It's a meta fantasy rpg that's actually a gnostic science-fiction story but really it's an allegory for the creative process. It's hard to talk about what makes it good without giving away too much and maybe I already have but it's very fun. It has a labyrinthine level design and labyrinthine plotting. It's one of the few games that does a "meta" twist well. Mainly because it doesn't expect you to be particularly surprised by it. You'll probably figure it out before the protagonist does, it knows you probably will and a great part of the game is concerned with the "Well, what now?" that comes after it. It never falls into the cliche's you'd expect from that kind of premise.[/quote]
That game has an interesting graphic style. What I like about a lot of these weird rpg maker games, is that the ones that have stories worth talking about, are usually the type of stories that you no longer see in gaming anymore after gaming got taken over by non-gaming financers.
Shadow Hearts is probably the last one I know of that didn't base its plot around popular anime or movies. At least the first 3 didn't (Koudelka, SH1, Covenant)
Shadowhearts 3 is animu as fuck but at least the art & music is still interesting. The music is the one aspect of the series that stayed weird throughout each game.
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You named Fear and Hunger so the logical other series to name is Black Souls. It's a dark fantasy reigmagining of fairy tales, in case of the first one and Alice in Wonderland, in case of the second one with some mechanics inspired by the Dark Souls series and also it's, kind of, a porn game. And yes, I know all of that sounds really edgy and cringe but it's surprisingly better than it sounds. The way it uses fairy tale motives is sort of the thing I'd expect Yoko Taro to do if he wasn't a poser. And it's a lot better designed than a lot of the actual Dark Souls game in terms of actual game making.
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All good horror has sexual elements like Alien, Hellraiser 1 & 2, and the Hellraiser 1 Reboot. (One of the only times that a horror reboot was actually good and marked the return of LEVIATHAN!)
I also include outright porn in this like Kite or Mezzo Forte. Much of Japan's live action 1980s & 1990s horror was basically just porn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esBQ-0YnNuo
I posted both posters of the movie Organ, because I'm not sure which movie poster looks cooler.
[img]https://i.postimg.cc/xTvbZHhg/Jphorror.jpg[/img] [img]https://i.postimg.cc/L8mZF5MS/jphorror1.jpg[/img]
This is the type of artistic style that Jap games used to use back when Jap game developers were Gen X & Boomers and based a lot of their works off of the hard lives they had as children shortly after the end of WW2.
Seeing the pics of that Black Soul game though. Goddamn it is cringe. It uses that moe blob style of anime. I was expecting a horror anime artstyle like Angel Cop or Ninja Scroll.
Elaborate more on Yoko Taro. I'm not that familiar with his games. The resident Taro fan amongst us doesn't want to post here.
I've only played two of Taro's games. Drakengard which is one of the worst games that I ever had the misfortune of playing and Nier Automata. A game that I try really hard to love but I can't. The game is so fucking boring & the writing is just anime noise imo. It's nothing like Shadowhearts or Classic Persona where you can clearly tell that they're both highly influenced by occultism & you'll gain more from the game's narratives if you're falmilar with what they're refrencing. Automata had that typical Anime writing style when they have surface level references to Western philosophy but in reality it's just anime melo drama about the tragic lives of anime dolls.
The only reason I kept Nier Automata (when my normal reaction to a shit game is to sell it.) is because 2B is fucking hot and I'll play that game every once in awhile just to admire her finely sculpted ass. (after pressing the suicide button since you can't actually see her butt unless you kill yourself.)
I bought Nier Automata and Tactics Ogre Reborn around the same time. Within that time frame, I've played through Tactics Ogre Reborn twice. I have not gotten passed a single playthrough of Nier Automata. I never even made it that far either because even the combat is kinda shitty.
I mean sure, Automata's combat is good when compared to crap like Witcher 3 but it's shit when compared to Bloodborne (which is mostly carried by its level design) or Ninja Gaiden 2.
