Grissan by Spirit Young

Grissan is a cowboy that seems a hybrid between Chuck Norris and Roland Deschain from The Dark Tower Series. Like Roland, in fact, our Grissan travels through a land populated by mutants and zombies. A ghost warns Grissan that an evil creatures, the Deity, wants him dead. So our hero starts his hunt.
I warn you that this game is an exaggerate parody with strong language and some politically incorrect situations: for example Grissan is a violent badass that heals sniffing "magic marching powder". The complete adventure lasts for about one hour.

Grissan is a short game that has more in common with the choose-your-own-adventure games than to rpgs: this is a series of battles interspersed with the occasional dialogue and choice, for example in some parts we can choose to trade with some vendor or decide which path Grissan will take to reach Deity. In some cases it's possible to fight more battles for extra loot, but there are no experience points nor levels, and Grissan will upgrade his stats during some specific points (like when finding some steroids). It's a short and peculiar game.

Download Link

Rpgmaker.net

Rmarchiv.de 

Random Fact: Grissan uses a single map, and everything happens on battle backgrounds, including all the dialogues. We only see Grissan's and the other people faces in the portraits, but the visual is always in first person. Despite this, the use of various sprites, animations and sounds really makes the game more dynamic.

Final Verdict: Grissan is not a classic or even game that can be taken seriously, it's cheesy, has many typos and even the name and title is often mispelled during the game. Despite this it's still and enjoyable parody with some funny moments.

Name 73 by Cynon

The story begins in the far future: the capital of the world is Neo London, and the population is forced to live inside underground cities that keeps them safe from the wild contaminated desert. One of these inhabitants is Erin Marchesi, a labourer in Gravis City, where she works in a factory of the Haas Corporation that refines a prized material called Kletium and makes ammunitions. One day Vadriel, the bodyguard of Mr. Haas, calls her to perform a special mission to evaluate her skills. This has probably something to do with the fact that Erin in the past fell into the Kletium and survived. But what are their motives?

 

Name 73 is a RPG Maker 2003 game created by Cynon. It is one of the few RPG Maker games that takes human racism and real-world religion and makes them both topics. According to the developer, he was sick and tired of hearing anti-religious and anti-racism messages being sent in commercial RPGs that hid behind fantasy names. 
The game for the futuristic dystopian setting and some similar locations reminded to me of A Blurred Line, but it's different even if it belongs to the rpg category: expect battles, exploration, fetch quests and other classic activities.

 

Download Link

Rmarchiv.de

Random Fact: the game folder contains also a .txt file with some notes: these include the text from the intro sequence, the bios of the playable cast, the details about the other important characters of the game, and the developer's notes.

 

Final Verdict: a dark futuristic game that reminds to me of A Blurred Line for the setting and the protagonist being a normal worker. It's a nice stylish game, only issue I had was the lot of walking around you have to do, with a character that has a mediocre speed and the lack of an in-game map. For the rest it was good, pity it includes only the first four chapters of the story.

Flower Bubble Game!!! by LockeZ

The game Flower Bubble Game!!! is all about collecting flowers… and sometimes blowing bubbles. Anyway, let's start from the beginning: Ginny is a blonde girls that plans pick up flowers and sell them to get money, lots of money. That's it. Well to tell the truth there are a couple of subquests (like learning arts from a pink ninja that lets you unlock new areas, or removing a huge plant that blocks the stage where the musicians want to play.

 

This isn't a fantasy rpg, nor a horror adventure, but rather a casual repetitive colorful and lighthearted time-wasting game about picking and selling flowers.
This activity is stressing and apparently the only way to recover the PP aka Picking Points, is blowing bubbles or resting. Money will be used to unlock upgrades and gadgets, while levelling up will let Ginny learn new skills. For example the Basket Case lets you take the big flowers: you will need to spend 3 PP instead of 1, BUT their value is 6 gold coins instead of 1! Anyway check the game here:

Dowload Link

Internet Archive

Glorioustrainwrecks.com

Rpgmaker.net

Rmarchiv.de

 

Random Fact: the author made this game for his girlfriend, who kept pestering him about it, and then dumped her for liking it.

 

Final Verdict: a really unique game with a repetitive gameplay and a repetitive music. In any case it is not much different from most mobile games, but for me the best part was the colorful graphics and the quirky characters, such as Shining Blossom the Pink ninja. He deserves his own game!

A Home Far Away by Strangeluv

A normal day in the serene village of Everdale. School's just been let out. The village is preparing for a birthday party. Mr. Ronedale has lost his chickens. Mrs. Apricot is baking a pie. And little Danais is consigned by his sister Farrah to buy a b'day present. Enter Skarsgaard, a local thief consigned by his boss to raid this serene village.
And then everything gets thrown into disarray. Danais is missing. Farrah has to go out in search of him and they end up in a town very far away from home! How are they going to get back? To make things more complicated, in comes a band of pirates arrives in the port town. And the Mayor is suffering a migraine from demands from the townspeople: a clown needs cheering up, a young boy needs help wooing a girl, a shaman needs his monkeys returned, a thief needs to be caught, a merchant needs to be protected, and so much more! 
How are Danais and Farrah going to find their way home in the midst of all this insanity?

 

A Home Far Away isn't your typical epic fantasy rpgmaker game: it's a lighthearted story driven adventure about two siblings, a kid and a young girl, trying to go home. They live fantastic adventures during their journey, and the game offers to the player puzzles, minigames, exploration, little subquests and some battles too. There is a lot of variety and the game is really full of many little details.

 

Download Link

Internet Archive

Rpgmaker.net

Rmarchiv.de

 

Random Fact: Captain Grizzlybeard, the leader of the pirates who is in a mid-life crisis, will come back in another game by Strangeluv, Leo & Leah: a love story, released one year after this game. So technically both games take place in the same world. 

 

Final Verdict: this was an entertaining journey of two little heroes, and a fun entertaining adventure with some diversion an minigames, even if for me the first half was definitely better than the second. In any case it was still a charming little game.

Tenora by Dreaded

The army veteran and operative Kinson is betrayed by his own organization, and now the president Trevor wants him dead. But despite being hunted by his former colleagues he survives and forms a ragtag team of misfits that have a grudge against his former employees: this includes Karana, an ex engineer, Hirashi, a gothic gang member and Alleck the chemist. However in the dystopic futuristic world of Tenora, the menace comes from the depths of Hell.

 

Tenora is a sci-fi adventure that was clearly influenced by A Blurred Line: not only the setting and maps are very similar, and the plot is basically the same, but Kinson, besides his skill with the dual guns, has the same powers of Talan. For the rest it offers a more linear experience, pity for the any typos, but the developer made better games after finishing this one. I'll post them later, for now enjoy Tenora here:

Download Link

Rmarchiv.de

Random Fact: if the main inspiration came from a Blurred Line, the protagonist Kinson uses the same charset of Evan Selwyn, an important character of Onyx, and the protagonist of Onyx 2. Tenora was in fact released some time after the previously mentioned games.

 

 

Final Verdict: Tenora seems an edgier version of A Blurred Line, clearly simpler and more linear, but these differences aren't a problem. Its problem is that this is the developer's first game, and it shows, as it's not as good as the next games made by Dreaded, but everyone has to start somewhere. In the end it was still enjoyable.

Achievement unlocked: 50 games showcased!

Hello again!

I'm back to say that the library has reached the 50 tomes... or games, one added each day! Ok, some of these stories are incomplete, but still they deserve being remembered. For now I will list only Rpgmaker 2000 and 2003 games, but things will probably change in the future, with the addition of games made with more recent rpgmaker versions and also other engines like Wolf Rpg Editor or even Openbor.

 

I'm also thinking about adding to all the games showcased a "Final Verdict", with a couple of lines about my personal experience playing them. Well, we'll see, anyway there are much more games that will be added!

A Blurred Line by Lysander86

A Blurred Line is a futuristic game that makes us play as Talan, a regular blue-collar worker at a factory run by the powerful Delcentric. When the Director of the Agency is assassinated after giving a speech at the factory Talan works at, Talan finds himself the prime suspect and goes on the run. It's then up to Talan to evade his pursuers while discovering his new powers and getting to the bottom of the mystery at hand.

 

 

A Blurred Line is an old classic praised for its compelling storyline and non-linearity. Aside from a couple of puzzles and minigames, this is a classic Rpgmaker 2000 adventure that uses the default system with a party of characters with various abilities and random battles. Unfortunately the story was left incomplete, the final chapter, Line's End, was teased for a winter 2003 release, but since then, there has been no word on it. It's no doubt that this game influenced several other Rpgmaker games of the following years.

Download Link

Internet Archive

Rpgmaker.net

Rmarchiv.de

 

Let's Play Archive

Youtube Playthrough

 

Random Fact: maybe a coincidence, but the protagonist's name is Talan, almost identical to Taran, the name of a previous complete game by Lysander86: The Book of Three, that was an adaptation of the classic fantasy novel of the same name by Lloyd Alexander.

 

Final Verdict: a classic Cyberpunk adventure, sadly unfinished. I played and enjoyed it a long time ago, and probably hasn't aged well at all. Still I think it was pretty good except maybe for the maps, not really the strong point of Lys86. The non-linearity was instead the main and best aspect.