FADE by Milennin

 

FADE is a direct sequel to the first game, BETA. The story picks up shortly after the ending event from the first game, and continues to build on the established main characters from the first game, as well as introduce new characters later on in the game. It is not required to have played the first game, though. 

 

The game begins with the heroes on a flying airship but soon everything goes badly and they will be stranded in the wilderness without equipment, trying to survive and reach civilization.

Unlike BETA, FADE is a classic fantasy jrpg with a cast of four characters: Roth, Thieme, Rage and Eldin return forming a classic party of four adventurers.

While Beta that was incentrated on the exploration of a single town, Fade is a journey (sadly incomplete) about traversing a forest, hills and a volcano. There are lots of enemies wandering the areas, and luckily no random encounters, but if you want to escape from combat then you need to use an item, the smoke bombs.  Combat is classic but with some features: for example you can recover some mana using the standard attack and each character has a special ability with no cost that provides a temporary small bonus to a party member. While the natural element of the enemy is not important (a fire elemental still receives full damage from Rage's fire attacks), some are able to protect and even counterattack physical or magical attacks, but luckily the game list the party members and enemies buffs and debuffs clearly.

 

Download Link

Rpgmaker.net

Rmarchiv.de

 

Random Fact: you do not need to import the savegame from the previous adventure, BUT that's because the game when you start asked a series of things that happened in BETA. This will changes some dialogues and situations in the game. However, being a demo, this wasn't probably fully implemented.

 

Final Verdict: Fade is just a demo, but in my opinion compared to Beta it is an improvement under every aspect: I liked more the dialogues and situations in Fade, and I also was never stuck into a situations or place without knowing what I had to do next or where I had to go (this happend to me in Beta). There were also less annoying minigames and combat was balanced and familiar, but at the same time it felt different because of the particular complementary abilities. I also like how this game is player friendly, despite providing some good challenges too.