The adventure starts in the quiet village of Wooded Heavens, inside the Robewood forest: here our protagonist is informed by his friend Nillia that his mentor Gariod needs to talk with him. This will be the last lesson, then Gariod will have to leave for some unexplained task. But after he left our protagonist is suddenly attacked by a mysterious assassin...
Fallenwood is a game that takes inspiration not from classoc Jrpgs like the Final Fantasy series but rather from Crpgs like Baldur's Gate. The game begins with the choice of the name between Flint, Busnin and Furuk, and then the class: Fighter, Mage, Rogue or Ranger. Facesets are taken from the Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights artworks, and Fallenwood comes as close to a western cRPG experience you’ll likely get
with the RPGMaker engine.
There are optional side-quest, dialog-trees
and the feel of the demo reminds me of old AD&D cRPGs. There are no
random battle encounters, the bane of most jRPGs, and the whole thing
has a very polished feel. Sadly, after you leave the first village and
the woods there’s not much you can do anymore and you’ll get stuck.
Random Fact: it's not a mystery that Fallenwood was inspired by Baldur's Gate, in fact the mentor is called Gariod, sometimes even mispelled Garion, a very similar name to Gorion, the wise mentor from the Forgotten Realms. It's pretty obvious that instead Nillia is a sort of proto-Imen from BG1.
Final Verdict: what was unique about Fallenwood was not only its open-ended design, but the choice to go with ambient sounds in place of music. What a pity this was only a 30 minutes demo.
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