You will jump into the dreams of people you meet and can exit the way you came in or jump into the dream of another person you meet or person within your party. This allows a lot of back and forth into different landscapes, something you will need to do to advance farther in certain realms. You won’t be worrying about random monsters though, they appear on the screen for you to avoid or confront depending on you.

An interesting aspect that adds some difficulty to the game is the lack of a healing item inventory. Within the dreams you will find food of all sorts that will heal your party. Certain characters more than others depending on the food type. The true kicker is once you pick it up it is used immediately and removed from the map. So you need to use them sparingly and make sure it is the right item for the character needing healed most. There is a bit of a safety net as far as healing goes. You can use a fairy that appears near where you start, at a cost. If she heals your party the dreamworlds will react and make the game more difficult. So using her can be more headache than help.

Additionally, here’s an interview Adam Ames of TruePCGaming did with Indinera (the owner of Aldorlea Games). They don’t talk too much about the game itself there, though Indinera does mention that Dreamscape is more puzzle-focused than his usual fare.

The game’s backstory revolves around a man named Kale who can communicate with animals and other creatures. He is eventually cast out of human society, joins with a group of monsters, vanishes, then somehow reappears with godlike powers and commences a campaign of vengeance against humanity. That’s the bad guy. You don’t get to play him. You just play some schlub whose dad was once a general in a war.

Your Father is blamed for the murder of the King and taken away to be executed, your village is attacked and destroyed by monsters, and there is a plot in motion that could very well begin the Fourth Great War. What begins as a simple quest to rescue your Father shall become a fight for the survival of the human race…

So there’s that. Josh writes that PoT contains at least 7 hours of gameplay, and retails for a mere $8. There is a free demo available here, which you can use to try out the game before making any rash decisions. Meanwhile, here is (what else?) a trailer:

I’m not going to bother summarizing TFoG’s generic story. (Playing the game, one gets the overwhelming sense that the developer didn’t care much about it, so why should we?) That said, TFoG uses a pretty neat implementation of the RPG Maker XP engine to produce an action RPG a la the old top-down Zeldas.

The free demo lets you play for up to 60 minutes in 8-minute increments, so feel free to give it a try and see if you like it. To buy the full game, you will need to pay (and I quote) “9.99 USD or 7.50 USD.” The link to buy the PC Version of the game takes you to a page where the price is $9.99, so I can only assume that the XBLIG version accounts for the alternate $7.50 pricing.

While you wait for the demo to download, here is the game’s official trailer:

EDIT: Oh, I almost forgot; they’re doing some manner of promotion where you can win a free copy of the full game if you give their game a 5/5 rating on XBox Live Indie Games. Frankly, I don’t think this is entirely ethical, but here are the details if you want to participate anyway:

I offer 3 xbox free copies of the game every week during 4 weeks.
All you need to do is to rate the game 5 stars on Xbox Live Indie Games and PM me your gamertag at :
http://geexgames.xooit.fr/

Aldorlea Games describes the game like so:

Marine and her friends have six days to find the four remaining warriors and make it to the showdown!
With such tight schedule and dramatic events piling up, Marine’s nerves are all over the place.
But Jeanne the tiny fairy is back! And this alone helps even the balance!

Millennium 4 is the most suspenseful, thrilling and emotional Millennium installment so far!

15+ character
25+ secret rooms!
25+ quests!
20+ hours of gameplay!
Battle superb monsters including 9 Animal Kings!
Awesome production values

Below are some screenshots, presumably representative of the aforementioned awesome production values. The game sells for $13.99, but in case you need more convincing, you can download a demo right here.

Arvale: Treasure of Memories, Episode 1 is a jRPG by Jaybot7 (Jason Surguine) originally released back in 2009. Created in RPG Maker and using mostly default RPG Maker assets, Arvale is a short game with a silly atmosphere and some amusing dialog. However, the issues with this game’s mechanics are no joke.

Let me tell you a little bit about the world of Arvale. It’s made up of four elements: Fire, Water, Earth, and Everything Else. (No, really. Everything Else is an element.)

As you might have gathered, Arvale is an extremely silly game. If you are like me and enjoy silly things, this aspect of Arvale will probably appeal to you. Admittedly, Arvale’s characters are all one-note caricatures. However, the dialog is written cleverly enough that I found myself chuckling on more than one occasion as I played through the game.

The plot, meanwhile, is a new spin on an old trope. When the game starts, you learn that the protagonist has saved the world already. He is now just a gardener with a head injury (which, conveniently, prevents him from remembering any of his prior exploits).

I’ve played plenty of RPGs in my day, and this is the first time I can think of where a game has used this particular setup. The main character’s memory loss becomes the basis for a great many jokes. Unfortunately, however, the biggest joke is on the player. There is no Great Quest. It’s been finished already. All that’s left are mundane, workaday quests. In any other RPG, this could have served as a poignant commentary on modern life. But here, it’s mostly just used to set up jokes and fourth-wall-breaking interactions with the game’s faceless narrator.

Not that this is bad, of course. There’s plenty to like in a game that refuses to take itself seriously. But make no mistake: this is no Space Funeral. While Arvale teases the player with funny dialog and self-parody during the game’s exploration portions, the rest of the game isn’t in on the joke.

This isn’t because of anything deliberate the author did. Rather, it’s a crime of omission: the developer simply didn’t adjust the game’s mechanics to fit the feel of the game. You never get to–for example–cast an Everything Else spell. Combat in Arvale is in no way silly, funny, or parodic. To the contrary: it is both grueling and obnoxiously frequent. Arvale uses a cookie-cutter Final Fantasy-style turn-based battle system, and due to poor balancing, routine battles are far more frustrating than they ought to be.

Consider the rats. Rats are the very first enemies you fight in the game (along with slimes). Rats can chain together stun attacks, pummeling you at length while you sit helplessly. And you have no one else in your party at this point, so being stunned means you lose your next turn, at which point you can get stunned again, ad infinitum. So there you are, comatose, round after round, being chewed on like your dog’s favorite stuffed weasel. Rats also deal a surprisingly large amount of damage when you’re first starting out. Did I mention that they are the first enemies in the freaking game?

Specters belong to the second enemy mob you meet in the game, and they are even worse. When you first encounter them, they will kill you with three regular attacks. Three! Meanwhile, they take five or six of your attacks to defeat. You are, again, still a one-person party at this point.

Now, difficult battles are not a bad thing in and of themselves. I certainly wouldn’t be griping if Arvale were a game where you face difficult battles but have a wide variety of tactics at your disposal to eke out victory against long odds.

As you might have gathered, this is not the case. You begin the game with only a single character, no spells or special attacks, and two usable item types: Weak Potions and Antidotes. That is it. Accordingly, there is only one viable tactic to survive the early battles: spam potions. And I don’t mean potions made out of canned meats.

Battles become a tedious exercise in alternating between selecting “Attack” and “Item > Weak Potion.” Weak Potions, in turn, are fairly expensive for most of the game, which means that you’ll be spending a sizable portion of your earnings buying them between battles just so you can keep going.

The only reliable way to improve your battles-to-potions-you-have-to-drink ratio, in turn, is to grind. So you fight lots of battles and use up potions so you can afford more potions and eventually grow stronger so you won’t have to use as many potions. This is every bit as fun as it sounds.

The combat difficulty doesn’t make sense from a narrative perspective, either. I think it’s high time that game developers recognized that losing one’s memory is not a level reset button. A legendary hero should not be at risk for getting his butt kicked by slimes and rats, regardless of whether he has lost his conscious recall of past events. His prior exploits should have imbued him with physical conditioning and muscle memory that would make him very difficult for low-level monsters to kill, whether he remembers specific techniques or not.

But no. Instead, we get the RPG equivalent of Hulk Hogan coming out of retirement and getting pinned by a 5-year-old girl. Except it’s actually worse than that. Imagine that instead of just becoming buff and good at wrestling, Hulk Hogan collected weapons and armor with every match he won, which he could then use in subsequent matches. By the time he became a wrestling champion, he’d be walking around in titanium plate mail getup and wielding a Ludicrously Gigantic Claymore of Ass-Kicking +20.

In Arvale, you haven’t magically lost all of your Hero equipment along with your memory, but the equipment has somehow become worthless. Your Hero sword/spear/mace are only slightly more effective than a garden spade, and less effective than a rusty sword. That’s not hyperbole–you can actually buy a rusty sword, and your attack power will go up when you equip it. Duncan could probably deal more damage with a sharp reprimand than he could with his old “hero” gear. Considering how often the game lampshades itself, I’m a little surprised that the developer let such obvious implausibilities slip through the cracks.

But this is nit-picking. Ultimately, the narrative inconsistencies in Arvale aren’t the part that really hurts. Did you think I was done complaining about the game’s balancing issues? I hope not, because if you did, you are about to be disappointed. This game is about as well-balanced as W.C. Fields during Mardi Gras.

Consider the third boss fight. You will find a life potion right before this fight, and presumably it will be useful, because at this point you’ve got a second character in your party. Um, yeah. Not exactly. The third boss spends 70% of his time spamming “damage everyone” attacks at the beginning of each turn, and the life potion brings your characters back to life with 1 hit point. Which means that if you bring someone back to life in this fight, they are almost certainly going to be killed immediately afterward, and the other character is going to take an extra round’s worth of damage for their trouble.

There are innumerable other examples of this sort of sloppy execution in the game’s combat balancing: enemies who “double attack” yet deal the exact same damage as a single normal attack, enemies who inexplicably drain 2-3 times the health as the number that pops up onscreen, and so on.

Magic is another sore point. Most jRPGs rely on a selection of spells with varying effects on different monsters in order to provide a semblance of tactical variety. Arvale does not. With very few exceptions, spells in Arvale are useless. Even the most basic spells cost 20 magic points or more to cast–in exchange, they both heal less damage than potions and deal less damage than attacking.

There is only one type of enemy in the game that takes noticeably more damage from spells than it does from regular attacks, but your spells are so expensive that you are far more likely to run out of magic points than you are to actually succeed in killing the thing.

The only two spells in the game that are routinely useful are Quick Draw and Temptation Dance–the first primarily for boss battles, the second solely for regular encounters.

“But Craig,” you are probably thinking, “all jRPGs have kind of a crappy, poorly-balanced combat system that is more annoying to deal with than it is fun.” This is true, but there are degrees. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king; and the guy who just straight-up doesn’t have a head is the janitor. Arvale, unfortunately, is the janitor.

Still, I wouldn’t spend so much time ragging on Arvale’s mediocre combat system if it weren’t for the high random encounter rate. You are going to be fighting these dull battles constantly. Especially in the dungeons.

Arvale’s dungeons are generally fairly short and linear, without much in the way of puzzles. They also end, universally, with a HP/MP restoration pool situated right before a boss. Because of these two facts, you never have any reason to fight any enemies until you’re at the very end and can hang out at the recovery pool. Then, of course, you’ll need to spend time grinding to make up for the fact that you spent the entire trip through the dungeon walking a few steps, being attacked, running away, walking a few more steps, being attacked, running away, and so on. I never thought I would resent a game for regularly providing me with HP/MP recovery points, but Arvale somehow pulls it off.

Around this point in the review, most reviewers would point out that Arvale is quite short, and that it is not a free game. I don’t generally like this approach. Purchasing a game is not like choosing the brand of dish soap that will last you the longest. If you enjoy a game and its price tag is within your budget, then you should purchase it, even if some other RPG you played in the past had a larger ratio of hours-of-playtime to dollars spent.

That said, this first episode of Arvale is extremely short. I finished it in just over three hours, completing what I believe was every side quest the game had to offer. Five dollars is cheap for an RPG, but you don’t get a lot of RPG for your buck here. (Interestingly, there are actually two free Arvale prequels, advertised as containing “over 20 hours of gameplay” and “over 40 hours of gameplay,” respectively.)

The Verdict: 1/5. Arvale’s light-hearted tone and sense of humor are fun, but the core game is tedious–and you’re going to be spending far more of your time with the latter than the former.

Well then boy-howdy are you ever in luck! Eridani Games has just released The Witch and the Warrior, a game which (I assume) bears no relation to the seedy romance novel by that name. Which is a shame, actually, because that might have been more interesting than what the game is actually about:

Life’s not always a fairytale when you are a witch, especially in a world that is still coming to peace with it’s past. An uncomfortable truce is only just forming between the magic and non-magic folk after years of war. At the head of the peace efforts is Queen Clarise, determined that all can come to appreciate each other and work as one. The message is getting through in some places, but slowly – and to Ember, a teenage witch on the island of Vester, every day is a struggle to deal with the insults and prejudice that come with just being her.

Here are pictures of the titular duo, in case that moves you to try the game out.

Join Jade in her journey to master her powers and save her father!
Jade is a regular girl living in a regular village until one day… it all changes.

Seriously, that’s it. Oh, and there are a couple of screenshots of a girl standing outside of a couple of different buildings. So the game features buildings for sure. And grass. If you like girls standing in the grassy areas outside of buildings, this game may be for you.

EDIT: I am informed that Aldorlea Games did not actually make this game: this game is by Warfare Studios.

Deadly Sin 2: Shining Faith is a jRPG developed by Deadly Sin Studios in RPG Maker. The author was plainly influenced by Final Fantasy 6, evident in some of the character names, much of the overall plot structure of the game, and in a strangely familiar system for simulating pitched battles with multiple parties. But make no mistake: DS2 is its own game, featuring many inventive and clever design decisions that add up to a very well-crafted experience.

The dungeons in DS2 benefit from something called monster nodes. A monster node is essentially the jRPG equivalent of a monster generator from Gauntlet. Every explorable area with random enemy encounters has an associated monster node. Once you find the monster node and turn it off, enemies stop spawning. (You can turn the nodes back on again, but dear God, why would you?) The feeling of switching off a monster node is immensely satisfying. It’s like serving an eviction notice to every annoying neighbor on your block at once.

As an added bonus, switching off a monster node nets you a shiny Monster Node Shard, which you can distribute to one of your characters to help level up a skill. Every character in DS2 has three passive skills (things like “weapon mastery,” which boost that character’s strength and critical hit stats) and nine active skills (like spells and special attacks).

There are no skill trees—rather, each character can put points into any skill from the very beginning of the game. However, until you do put points into a skill, your character won’t have that skill in combat. You start out the game with no skills whatsoever, which can be confusing to newcomers. (Your mage, for instance, begins with no spells, in spite of what a cut scene prior to her acquisition might lead you to believe.)

Combat in DS2 is in the Phantasy Star style, but with character turns decided according to character speed. Fast characters gradually lap the slower characters, picking up extra turns in the process. Enemy encounters are well-balanced, and the assortment of useful skills at your disposal provides just enough flexibility to keep encounters tactically interesting.

The skills are distributed well among your party members—each character in your party (with the arguable exception of Ruby) is useful in a handful of different roles. Many individual skills are unusually versatile, with multiple beneficial effects that make them useful in different situations. Cure, for instance, can be leveled up to simultaneously restore a lot of hit points and cure most status ailments at once. Other skills are high-damage attacks that deliberately boost the attacker’s Threat rating.

“Wait,” you ask. “Threat rating?” Yeah—that’s another thing. You can actually determine who in your party the monsters are going to attack each turn. Characters’ Threat ratings go up when they damage a monster, up even more when they kill one, and way way way up if they kill or heavily damage multiple monsters at once. It’s basically a “how much have they pissed off the monsters” meter. Whoever has the highest Threat gets attacked by every monster. This means that you will have to plan your actions to avoid having your weaker characters accumulate too much Threat—or, alternatively, do your best to have your toughest characters up their Threat enough so they take the brunt of the enemy attacks (hence, those Threat-boosting skills I mentioned). I didn’t think that I would like this system at first, but it adds an extra tactical consideration to combat that I’ve grown to appreciate.

DS2 merits a special mention in its item design. Healing items recover a fixed percentage of your total health, not just “X hit points.” Better healing items recover a higher percentage, but it’s still a percentage. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Craig, who cares. Why are you wasting review space on this?” This is actually an impressively smart design move, and it’s indicative of the care that went into this game. Because healing items recover a percentage of health, they remain useful through the entire game. You won’t ever reach a point where all your “Potions” become useless filler, to be replaced by “Hi Potions,” to eventually themselves be replaced by “X Potions,” as happens in basically every other RPG ever made.

DS2 has an item augment system reminiscent of Diablo 2′s: you collect gemstones, coins, runes, shells, feathers, and other augment items to give your equipment various different bonuses. Unfortunately, augment items cannot be removed from your equipment. Your equipment, in turn, suffers from the sort of pointless attrition that Deadly Sin Studios had the courtesy to remove from the game’s stable of healing items. So basically, used augment items are only good until the store updates its stock of weapons and armor, at which point your augmented shields and broad swords will start to look like month-old pizza boxes and dog poop on the end of a twig, respectively. I always feel a little guilty using an augment item, because I know it’s going to end up being wasted sooner or later (usually sooner).

The writing in DS2 is inconsistent–it’s well-done in some areas, and poor in others. Thematically speaking, it’s great. The game deals with a lot of mature issues: political intrigue, terrorism, criminality, drug abuse, and romance, to name a few. I’ve been trying to decide what happens after a double-cross, if someone gets double-crossed again. What kind of a cross is that? Do you just add one, or multiply? I figure it’s got to be either a triple-cross or a quadruple-cross. Either way, you can be satisfied that there is a lot of crossing going on in this game.

DS2 is ambitious, there’s no question about that. Too much so. The game simply overreaches in places, setting up plot points it doesn’t adequately resolve, or piling on drama that hasn’t been earned. The romance, for instance, frequently comes off wooden, as though the author were writing what he’d seen other people write elsewhere rather than drawing on his own life experience and knowledge of the characters to produce something organic. The experience would have been better with a tighter focus on the things the author knew he could (or would have time to) pull off convincingly.

The main cast is a high point. Ruby (the bad-girl emperor’s daughter) and Maric (an egotistical heart-breaker who is inexplicably appalled by female nudity) are reliably entertaining. Teresa, on the other hand, is serious and dutiful, and while she rarely has things to say that aren’t plot-relevant, she too has her humanizing moments. Your main character is mostly believable, relatable, and not quite the one-note, apathetic, brooding jRPG drama queen his name would lead you to expect (though he does brush dangerously close on several occasions).

Character dialog in DS2 is uneven. While there is no shortage of fun, clever banter during light-hearted scenes, the darker scenes tend toward the melodramatic and corny. Consider this gem: “But we will hold this line with our last dying breath!” Now, I always thought that your last breath was your dying breath, pretty much by definition. But apparently this guy is going to have a whole bunch of dying breaths. Breathing, dying, reanimating, breathing some more, dying again, and so on. And by God, he’s holding that line until he’s done with all of them.

Characters occasionally make strange leaps of logic. In one early mission, you pull a red switch and are hit with an electric shock. Maric announces that you should try the blue switch first. Now, I know for a fact that Maric never saw any blue switch, because a) I hadn’t gone over to it yet, and b) it was far away and behind two separate groups of book cases. In another early quest, you find a love letter in the general vicinity of a skeleton. The letter says nothing about the writer dying. When you later speak to a girl anxiously awaiting the return of her lover, you inform her that her lover is dead. Now, hang on. How do we know that? What if we’re wrong? We just told some girl that the man she loves is compost, based on nothing more than a hunch. Maybe she’ll start dating someone else, and it’ll turn out that the guy is perfectly fine. Nice job breaking it, hero.

DS2 runs slowly on my netbook, with some of the larger maps reducing it to an absolute crawl, but the game would no doubt fare better on a beefier rig.

Harmony wrote the music for DS2 himself, using East-West instrument libraries for the sounds. (For those of you who don’t know what that means, those are the same sound libraries Josh Whelchel used in scoring The Spirit Engine 2.) The tracks in this game range from good to excellent, and the use of high quality instruments really puts them over the top.

With the exception of some really nice custom graphics for the main characters, DS2 relies on stock RPG Maker sprites and special effects. They look nice, of course, but it’s hard to give the game credit for using stock images.

The Verdict: 3.5/5. Fans of the SNES-era jRPG will get many hours of enjoyment from DS2. The game’s writing could have been stronger, but from a design standpoint, this indie jRPG is a worthy competitor to anything I’ve seen released in RPG Maker.

Here’s the trailer: