New release: Jesus Christ RPG Trilogy
We have reached a new milestone in indie RPGs. Up until last week, Jesus Christ had one role and one role only in jRPGs: to have his name muttered angrily under one’s breath after running into the 15th random battle in a row. No longer! As of October 15, 2013, Jesus Christ has his very own jRPG. Three of them, in fact: Baby Jesus Christ RPG, Jesus Christ RPG, and Rise Jesus Christ RPG.
The premise:
you can play as Jesus Christ and his friends and also his parents and the three wise kings.
So, you know, there’s that. Given the proliferation of god-killing plotlines that we commonly find in jRPGs, the decision to use this particular genre as a vehicle for telling the story of Jesus seems almost subversive (if not a little cheeky). I had to know: why a Jesus Christ jRPG? The author, Felipe, responded:
Before deciding on Jesus Christ, I was looking into adapting any story into an RPG. It occurred to me that I would love to play a game about Jesus that was neither too reverent (thus off-putting) nor disrespectful. As a player, I would like just a fun game that kept some basic principles intact.
This decision helped in shaping the gameplay:
– I would not write any of Jesus’ words, which were all quoted straight from the bible. His words and other bible quotes in this trilogy are between quotation marks.– Jesus, for instance, cannot attack and he’s also immune to any status effects. Why? because status effects are cured by miracles and Jesus never performed a miracle on himself.
On top of that, I also tipped my hat to the Final Fantasy series (which explains why I wrote an arpeggiated theme song) and Dragon Quest (with the curved logo).
Summing up, just tried to do something amusing and non-preachy, while respecting the characters.
Given that Jesus cannot attack, I can only assume that he’s portrayed as a character in the healer mold. Here’s a trailer showing a bit of what you’ll be in for:
The Jesus Christ RPG trilogy is free; Windows only. You can download each of the games from the author’s Dropbox account here.
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