A History of RPG Maker Earthbound-likes (Part Two)

art source: https://twitter.com/xndgoat/status/1348954104169566209

We tend to be dismissive about fanworks or just about anything that “rips off” from existing properties. Yet I think the trick isn’t so much whether or not you’re heavily influenced, but where you get your influences from. Itoi is literally (and actually for emphasis) a boomer, he was 41 when development started on Earthbound and he was able to experience the transformation of a post-WW2 world along with being able to construct a JRPG with arguably the most known video game company in the world. The sensibilities that come from jiving through the 60s and 70s as a young adult is apparent in the Mother games. Yet I get the feeling that most fans might not care for The Beach Boys or John Lennon (Their parents maybe). It’s also important to make a distinction between influence and similarity. You could technically compare Earthbound to Dragon Quest in both gameplay and format. More abstractly the music that Itoi worships tends to inform the themes or whatever creative choices he makes (that leads to riding a yellow submarine for example). As media leap frogs influence to influence, the original meanings and ideas get obfuscated. I think about that a lot especially while playing these Earthbound fangames as each them tend to grab and discard different aspects of the Mother series.

Cognitive Dissonance 2008 (Complete)

Main Site Download

Cognitive Dissonance is unlike any of the Earthbound fan games I’ve played so far. This isn’t just a compliment but also that it is a fangame of Mother 1 more so than 2 delving into the origins of Giygas. It was originally released in 2008 but got a massive overhaul and was completed by 2014. The intro of the game has you playing the villain from the first Mother game undergoing the final battle of Mother 1. You then assume the role of one of a Mook living on planet Saturn who then embarks on the usual universe saving stuff. You can get Mr. Saturn AND Starmen in your party. Not only that but it is a full game, rpgmaker wikia lists the game’s length as over 19 hours long. You also get to explore not just one planet but the entire solar system. The game also has a sizable following, it was featured in a Nitro Rad video garnering over 300k views. Which when you think about it, is impressive for an RPG Maker game that’s actually an RPG. Sure RM games aren’t a stranger to generating large cult followings, but other than LISA they tend to be in the horror/Yume-Nikki camp.

It’s safe to say that I will not be able to cover the entirety of this game in this article (check Nitro Rad’s review). What held me back was well – the usual suspects in an RM2K3 game: slow walk speed and agility problems(tm). You can easily hack in a walk speed changer but some battles have questionable balance. There are enemies that have the ability to increase their own speed, which means the ATB will exponentially go up slower depending on how many enemies are doing it. If you’re ignorant on how ATB speeds in RM2K3 work, messing with speed stats can result in poor battle flow. Thankfully you do have a free skill that slows them down, but it can only help so much (and isn’t very engaging to fight against the flaws of the engine instead of the actual enemies). Besides all of those issues the game does get more exciting once you get past the first chapter. This is all likely due to the game getting better as development went on (common for hobbyist development).

On a final note I will say this game has one of the better abstract/moving backgrounds of any RPG Maker game I’ve played. It really pushes it to another level of creativity. Most of the time it uses a mostly black foreground with cutouts to simulate the backdrop to be particles. It’s simple but you almost feel like the background is rotating or moving in ways that feel like an optical illusion. This is all just with X and Y scrolling and 2 images. The original Earthbound had palette cycling, much more flexible scrolling, oscillation, and transparency to work with. Yet even with such a limited engine there’s always ways to impress.

Battle with Starman (2008) (Video)

This is not a playable game at all but rather a battle animation demonstration made in the RM2K3 default battle system by Ranmaster. Earthbound’s influence isn’t just felt in games and fan-games but also what creators choose to use as a placeholder example. What made me add to this the article was this weirdly has a standard RPG character in the trippy background format, which well, why not? Does every EB inspired game need to be first person (other than not having to do as much animation). It is quite hard to get anything out of the RM2K3 DBS but this demo demonstrates enemy animations, limit breaks and generally smooth animations. Ranmaster lately has been doing animation work for Blindmind’s Beloved Rapture which is still in development.

Ghosts of Aliens (2008) (Complete)

Archive Download

Long before Space Funeral and OFF commanded attention, this game very much broke the mold as far as venturing into the surreal aesthetics of RPG Maker. Like Homeland this also originated from Gaming World. Replaying this game I am reminded again of GamingW’s music scene. The tracks have an unpredictable aura as you don’t quite know what to expect with a mixture of twerpy dream pop vocal tracks and straight up 8bit. Yet there are some familiar songs, like an Onett remix for one of the towns. Some of the music was done by CBoryardee who made Barkley, Shut up and Jam: Gaiden. According to the creator Swordofkings128, the project started out as sort of a joke, but for whatever reason he kept at it and managed to complete it.

The game is closer to the original Mother more than anything as the main character’s sprite suspiciously looks like an edit along with the interiors. There is a lot of custom art that resembles sketchy pixel work where lines aren’t super defined. The colors sort of have an off kilter highly saturated MS-Paint aesthetic that is done quite well. The art-style feels ahead of its time, sure there might be quite a few indie games that look like this now but back in 2008 it was very uncommon for someone to go for the neo-retro NES look.

The story is that you’ve crash landed your spaceship and died. Like the title you float around as a ghost to retrieve your body, unlike the title though you are actually in living form for most of the game. Then again you aren’t the only alien. The plot is rather paper thin with a Final Fantasy wizard appearing everywhere telling you where to go. The NPCs are quite terse with some light humor, but some of them might be part of the background like a talking tree that ends up being the entrance to the dungeon. The game’s balance is all over the place, you have a skill that one shots most enemies at first but the boss can pretty much one shot you, but you can also poison the boss. There are hazards that send you to the game over screen, but you can save anywhere and save scum your way through it. I suspect the creator didn’t have time to balance it so they left behind enough solutions to make the game bearable. It’s one of those games where you just want to see the next area, the next character, or next music track. The gameplay itself, maybe not so much. Which is in line with what I’d say about the Mother games.

One interesting feature is being able to drive a car that crashes if you hit a wall, you then have to walk the rest of the way after that though. Party members will appear next to npcs talking to them when entering a house. So there’s a lot of unexpected events throughout the journey that makes the game worthwhile. Just be prepared for a gauntlet of bullshit to bypass. .The game is quite long, boasting a whopping 10 dungeons and various in-betweens, so there’s quite a lot to explore and get through.

The Space Funeral creator cites this game as an inspiration and it shocks me to this day that this game didn’t get more attention. The game was completed by 2012 (Space Funeral was made in 2010, OFF’s english translation was in 2014) so it wasn’t like it missed the boat, but maybe it just didn’t go through the proper channels. The writing does have a little less content than Space Funeral / OFF though. As in there aren’t any crazy meanings to derive from it. Regardless, I think it deserves a retrospective.

Chromatose (2009) (Unreleased)

Webarchive Game Page

This game does not exist in any public playable form. It was a game project in collaboration with several members of the RMN community with the user Tardis (now goes by Finbeard) at the helm. It started out as an entry for the Release Something 10 event where you’re encouraged to release whatever you happen to be working on like a demo or screenshots. The Chromotose devs decided to go with the latter and release a game afterwards. Nothing came of the game aside from a gamepage and the usual screenshot hype, but I think it’s important to reflect the community’s then culture with what could have been.

The group that made the project were known as Team Cascade, or as I remember the “the lol detectives” A user geodude would make an alt account called the black cape and try to foil the misao awards and cause havoc in the forums of RMN. Members of team cascade would change their avatars to old timey characters. I guess you’d call this forum LARPing. It was… a different time back then.

I got in touch with Kevin Liu (formerly known as AznChipmunk) who miraculously has a very good memory about past events, and was the programmer of the battles/menu. Some would assume the super elaborate menu was a mockup, which was often a contention in the community. Basically users would post mockups and pass it off as screenshots, which in the RM community can turn into a usual school yard fight of “Your screenshots are fake” “No they’re not” “Oh yeah prove it” but surprisingly the menu was actually implemented in the game. The battle menu was able to power up and go through a turn order but short of having actual enemies.

The story starred a character named Chess and his friend Lyle. Chess works for the post office until these mysterious alien invaders show up called Staticians. The humor behind it was that math and statistics were boring, therefore evil, replacing the color of the world with static mono-chromatic bleakness. Which is where the title of the game comes in. The main gimmick of the game is that you’d be collecting hats that would give various abilities in battle or for solving puzzles on the field. It wasn’t just Earthbound being an influence but also Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga.

“I think one of the problems with the project was that everyone worked at a different pace and then motivation for some people died out” Kevin Liu said. “When I started college all of the RPG Maker projects I was working on died off.” Liu still had his own project Muse on his mind but shortly bowed out of the community in general as college got more busy. This is the usual for ambitious projects started by highschool kids. The team split and most people moved on to other things. However the leader of the project, Finbeard decided to keep doing the project under a different name and engine.

That later project too eventually came to a halt as pursuing comics and illustrations became a more primary creative outlet for Finbeard.

Mockups from the also cancelled POST*BUSTERS

Mother 2k3 (2009) (Cancelled)

Game Page and Download

Another cancelled project that came out with a demo in the same year as Chromotose’s announcement. This project would eventually be cancelled but it demonstrates full CBS/CMS functionality built to mimic many of Mother 3’s interactive quirks. The most notable is the rhythm mechanic where tapping to the beat while the attack is happening will score more hits. It even contains the rolling numbers (just with less polished animation). The released demo doesn’t contain much story so much as a tech showcase (and of course slow walk speed paired with large maps) but it certainly broke new ground on what to expect from a Mother RM fan-game.

Touhou Mother (2009) (Complete)

vgperson’s Translation Download

So this is one of the more unlikely crossovers. Touhou is a danmaku game by indie japanese developer ZUN that is then slapped together with Mother in this game. Yet when you think about it, both games have arguably been popularized by the internet culture at large. Translated into English by vgperson this is another chance to view the Japanese side of RPG Maker. I have not played a Touhou game since probably the time this came out but I do remember touhou dominating some IRC conversations. This game does require some knowledge of Touhou and Mother to grasp some of the story, (or rather the countless references and callbacks this game throws out there). Though this is not limited to just the two titular properties, an enemy for instance will throw a tarot card that is presented as a Yu-Gi-Oh card. Some sound effects were clearly ripped from Dragon Quest. Characters will break the fourth wall occasionally, so it very much feels like a shitposty pop culture reference heavy game yet with a lot of effort into it. This is emblematic of one particular Japanese RM community, where there’s a competitive spirit to see who can make the best “kusoge”. At the very least it certainly has the sensibilities of that subculture.

The gameplay itself is pretty straight forward. The battle system is custom made yet uses the interesting choice of using default event messages to describe what’s happening in the battle. It also has scrolling numbers (but no rhythm system). Yet it still uses the default menu for out of combat things, so it’s very much a default/custom hybrid where it makes sense. The combat itself is fairly basic and you can’t use items (maybe a missing feature due to the number of items acquired being impossible to track via conditional branches unless you use variables manually thus abandoning the DMS).

Compared to all the other games I covered I feel this has the best ratio of completeness/polish, it doesn’t excel at both components as much, but it feels well rounded. Considering the battles are custom however the backgrounds do feel a bit disappointing, it’s just a trippy pattern that just moves in one direction. The developers likely used parallaxes for them but could have easily used pictures which are unlimited with patches and can be rotated, transparent, tinted and sine waved. However maybe parallax backgrounds were just good enough to keep development rolling.

A lot of the dialogue is mostly the Touhou shrine maiden personalities bickering back and forth while they fight an alien invasion, so if you’re down for that then this will probably be the main draw. Again, this game appeals to a very specific set of people which makes it all the more intriguing as to why someone would go this far to make it. It’s really something that can only exist in the hobbyist RM community. Also this game has a sequel, so if this is your thing then there’s a lot of it.

Wooby RPG (2010) (Cancelled)

rpgmakerarchive page download

Started in 2006 this was a game made by Dookie, a username I kept seeing in Earthbound rips and credits of earlier fangames. You play as a very early gameboy version of Kirby, or maybe the mask of a certain minecraft youtuber. Though if anything it feels mostly like a Pac-Man RPG. Your name is Wooby, your sister is named Looby (and has a red bow on her head), the macguffin stolen from you is called a woob block, the town is called Woobton. It’s very much a universe where things are just the way they are because they are.

The game has a lot of Earthbound edits but it might not be noticeable if you haven’t played a lot of Earthbound (and becomes less apparent as the game goes on). Some of the gameplay takes on the form of the usual Mario RPG fare, you can jump and collect coins and even get coins by bumping your head into blocks. The battles have the trippy background but are still sideview and Wooby will occasionally unleash a limit break, so there’s a smattering of different visuals being used here. Like Cognitive Dissonance this game has some great uses of the DBS backgrounds (maybe that should be a misao category). Every battle has two black bars that go over one of the layers, so the limitation that the author has to work with is that the foreground has to be static, but that doesn’t stop the creativity from displaying. I could have sworn some of the backgrounds were using the sine wave effect, but they really weren’t, it was just an effective use of cut-out and some magic.

Overall the game’s story is fairly simple and straightforward, you’re chasing a crocodile in a trench coat that stole your family’s precious Woob Block. But what I like is that the game feels like a huge adventure despite such a simple premise, there’s a lot of effort put into things you wouldn’t expect. Like when you enter a mansion there’s an overlay of a spider dangling from a web as you walk through the halls. The experience is simple but it’s not generic, which is how I’d describe Paper Mario or similar games.

While the demo has quite a bit of content, the game was cancelled, likely because Dookie had grown as a developer over the years and moved onto other projects. Most relevant to the article is Eagleland, a game set in the Earthbound universe. It was posted on Starmen.net showing quite a few screenshots and video content, but no demo was ever released. What’s interesting to me is just how developed one of the city areas is. I cannot think of many RPG Maker games that attempt cities as large and detailed as this, it’s a sort of ambitious holy grail people don’t usually talk about. Given the constraints of RPG Maker, it is still entirely possible to make an open ended walkable environment with the size of a world map, yet it’s probably a nightmare to organize and maintain a level of quality. Of all the RM direct fan-games this is probably the most visually impressive and consistent.

Once again the game was cancelled but it contributed to Dookie’s growth to pursue the now in development Kingdoms of the Dump. A game that’s made in Godot, a very different and more advanced engine than rm2k3, but I can see some of the Wooby DNA in there but also it has its own identity. The character designs and world building is a lot more developed, and personally I’m looking forward to this game.

All the other RM Earthbound-likes

As much as I’d like to, I can’t cover them all. While it is definitely its own thing and even contributed to a minimalist genre, Yume-nikki is thought to have been influenced by the Mother series due to the similarities of the FC world and some graphics. By proxy that game has flooded into a whole mess of tributes and fangames. Undertale creator Tobyfox made a halloween themed Earthbound romhack and has stated that he dabbled with RM2000 before eventually settling on GameMaker, so there’s some loose connection there. There’s also LISA which also contains a large dedicated following. Omori is another similar popular instance, but I haven’t even begun to look into that. There’s just a lot to go through but I thought I’d cover the overlooked or the ones that never quite made it yet showed potential.

If there’s any takeaway I can get from going through all of these games it’s that you can gain a lot just by making your game quirky or less serious, there’s a huge advantage to the looseness if you decide to suddenly contrast it with darker or surreal elements as these games tend to be. Though nowadays it is definitely a trend in the larger indie games, but I don’t really blame them. It also just plays well to the internet and the urban legend nature of having lore that can be interpreted and devoured by wiki archiving savvy people. The more traditional RPGs require the audience to buy into the world building on their own volition and I think for older people like me there’s an acquired taste that comes from growing up in a specific era. Though I would also argue in the amateur spirit of RPG Maker there’s no shortage of off beat writing and style, it’s just hard to market if there isn’t a baseball bat or trippy imagery to go off of. There’s probably like 10 articles I could write about what Earthbound means to people and how it has affected the RM scene and the audiences that keep it going. That does speak to the multiple angles to go at this type of content.

This article became way longer than I expected and I probably won’t do another giant game compilation any time soon. However it was nice to shotgun through some small things that might have not gotten an article of their own, so I might revisit this format later on.

A History on RPG Maker Earthbound-likes (and fan games) – Part One

Baseball, newspapers, cars, asphalt. Just simply making your RPG set in contemporary times is immediately going to invite comparisons to HAL’s well known Mother series (alternatively named Earthbound). A light hearted touch is also required or else you just might veer into being a horror game like Parasite Eve. Of course Mother games don’t shy away from dark and trippy themes. Things like war and crime do exist in our current times, but it’s hard to really contextualize turn-based conflict in a neighborhood without a weird spin. Being Nintendo family friendly was also an incentive. A zombie apocalypse or an alien invasion, a cult, or SOMETHING needs to happen (Earthbound has all of this) That I think is why it’s so easy to steer into Shigesato Itoi’s wheelhouse when making something modern. Fantasy and Sci-fi are inherently absurd, typical ideal American dream suburbia is not (depending on who you ask). Though really just merely making your game quirky is enough to obtain the Earthbound label.

Things haven’t changed. There’s a certain indie game discourse around being tired of “Earthbound clones.” I uh, won’t go into it. Let’s just say the outlook and attitude surrounding it back then was about the same as comparing every platformer to Cave Story. It is hard to condense what exactly elicits everything that makes Earthbound, Earthbound. However with the early goings of the RPG Maker community there really weren’t that many EB-likes. A ton of fan-games sure, but it’s interesting to think about how the modular-ness of certain Squaresoft sprite rips had more effect on the setting (and by proxy the story) of many RPG Maker titles more so than the actual art-style. There is actually a dedicated website dedicated to providing Earthbound rips formatted for RM2K along with eventing tutorials. There were more templates and resources than there were actual fangames (and a lot of battle systems help threads on how to make rolling numbers).

Early Earthbound Fangames (2000-2005)

So Starmen.net is probably going to be brought up a lot as it dates back to as far as 2000 and hosted many fanworks. The fan games and apps page has anything you could possibly imagine (there is an Earthbound Doom WAD for chrissakes). The site’s fangame forum has become something of a RPG Maker community of its own and some usernames caught my eye when researching for this article. The early game that sticks out is EarthBound Max (RM95) (2000). This is probably the earliest and most tangible RM incarnation resembling EB. It looks to be RPG Maker 95 based on the remaining screenshot. The Angelfire site for it is miraculously still up. Sadly the download isn’t recoverable due to the defunct third party hosting. All that remains is a story write up.

EarthBound Force (RM2K) (2001) – Was an Earthbound / Resident Evil crossover. This won’t be the only cross over we’ll get into. The screenshots that remain shows Future RTP being used. No download seems to be available.

EarthBound Revolution (RM2K) (2002) was another game that was sadly lost to the silicon of time. But there was quite a complimentary writeup by someone at Starmen.net praising its effort.

Earthbound: Ness’s Legacy (RM2K) (2002) Demo is fortunately still available as a download. It is a direct sequel to Earthbound although it is a game with Ness trapped inside of an RTP game nightmare more than anything. Using the FF9 battle theme for combat is certainly a choice. Curiously this is dedicated to the unreleased Earthbound 64, Mother 3 was often the alternate name for the game that was announced to be cancelled UNTIL…

Download (Google Drive)

Mother 3 and One Third (RM2K) (2004) Demo

This is a step up from the usual RTP game with Ness swapped for Alex. It uses the actual rips for chipsets and characters. Although I spoke too soon when Pokey asks if you want to fight and follows up with “Too bad bitch” if you say no. The author has apologized for swearing in a mainline Mother game, hopefully whoever actually makes Mother 4 does not repeat the same mistake.

Download (Google Drive)

What’s even more intriguing is that Starmen.net had various community focused games Rescue Reidman (2002), Rescue Reidman 2 (2002), and 2015: A Starmen.Net Story (2003) are in-joke games that feature community members likely brainstormed in an IRC chat long ago. This was really common in the RPG Maker community at large but it’s nice to see the tradition carried out here. There was even a game called Earthbound Petition (2002) which was based on a petition Starmen.net created that had over 200,000 signatures to bring Mother 3 (Earthbound 64) to fruition after it had been cancelled. Mother 3’s development history was… complicated and even more-so the fan outcry for anything Earthbound related. The passionate desires of the fandom are so embedded in its history that not even fan games made in RPG Maker can avoid it.

**Earthbound Petition**, Rescue Reidman, and Rescue Reidman 2 respectively

It’s easy to forget that Mother 3’s release in Japan was in 2006 (2 years after the Nintendo DS released), the anticipation for this game and its translation is likely what spurred the second wave of EB-likes among RPG Maker users. Some argue that Mother 3 is very different in tone and themes than Mother 1 and 2. It was wild timing for a 2D sprite based RPG by Nintendo/HAL to be released during the early Xbox 360 days, but the perfect era to be getting into pixel art on an RPG hobbyist forum.

Homeland (RM2K3) (2006) Demo

Download Link (Mega)

Anyone hailing from the now defunct Gaming World would probably mention Homeland by Marcus, a game that stood out due to its very influence. This is as far as I can tell the first non-fan game that’s clearly derivative of EB. At first the EB formula is followed very closely. You name every relevant character to the bop of some music and get very ominous with the year declared “XX58” along with a narration that alludes to strange happenings. However what strays away from the formula is the writing. The jokes have a sort of cartoon sitcom edge to it. The Office is referenced. Your computer has a BSOD and is next to a “Playtinspehere 6” (I mean we’re almost there number-wise). My most vivid memory of playing this game back in 2006, is the rodent licking his nuts.

Looking back at Earthbound’s influences. A japanese developer set out to depict an endearing parody of America from their perspective with a vague time period smorgasbord of American culture. It’s set in the 90s yet some locales look straight out of a vintage Archie comic. The game is drenched in rockabilly / psychedelic aesthetics that emerged from the 60s-70s transition. The Runaway Five is similar to the Blues Brothers who play a song eerily similar to Changeling by The Doors. The Casey Bat has a 25% chance to hit in reference to the 1888 poem “Casey at the Bat.” An NPC calls you Rambo. The Starmen resembles Gort from 1951’s The Day The Earth Stood Still along with the title-screen evoking War of the Worlds. Even though The Beatles are British, there are a LOT of The Beatles references (and by proxy, Mother is named after a John Lennon song). In fact the entire soundtrack is a discography copyright mine field. Mr. T is in it.

You take all of those culture bombs and stuff them into an SNES cartridge and give it to a 90s kid and say: “Here, be influenced by this” That kid becomes a teenager in the mid 2000s setting out to depict an homage to a video game made by a Japanese developer doing an homage to American/western culture. Whatever gets retained and filtered depends on that teenager’s sensibilities. I’m fascinated by that chemistry. Even if it results in a rodent “licking his nuts”.

The chipset graphics by Shardicefire were pre-existing and what Marcus attributes to deciding to create the game. There are some Earthbound rips for the on map monsters. The charsets and some furniture seem custom. The battle backgrounds are where things get wild. As you know the default battle system is extremely limited when it comes to visuals. At first glance the background only has one static layer. If you look in the Terrain tab however, it lets you separate the battle background associated with it into 2 layers that can go into horizontal and vertical speeds. It gives just enough wiggle room to create your own designs to experiment but just enough limitation that you can’t do wild procedural generation. Just how we like our RPG Makers.

What stuck out to me was the composer for this game: Ragnar. GamingW was known for having a sizable music community. Ragnar in particular was a very experimental artist and had a keen interest in eccentric internet culture. The music really leans in the psychedelic aspects but it’ll even have unexpected vocal samples. There’s a lot of speed up and slow down or record skips mixing that feels like DJ club music. The most emblematic sound of EB to me is that crunchy sound chip white noise which the composer emulates quite well. Something about it really gives off Gaming World’s soul as the site started to gravitate towards weirder games (one of which we’ll get to later).

The game is quite difficult at first. As long as you know to get the second party member ASAP it becomes a little more tolerable. Class is cancelled and you’re stopped by a bully who… challenges you to a scavenger hunt of all things which means hunting down specific on-map monsters. I blazed through the end and it seemed to end on a cliffhanger with a mysterious government agent up to a nefarious plot.

Demo pretty much ends there. It’s a crude EB with a slight edge to it A purist would say it doesn’t even come close to matching the exact tone of the writing aside from a few miscellaneous NPCs. Yet I feel drawn to what exactly gets portrayed or even observed in the comedic musings of the writing. It’s something you don’t get by default in a fantasy setting. The parents seem straight out of Daria yapping about work and coffee. The mother is at least a step up from the usual RTP mom. There’s nothing super clairvoyant in the exact outlook on the education system or bullies, but the direction seems to just be: exaggerate society a little and it makes for a good RPG backdrop. Which I think it sufficiently does.

But what if I told you this wasn’t even the first Earthbound clone to come out in the year 2006? 6 months before there was in fact (shocker) an Earthbound Fangame.

Earthbound Memories (RM2K3) (2006)

Download Link (Mega)

This is a nice treat since the download was thought to be lost until recovered in 2021. So just in time for this article. This game is surprisingly hefty, with a whopping 96 maps and yet it is still a demo. The author was once a maintainer for the RMXP EarthBound Starter Kit and a moderator on Starmen.net.

The intro is surprisingly good. Maybe my brain has been battered by all the first draft Earthbound-but-RTP games but I feel like this is the turning point of the RM scene where the majority started paying attention to things like tone and direction. The game opens up with an In-Media-Res with you the hero invading the starman base. It has a credit sequence that you can walk through as the names pop up. There’s a very visionary aspect to how everything is paced, the sound effects are lifted directly from the game, but even something as simple as a pause or prompt has that Nintendo feel. The battle scenes have a sort of Phantasy Star over the shoulder view rather than first person. The 2 Layered scrolling backgrounds are used to decent effect and the PSI effects are pretty faithful.

You descend deep into an elevator with human NPCs saying vague and non-decrepit things. You make your way through a strange sewer of madness that evokes the last dungeon of Earthbound. You then fight a Starwoman? I guess? At the end it turns out it was all a dream by a grown up Paula.

At first I thought she’d be the main character but it turns out the game basically follows the exact plot beats as the original. The title of the game in the application window is “Earthbound 2” after all. Aside from the events clearly having transpired since the first game, Onett is pretty much recreated. I ask myself how imperative is this? If I had to say anything about fanworks, I often question why they need to feel like remakes. Sure Mother 2 often feels like a remake to Mother 1 but they still deviate quite a bit in terms of production values and story. There’s at least some kind of evolution. Maybe it’s enough for some authors to simply recreate what they love and edit from there.

Disclaimer: The game asks you what your favourite game is

After reaching the meteor and descending down to a basement the demo ends quite shortly. The demo does let you wander around in the remaining maps that lack story content but contain wide empty spaces and NPCs to talk to. There’s a neat little debug room with a CBS demo (within a demo with a DBS). People were really dedicated to recreating the battle system despite RM’s DBS being quite fine for the job. The urge to have those rolling slot machine numbers for the character status is hard to resist I suppose. One detail I really like is that there’s a photo album in your room of all the photos taken in the previous game.

Overall it’s a neat demo, and the intro is the most impressive part. I wish the game maintained that endgame tone. I don’t mean that it needs to be so edgy that Pokey calls you a bitch, but I think the biggest potential fangames have is to go all out on one or two aspects of something existing. The world building is done for you for the most part, the trick is what to do with all of that and harness it into something different. The game in the next article of this series might just do that.

This became a much bigger article than I intended, but it’s fun to see how the Mother series has affected the RPG Maker culture at large, as even non-EB clones tend to reflect those sensibilities. I’ll also be getting into the games that didn’t even make it past a demo and the wild battle system templates. So stay tuned for part two.

Starmen.net

Starmen.net Fangames (Archive)

PSI-RPG2K (Earthbound Resources and Tutorials)

Final Fantasy VII 2D Remake

the way you speak about rm2k3, like “modules, arrays, pointers” sounds like
you’re some badass c++ programmer stuck in the past and only has rm2k3 to
work with
Gutts

Final Fantasy VII is probably the most responsible for the enthusiasm many had in the RPG Maker community as a whole. Even RM2K’s default menu resembles a menu eerily familiar to anyone who’s ever played a Final Fantasy game. While the gameplay template was more akin to Dragon Quest, it was very clear users wanted to make their own Final Fantasies. Fan games, fan sequels, fan remakes, you know it. But even if you weren’t interested, no matter how original a game in RPG Maker was, FF7’s influence and DNA could be felt in all of them.

The top popular games on RMN as of writing

The idea of remaking a Final Fantasy game was always brought up in idea feedback forum threads. Of course, anything past FF6 would be more considered a “demake” because RPG Maker is 2D. Questions would arise at the dilemma of remaking something so close to or above the capabilities of the engine you’re doing it in. Remaking the NES Final Fantasy games made sense, but that had already been done before by Square themselves, multiple times. Doing the SNES games was about on par what RM2K3 was designed for, but even that still has its issues. As we get further out into demake territory the purpose of remaking starts to evaporate. What’s the point? What is the logic in doing this?

The rabbit hole goes deep with Final Fantasy fan games made in RPG Maker

Let’s assume for a moment that the question has been answered. Then there’s the problem of the RPG Maker community often being very amateur. There are a lot of choices to be made on what exactly your goal is. Is it to pretend that Squaresoft had actually made a 7th game on the SNES? Or is it to render everything FF6 styled as a substitute instead? Would you use the character sprites that look like RTP? Would the goal then be to do whatever is humanly possible in RPG Maker? There are a lot of directions and intentions to go in, and very few would realize a consistent process. But one such game got very close to being consistent, and that is Vanit’s Final Fantasy VII 2D Remake.

The goal is pretty straight forward: What if FF7 was 2D and created in some kind of alternate reality? The author’s intentions are documented pretty well in the game-page description. Reading through this, it’s easy to realize how subjective this can all get. Vanit is very clear about preserving even the flaws of FF7, however those flaws may be interpreted. For instance, do you fix the typos of the game? Or would the typos still exist in the proposed alternate reality? Vanit recreated all of the UI as best he could, while the over world graphics had to be completely different. Animations, however, were timed out in-sync with the original game as much as possible. Simple details like Cloud popping back into position after attacking were implemented.

Of course PS1 Cloud decides to crit when syncing this up

Liberties still had to be made though. The angle of the pre-rendered backgrounds means that everything had to be locked at a top-down angle that worked well with the grid-like movement RPG Maker came with, a default characteristic. Speaking of RPG Maker defaults, what is most notable about this project is the solution to forgo the default battle system and remake it from scratch with event programming. This means using the point and click tools RPG Maker gives you with no proper coding. It’s one of the more bizarre instances as CBSes were often rare, let alone used for a fan project. Most people who were capable of making CBSes were computer science students who made you wonder why they weren’t just making their own engine with C++ or curing cancer.

Probably more impressive than the CBS is the custom menu. The menu has been fully recreated and is the closest thing to the real game. Visually, the menu does bring out some very specific nuances in how PS1 displays video to the TV screen. As most know, RPG Maker is rendered at 320×240. FF7 actually has 3 different resolution modes, 320×240 for the battles, 320×224 for the maps, and 364×240 for the menus. This makes it difficult to recreate everything pixel per pixel as there has to be choices in how to best to constrain the widths as faithfully as possible. Not only that but the way you would copy the colors based on the original console is up for interpretation.

As I compare the two screens, small things start to crop up. Why is Cloud’s MP at 54/56 at the very start of the game? What about the 240 gil? He’s also about to level up, likely intended for the first incoming battle. Many of these choices are probably arbitrary, but maybe not, it’s hard to say. You’ll notice that Cloud is named instead of being the mysterious Ex-Soldier. It’s mainly due to Vanit running into limitations and deciding to just name Cloud by default, which he details in the best way to own someone online over CMSes. The auto-scrolling is another detail that’s been studied. The CMS was even known for some breakthroughs. If FF7 was only its menu, the 2D Remake would technically be feature complete. The only thing left to do is to actually build the scenes, the story and the battle sequences to support it. Which is the hardest part.

Loading up the game, it’s surreal to hear the bombing mission midi (ripped straight from the PC version) play as Cloud hops out of the train like old times. The chibi-fied nature of the RTP charasets blends pretty well with how you’d remember the pop-eye 3D models. Though, it is hilarious to see some of the stiff 3D animations faithfully recreated in sprite form. Even the way the AVALANCHE NPCs moves on ahead of you demonstrates the nuances behind FF7’s direction. There’s also the text boxes being displayed in a custom fashion that lets them appear anywhere on the screen, and where and when they pop up is faithfully recreated. There are some slight differences if you’re paying attention, like the steam coming out of the train right before Biggs jumps out. Barret voices his distrust for you, and that’s about as far as the demo gets. You can wander around a bit and fight some battles and mess around with the menu, but sadly you aren’t able to blow up the reactor. Vanit eventually gave up on completing the bombing mission and the project as a whole.

I think it does answer the question of why to “demake” a game, though. It strips away the technological/professional differences between RPG Maker games and the games they’re inspired by. It highlights the vision FF7 had and what it meant to so many people. It’s also a craft, in that there have been many many many many attempts at demaking or remaking FF7, but I would say Vanit’s attention to detail highlights that there is an eye for noticing even the most arbitrary of things. However incidental or slapped together a lot of choices in FF7 may have been, there is plenty that can go wrong even in recreating many of these things. That by itself, I think, is interesting. It makes you question the fabric of any creative choice. When things get more subjective on how best to interpret and handle things, a back and forth conversation tends to happen. You see, FF7 was made by humans, for humans, and you can’t really “port” that.

However, being on the frontier of remaking a beloved franchise without any money or credit for originality might not be too liberating for most people. It’s a very arduous task with very little pay-off. There might even be a DMCA in it for you when you do complete it all, and your hard work has to be hosted on torrent sites. Assuming, that is, you don’t get a C&D letter before the project even finishes. There’s also the fact that maybe only the people in the RPG Maker community would appreciate it, and even then as a novelty. It’s a weird curiosity niche that satisfies the what-ifs but not really an entertainment product. As detailed in his blog posts, Vanit moved onto other things and decided to release the source code for all to see. People are welcome to expand on the project or use his findings to further their game development endeavors but it’s pretty much a closed chapter.

It’s easy to look down on fan efforts and wonder why anyone would take it seriously, but that applies to most things that aren’t necessary to your survival. It’s only because an endeavor is accepted by communities that they seem more valid. Even the commercial FF7 Remake could be considered a fan effort, just an officially endorsed one. At the end of day, just go after what you think is cool, after all that’s how Final Fantasy VII was made right?

Final Fantasy VII 2D Remake Gamepage + Download

Final Fantasy VII 2D Remake Topic on Gaming W

REAL cms autoscroll in Rm2k3 Tutorial

FF7 2D Intro Youtube Video

FF7 2D Remake Youtube Channel

Another Hiatus Post (and my game)

I thought I’d plug what I’ve been working on these past months. It’s not an RPG per say, nor is it even made in RPG Maker. Though it does contain a lot of aspects of those things (Top down perspective, tile based, dialogue text, exploration oriented). It’s a Survival Horror game with an emphasis on inventory management and navigating through underground areas:

>> Click Here << to check out the Steam store page (Wishlists appreciated)

The core gameplay is a huge love letter to Resident Evil (the original specifically). Past the first game I never felt they really nailed the balance of having just enough ammo to defeat the necessary enemies. Obviously as Resident Evil rose in popularity there were other gameplay avenues and trends to consider. But as someone came into the series really late (2015) first picking up the REmake on gamecube, I couldn’t find any other game that matched the way item pick ups changed the way you explored the environment (even games way before RE4 barely bother with this). I realized most other Survival Horror games really just cared about the story, pacing or puzzles (which is fine!).

My goal with this game isn’t merely to scratch an itch relating to one specific game. There are a lot of ideas I mixed in because I thought they’d change the flavor of the typical genre I’m working in. The setting is very much a post-apocalyptic underground scenario in which you just wander around and discover the history for yourself. A big inspiration is the manga BLAME! In which the plot is somewhat scarce with some intrigue throughout, but the substance is in the background, the strange spaces that unfold in the panels.

BLAME! A manga that has developed a cult following over the years

There’s a certain feeling I can’t describe that I want to recreate in an interactive fashion. Though I don’t know if I’ll be successful or if it’s even possible to convey. It falls somewhere in the camp between appropriating German Expressionism and wandering around abandoned areas IRL.

If this sounds like a value proposition to you then I hope you’re one of many. I want to find out that I’m not isolated in my search for a game like this, it just so happens I decided to make it myself. Somewhere along the way a lot of Sci-fi RPGMaker games have probably influenced my sensibilities in how the maps were constructed and laid out.

Anyway I’m pretty close to release and things have been busy. So that’s why I don’t have much extra time other than to promote it and constantly think about the launch.

Appreciate any support and don’t forget to wishlist!

Small Hiatus

I wrote a big tldr of my hiatus situation, then wordpress decided not to save as a draft in the middle of it. So tldr: I don’t want to have people thinking an article will spring up randomly any time soon or give the impression that the site’s dying. Rest assured I’ll get back to this blog in a few months after dealing with business.

Also check out Villnoire, Country of Snow, Pilgrim’s Road, and Theia – The Crimson Eclipse, if you’re looking for any 2019 rm2k3 games to try out. They’re quite cool.

Finding Forever Eden

Author: Nerow_Alexangelos / Rowen
Released: January-November 2006
Engine: RPG Maker 2003

The title of this game probably says more about its development than getting an idea of what the story could be about (zing, still got it kids). It barely got past the status of being a notable proof of concept demo and always seemed to be re-iterated on over and over. The last incarnation of this game doesn’t even have the same title (on RMN it’s known as Ghosts of the Arcanum), at some point the author was compelled enough to share the history of the game’s development through screenshots. Through the several UI changes, the swapping of ideas and scenarios, it’s hard to remember which of these screenshots represent what I remember of this game.

My mind conjures up a haze of a saturated maps with a semi advanced DBS showing off potential features. There’s a deliberate noir-like tone enhanced by the charsets dressed in garbs that would fit in The Matrix. That’s probably apparent in all 4 of the demos, but it does beg the question of how one compartmentalizes game releases. The creator of Arafell likely wishes to bury the 2005 demo in favor of the newer refined commercial 2016 release. That’s 11 years of conjuring what Arafell was eventually going to be before the full release finally concluded it. There’s a similar discourse on how a certain popular TV show based on a set of fantasy novels should have ended. But what if the media in question never ends, and what if it’s split in multiple re-attempts?

The first demo named Finding Forever Eden – Intro contains a whopping 2 maps that feature a cut-scene introducing the game with a voice over followed by a slow text crawl (that’s still faster than l i t t l e m o n e y) explaining the lore of the game with terms that would make for good metal band names like “Celestial” which refer to angelic beings tied to the titular “Forever Eden”. I won’t go to much into the story as it kind of is what you’d expect from an RPG lore dump, but there is something about it that focuses a lot on biblical interest and spiritual connections.

The second demo released in around March 2006 simply titled “Finding Forever Eden”, features a battle training area complete with a scrolling abstract white grid background. A mysterious character tells you about how battles work and you’re thrown into a fight with 6 beings known as “Glitched Shado” there’s not a whole lot to the fight really as they have really large HP pools that can be dispatched with a strong AOE. But then the fight just resets again. The load file does have a NPC reference to the game Eldritch, a game made by Legion which is cemented in ancient forum history.

Onto Finding Forever Eden 4.0 (May 1st 2006), though not quite the 4th game in the series it was common for many RM creators to never have a consistent way of numbering versions. We can at least assume it came before 9.0 though. The title screen no longer features a hand drawn anime character and leads into a rather abstract menu backed up by the signature white grid. There are many menu options and seperate story cutscenes. Much of the dialogue is rather hard to understand. As evident by the music, it feels like being thrusted in the middle of a Kingdom Hearts cutscene with no context for what’s going on. There’s a dream sequence that resembles the beggining of KH too, but there’s a more mature slant to the world that gives this game its own voice. It steers clear of any common RPG terms like “Potion” or “Magic” and instead has a lot of abstract replacements for what you’d typically see in most other fantasy affairs (for example the poison status is called “Impurity”).

The battles are slightly improved this time around, featuring a context command that allows you to perform moves in specific situations. For instance in a battle surrounded by two enemies you can jump up in the air to let the enemy hit the other. It’s not complex to use at all, but it does add a cinematic flair to the combat filled with black robed figures. It concludes with more monologues from a mysterious robed figure, and our amnesic hero is left with a lot of questions before a Coming Soon message appears. In my own way, I too want answers. None of the demos really resemble what I remember of this game, and yet the game’s themes is very bent on memories and illuminating the truth in darkness. I certainly don’t remember this much story, so it’s still a treat. Perhaps 9.0 will shed some light.

This is the first shot I see and it basically confirms what I remember. A foresty cabin area with a combat demonstration. By now the aesthetics of the text boxes have become a muted black with a thick white border. What’s also apparent are the custom symbols that became widespread when hacking into the RPG_RT became common knowledge at this point. To be able to witness the subtle UI color differences between builds is an exercise of realizing how re-iteration is sometimes a slow gradual process.

The funny thing about the schizophrenic nature of the story in the 4.0 demo is that it’s analogous to how much the story-line and presentation keeps changing ever so slightly in development. The main character Rowen is subjected to dream-like sequences with the drive to find out why he is in the situations he is in. There’s a large focus on memories and anthology style of story telling where details are obfuscated in favor of ramblings about light and darkness. It’s not to say that the development having setbacks is some kind of avant garde way of making this more than it is, it’s just that the tendency to wander in ideas seems to correlate with the game’s unwillingness to sum up anything concrete.

The screenshots section on RMN tells a story that the game’s development started as early as RM95. The game also went through some unreleased progress on the author’s youtube channel. Some time in 2016 the author asked about engine recommendations. One day it might return in some form, but at this point it’s not really about remarking on the shoulda couldas or hoping that this game would be released, but to at least derive some admiration for what made the tiny snippets of this project so memorable. It’s not that the demo has any compelling gameplay or moments, but that the shell of what it wants to be can lead to a pretty cool set of ideas. The Matrix meets Kingdom Hearts is a rough way to sum it up, but I can’t think of any other media that tries to attempt that either. Only in a strange niche part of the RPG Maker community could a thing like this appear in the void.

For more thoughts on the game I’m doing an experimental commentary video over the demo gameplay footage. Let me know what you think of the format:

One correction, the intro demo actually came before the first battle demo

Download (All 4 Demos)
Ghosts of Arcanum Game Page
Youtube Development Footage
Youtube Playthrough (Commentary)
Youtube Playthrough (Gameplay Only)

Seekers of the Sun

Author: Remains of Scythe / Remainaery
Released: June 2004
Engine: RPG Maker 2000

In the early 2000s, CBSes (or Custom Battle Systems) were all the rage among RPG maker users. At the time RM2K was only able to do Dragon Quest (first person perspective) battles that were quite plain. There was an unspeakable notion in the scene at the time: that almost everyone wanted something akin to Final Fantasy 6. Give us chibi sprites standing on the side of the screen delivering blows that pop out numbers and all of our problems would be solved (except for motivation, limitations of time, and responsibilities). However Seekers of the Sun is notable in that it didn’t just rest at making a side view, but decided to tackle a Chrono Trigger styled battle system. Where the battles would happen on the actual map you were just walking around on. There have been “tech” demos that attempted this, but this is the only actual playable RM game with a CT styled CBS that I can recall.

The game is set in a cold dystopian underground complex. You play as the edgelord of edgelords, an artificial being known as Abyss. Much like the start of Elfen Lied (or the more kid friendly Pokemon: Mewtwo Strikes Back) you’re going on a rampage on those responsible for creating you. Abyss spouts lines of dialogue about how powerful he is and pathetic the things he’s going up against. Although this is all quite self-indulgent and angsty I kind of welcome it these days. Anecdotally I come across a lot of modern RPGs and games that are a bit too afraid to go down this route, or are too self-aware to fall too hard into this trap. The strength of this game’s grim dark tone is that things just feel IMPORTANT in ways that are hard to explain. Probably due to the various biblical references and showy philosophical musings. Ultimately this feels like an in-media res intro ala Breath of Fire 4 where you play as a powerful being at first to get a taste of the battle system while things are still easy. It’s likely you’re meant to play a more optimistic protagonist later on.

The graphics are mostly CT edits that are cohesively put together. There’s this dominant blue hue added to a lot of the assets and makes the world rather cold and unwelcoming. Some places look really great, and even if they’re a slog to navigate sometimes, they sure work well as a backdrop for when the battle starts. Speaking of the battles, there’s sadly not much to say. You can spam attack, defend, or use an item. The author’s note says he was persuaded to just release what he had even if the battle system was still basic. Still it’s really cool to see what the result looks like when put into an actual game with story. The execution is simply making the attack animation be a picture that moves to whatever xy coordinate the monster is, and play effects over the target. The challenge compared to other CBSes is mainly figuring out how to organize events on the maps themselves without things getting too messy. Taking a peak into the editor it seems like a lot of copy pasting is done in an organized fashion on the maps to pull this off. Every possible target and charset setting/animation is placed on the map even if you’re only fighting way less than the maximum. There are interesting design challenges to consider as far as how they’re initiated and where the space ought to be. There aren’t a ton of a battles to experience as a result of this.

The CBS programming was done by Kokibi, and in true collaborative fashion, Remains of Sycthe helped with the art on Kokibi’s own project: A Gate into Eternity. Seekers of The Sun garnered way more attention despite both projects featuring elaborate battle systems. Notably this was a German made game (seems only to be in English as far as I know) that was featured on Gaming Ground Zero alongside the likes of Velsarbor. It’s interesting to look into the author’s history and his origins being that of a webcomic circle. A lot of the faceset/portaits are his and seems very much in tune with the angsty dark anime aesthetic that plagued many deviant art pages and webrings. It gives the impression that RPGMaker wasn’t just for making “your own Final Fantasy” but also to bring imagined adventures to life that you had in drawings and in your mind. There’s a blend of rips and custom art that really adds character to the game and even though this only got as far as a proof of concept, I’m glad it exists.

Estimated Length: Less than an hour

Download Here (English)
RPG Maker Quartier Download (Mirror)
RMArchiv Page (Download Mirror)
Author’s Deviant Art
GGZ Archive and History + Download
Youtube Playthrough
Interview with Kokibi and Scythe (Google Translated from German)
German Site Page (RPG Atelier)
Trailer (Youtube)

Crossbone

Created by: Daniel Olsén
Released: August 2003
Engine: RM2000

It’s got pirates, robots, explosions and an old man who talks to birds! What more could you want? Back in the Gaming Ground Zero days I would occasionally browse the main site. There was no way to know of an upcoming game release or anything, no notifications or popups. You’d just go through your daily sites and hope to see an update. Games weren’t user submitted on GGZ you see, they were often approved and placed by the webmaster. One early morning, I happened across a game called Crossbone with only a couple of sentences and a title screen to go by. That was the thing about GGZ, you never really knew what you were going to get. Yet the games from that site were always a step above most RM games due to the curated nature of the members and the community.

Replaying this for the first time in 15 years, I realize this game still has a lot of heart. While the battles are a bit rough (enemies are sometimes higher HP than they need to be), the sequences are just so imaginatively crafted. A lot of the scenes often take a page out of a Final Fantasy’s idea of comedic relief. Where nameless henchmen have just as much personality as the main characters. A lot of the events play out like a Saturday-morning cartoon with a pint of seriousness. You play as Breeze, an anchor wielding (swords aren’t cool enough for him) freelancer who always has trouble following him wherever he goes. After getting entangled with some pirates he gets knocked out by a wave caused by an unknown being. This spirals into further crazy adventures.

“I was planning to pack so much into that game that it would have been unwieldy. I did learn a lot about being creative within limitations thinking back on it, even if it creeps up on me from time to time. Now my problem is usually the opposite, I tend to over-plan so I end up exhausted before I even begin haha.”
Daniel Olsén

The art is comprised mostly of original art overlayed on an RTP chipset framework. For example you might see the standard RTP ship tilset, but covered in metallic tiles made by the author himself. A lot of the scenes are accompanied by drawings that act as comic book panels of sorts. They give a really good cinematic emphasis in the flashbacks and important segments. I could talk about the individual aspects of this game, but it really comes down to it feeling like an adventure. I think RPGs always have that problem of sometimes starting out with hometown + chores or like fighting rats in a sewer dungeon. Crossbone just says screw that, you’re fighting a robot with an anchor in the first 6 minutes. There’s a sequence where this old man summons a giant owl god thing with a sword to fight this giant bug thing. There’s another section where a ship you’re on gets raided by dragon people using a slime infested coral reef that stops the ship from moving, but like, it can also turn into a mech? AND A UNICORN LOOKING BOAT ALSO TURNS INTO A MECH TO STOP IT.

“The ship battle sequence for Crossbone is made by the creator of Mog’s Adventure, in return I created the maps and such for the final dungeon of that game. A lot of the non-sprite art in the game is embarrassing looking back since I tended to draw the heads before the body so the proportions came out all janky. But it is what it is and every experience is valuable for the future. After Crossbone I went to college, I experience various things and worked as a freelance illustrators for a few years.”
Daniel Olsén

The dungeon in Mog’s Adventure that Daniel worked on

The author Daniel Olsén still works on game projects from time to time. His passion for fiction and art has never faded and mostly does art and comics. It’s easy to see the connection between how bombastic and theatrical Crossbone was and his current artwork. Although that can take a lot of effort and time, sometimes leaving an impression is worth it in the end. It certainly added to the surprise of browsing through RPG Maker games all those years ago.

Check out Daniel Olsén’s portfolio!

Estimated Length : 2 hours or so

Download Here (Archive)
GGZ Archive and History
Youtube Playthrough (Chapter 1)

RM Historia March 2019 Roundup

Since I’m in the habit of doing a lot of record keeping, here are some article recaps for the previous month. It’s been half a month in starting this blog, and the rush of realizing the need and potential for this… thing, this project, is easy to get overwhelmed by. I decided to pace myself more and keep some articles on the back burner instead of uploading them as soon as possible.

To summarize what this is, RM Historia aims to go through the RPG Maker games that time has forgot and provide context behind the communities they were made in. It also dwells on the connections prevalent in our media in order to try and better make sense of this fast internet high-way. Secretly it’s just an excuse to post screenshots/video coverage and keywords of rm2k/3 games for the giant search machines to latch onto.

Here are the games covered last month:

Wings of Origin

An emotive and vengeful story combined with the use of Brave Fencer Musashi tracks made this small demo stick with me. It’s a ride full of twists and turns all in 18 minutes.

Shattered Samurai

I recall this topping a lot of download lists on various sites probably because of the title or its liberal use of Rurouni Kenshin images. Regardless, it’s a pretty subpar action game with a story that focuses heavily on the death of the main characters parents (and by heavily I mean literally every NPC references it).

Fatal Limits

That’s the cool thing about RPG Maker, you didn’t need high caliber assets or talented skills to convey a dense dystopia. There’s just an aesthetic to this that’s hard to resist.

Redmoon Saga

Created 2 months after the RPGMaker 2000 translation had been released, clocking in at around 1 hour squeezed into 15 maps, this demo managed to impress people at the time.

Zeara – Tales of the Matrielle

Zeara’s charsets and monsters are custom while the chipsets are heavily edited RTP to match with the style. There’s a very cute aesthetic to the entire game, and it looks rather unique as a result.

Tetris

The real question though, is it THE Tetris? Very likely not. The aesthetics are somewhat charming though, and it feels in the vein of CD-i Tetris and how it’s more interesting to look into the background/music choices than the actual programming.

The Rose Chronicles

This started just as a side project Legacy001 worked on to take a break from doing the Naufragar series. Though it’s understandable why the project took too much effort to continue working on. In the end it ended up being one of the more memorable demos of the mid-GW era.

NigSek: A Monster’s Tail

This homage really interacts with the lore and ethos of Zelda, given that it came out before Wind Waker, there’s an interesting context from what material was available back in 2001.

Huey the Kid

Why did I remember this game? Why did I pick this game to review? I dunno. There doesn’t have to be a crazy meaning to everything, media doesn’t always have to go through holding up against the test of time. What matters to me the most about this game was the simple context of when and where I was playing it.

Solar Tear

The perfectionist mentalities were rampant, but so were the expectations and the standards. It’s sometimes hard to release with so much pressure on the line. In any case I was glad I got to experience this cyberpunk landscape once more.

ALEX : A Two Days Collaborative Game

This was a chance to witness many different development skills people possessed and put them together. Outside of this event, some members would never release a game of their own due to their motivation, but the event was a chance to just put something out there. There was also a guarantee that everyone would be playing each others maps, leading into something to talk and reflect about.

Legion Saga Zenith

Created by: BusterManZero
Released: June 2003
Engine: RM2000

So what if I told you people not only made fan games in rpgmaker, but people made fan games of rpgmaker games in rpgmaker? Really makes you think doesn’t it? The catalyst for such a project came from the Legion Saga series by a user called Kamau. These were 3 full games made in RPG Maker loosely inspired by Suikoden and other RPGs. What made Legion Saga special was that it was proof that you really could make a “numbered” series with RPG Maker provided you had the motivation and drive to pull it off. The original Legion Saga was going to have a remake made in RPG Maker 2003 (though there’s even another still being made), and there was even a spinoff game featuring a side character that had an ABS. It was everything you’d expect from a “franchise” even having its own lore wiki before wikis were even a thing. Enter in people wanting to make fan games to further expand on this potential universe, 9 of them in fact. Many of them were never finished, but the most prominent was Legion Saga Zenith (Not to be confused with Legion Saga Zero) as it was one of the first.

This is a strange combo of things. At first, the system sets, the Roco facesets, the Luca Blight Battle midis and the political dialogue involving kings and assassins are all there to feel like Legion Saga. Now most common wisdom would say if it looks and quacks like a duck then… but wait – the wide open mapping with no concern for proportions, the constant spelling mistakes, dialogue prose that of a robot… this is a noob RTP game! It may be far from RTP in terms of resources, but the application of everything makes it feel very rudimentary. It’s not to say the actual Legion Saga series doesn’t always have its shortcomings, but there’s just something about the cutscenes in Zenith that feel “off” as if there isn’t any coherence to the narrative.

Important events will just happen and then resolve moments after. Typically a known Legion Saga character will come in to save the day only to leave faster than that. As if these characters were actors with limited billing to do a cameo in a straight to VHS sequel. The writing overall really does sit in the realm of Shattered Samurai. Instead of awkwardly appropriating Asian tropes though, it’s weirdly appropriating itself while collapsing in on the source material. When both the source game and fan game are made in the same engine and only mere years apart, it becomes interesting to separate the standards and differences between the two, a microcosm of fandom vs creator interaction.

“Okay that’s great and all” you interrupt, “but is this game deemed CANON?”

Looking at the handy rules and regulations, you wouldn’t even be considered a fan game if you set the events after Legion Saga 3. But what does it matter at this point? Star Wars is by all accounts being made by fans these days. Just about any long lasting franchise will be recycled into eternity thanks to copyright extensions (Several NES games would be entered in the public domain by now to give you an idea of an alternate history). RPG Maker 2k/3 pre-2013 was a wild west though, the Legion Saga games were made on an illegal program used along with illegally used graphics. There is no real jurisdiction to refer to, nothing was enforced except from the culture of the RM community itself. That’s what I like about the situation of Legion Saga fan-games, they just did not give a shit about the outside world, yet stood by these invisible rules by Kamau’s word anyway. One thing that’s for sure though… is that Space Funeral 2 and 3 are definitely canon.