Exit Fate is an improvement upon Last Scenario in almost every conceivable area. It’s quite a good RPG, albeit something of a shameless rip-off (not that you’d know it from reviews like this).

First, what Exit Fate gets right. The biggest area of improvement is in the combat system. Exit Fate, like Last Scenario, suffers from BETS (Battles Every Two Steps) syndrome, but the combat system has improved so much that I hardly even mind.

Characters each inhabit one of three rows and one of three columns on their side of the battlefield. Characters in the front of a row block melee attacks directed at characters behind them. Characters further back have increased defense and do decreased melee damage. What makes things really interesting, though, is that some attacks have different areas of effect, such that your choices about character formation actually make a difference in terms of how much damage they are exposed to in a given battle. (Some attacks, for instance, target all characters in a column, punishing players who reflexively hide characters behind each other.)

SCF has gone a dramatically different route with magic in Exit Fate. Your characters all draw from a single common spell pool. For each copy of a spell you own, you can cast that spell once per battle. Character magic points start at a certain level at the start of every battle, and regenerate on each character’s turn. This makes it so you don’t have to avoid casting spells for fear of wasting magic points. Even better, if you have healing spells left over at the end of a battle, your characters will auto-cast them to heal your party. It’s a much, much friendlier system than the one in Last Scenario, in no small part because it means that you can reliably counter status effect attacks that enemies use on you. (Here is a boss battle to give you an idea of how it works.)

The end result of all this is that I actually enjoy fighting battles in Exit Fate. They’re still fairly simple, but they provide enough variety that you can actually get some mental stimulation out of deciding how best to approach them. However, if you’re getting into battles too regularly, you can bribe enemies to make them leave you alone. It’s a nice touch.

The writing is better too, albeit with one huge caveat. The writing wasn’t bad in Last Scenario, but it was largely wasted on an unlikeable cast and an unremarkable plot. Here, the cast is far less uniformly mopey, the world is more carefully fleshed-out, and the plot is far more packed with political intrigue. Suffice it to say that this is a story worth getting into.

Now, the caveat: SCF didn’t write the story by himself. Much of the plot is lifted wholesale from Suikoden II, with minor changes. Even the political organization of the various kingdoms in Exit Fate’s game world track Suikoden II (as in Suikoden II, a monarchy invades a nation of federated states). For those curious, Xander from TIGSource goes into the plot-lifting in some detail in his write-up here.

The story isn’t the only part of Exit Fate taken from other games. For some reason, SCF chose to cobble together Exit Fate’s soundtrack using tracks from old commercial RPGs. The title screen uses music from The Secret of Mana, the battle fanfare is ripped from Final Fantasy Tactics, town music is taken from Final Fantasy 6, and so on. Chrono Trigger is another frequent source of ripped tracks. This old music still sounds great, of course, and it works well in setting the mood of the game, but simultaneously, it makes the whole thing feel like an amateurish fan project. Given the proliferation of talented composers all over the internet willing to work for peanuts on a quality indie RPG, there is really no excuse for this.

Exit Fate’s visuals are quite nice, but here too, the work is not all original. While Last Scenario had some really nice custom graphics here and there, Exit Fate has managed to replace almost all of the default RPG Maker graphics. The character portraits, especially, are astoundingly expressive, clean, and professional. The character sprites in combat look great too, even though they mostly don’t animate. The tilesets that make up the world, however, are taken from Suikoden II.

The Verdict: 1/5. I genuinely enjoyed playing Exit Fate–I am disappointed to have to give it a low score. But given the sheer amount of content that this game simply takes from other games, I don’t think I can do otherwise in good conscience. Had this work been original (in the copyright sense of the term), I would happily have rated it a 4/5.

Special note: SCF does not provide any explanation for the amount of “borrowed” content in this game on the game’s official page. Some have suggested that this game is intended as an homage to Suikoden II, and that because it adds in original elements, it is not simply a rip-off.  I don’t believe that Exit Fate is identical to Suikoden II, but I am not prepared to condone the outright theft of others games’ content.

Also: For reasons that apparently relate to SCF’s choice of fonts, Exit Fate does not display any text when run on versions of Windows more recent than XP. I had to play it on my netbook in order to write this review. Consider yourself warned.

Made using RPG Maker XP by SCF, Last Scenario is a typical jRPG with typical jRPG weaknesses. It stands out vis-a-vis other RPG Maker RPGs primarily because it has some nice custom graphics. While most of the tilesets used in the game are stock RPG Maker sprites, Last Scenario has some really lovely character portraits and in-battle character sprites unique to the game.

Last Scenario is, at its heart, a Final Fantasy clone. It possesses the same linear town-dungeon-boss-town-dungeon-boss structure of a Final Fantasy game, as well as a mini-game that bears more than a passing similarity to a certain mini-game in Final Fantasy 8. Even the name itself, “Last Scenario,” is a take-off on “Final Fantasy.”

Last Scenario’s battle system, however, is technically more akin to the Phantasy Star system. Believe it or not, this actually hurts the game. There is no “active time” element to combat, everyone moves in a set order, and characters are—for reasons I cannot even begin to understand—limited to a maximum of two spells apiece by default.

The net result of all this is that the combat possesses virtually no tactical variety. Last Scenario lacks the spatial element of combat in games like Avernum and Caravaneer, and also lacks the timing and damage management aspects of a game like The Spirit Engine 2. You are, at the end of the day, stuck trading blows in infuriatingly dull random encounters whose only purpose is to whittle down your health and force you to use healing items while you slowly accumulate gold and experience points. I haven’t played a game that takes this tack for some time, and I had honestly forgotten how profoundly irritating it is to be randomly attacked every 10-15 seconds while moving around.

Even more irritating is that the game scarcely ever refills your health and magic points, even after your characters have clearly just gotten a full night of sleep, so you are forced to waste healing items or spend money staying at an inn. Bizarrely, the game won’t let you sleep in your own bed. You have to stay at an inn to go to sleep in your own hometown. I can think of no reason for this other than to force the player to expend precious gold, requiring him to then fight more battles to make it up.

Like most jRPGs, Last Scenario trades on its story, not its gameplay mechanics. Last Scenario’s story isn’t brilliant, but it’s fairly mature for what it is. People die. You’ll see blood. The higher-ups in the military plainly don’t care about the grunts. There’s even a little bit of political intrigue.

I can’t say that I like the characters, though. Your main characters include an angry, butch, female soldier who yells constantly; a grim but empathetic healer; a strangely bland amnesiac outcast with in-born magical talent fleeing from the clutches of an evil kingdom who wants to use her; and of course, you have your hero, Hilbert, cast from wherever it is that these RPGs import their young-men-obsessed-with-protecting-everyone-because-they-couldn’t-save-their-families-when-they-were-five-years-old. Not one of these characters has a sense of humor.

Hilbert, the protagonist, is particularly bad. I find him about as interesting as a wooden post, and a little less smart. In fairness, the creator does seem to have done this intentionally, as he undercuts Hilbert’s naïve expectations about what it means to be a hero fairly regularly. I can appreciate this as an attempt to subvert the tropes of older RPGs, but the execution is just a touch too heavy-handed, and in the meantime I’m stuck playing a complete doofus.

The Verdict: 2/5. Last Scenario is decent for an RPG Maker game, but below average by any universal metric. While it has some very nice custom graphics, it relies on tired, lackluster gameplay mechanics and grinding to pad out its length, and its narrative elements just aren’t strong enough to save it.

Special note: For reasons that apparently relate to SCF’s choice of fonts, Last Scenario does not display any text when run on versions of Windows more recent than XP. I had to play it on my netbook in order to write this review. Consider yourself warned.