IndieRPGs.com Checks Out The Book of Legends

It’s been a while since I last posted about The Book of Legends, hasn’t it? Originally released back in 2012, The Book of Legends is a jRPG from Aldorlea Games that recently made it onto Steam through the good graces of Steam Greenlight. Indinera Falls reached out to me about it and was good enough to provide me with a copy of the game to check out. The results, as always, are documented on video below:

So: what’d I think?

I didn’t get too far in, of course, but the mechanics mostly seem like run-of-the-mill jRPG fare. The inclusion of the “Rush” button is rather nice for those occasions where the battles are non-threatening and you just want to, y’know, rush through them; and the existence of passive abilities like The Immortal is a nice touch, though I have no way of knowing how significant those will be later in the game. The game starts off very, very easy, and I can’t say that I was immediately hooked from a gameplay perspective; perhaps that will change later on.

From a writing and presentation perspective, though, I found The Book of Legends to be quite charming. It’s refreshing to play such an unambiguous anti-hero in a jRPG, and Jordan in particular has a lot of character. The fact that he’s a homeless, brutish scoundrel who can talk to woodland animals like some sort of Disney princess is particularly amusing to me.

This is an RPG Maker game, and in fine RPG Maker tradition, it largely just reuses the game’s default graphics (though it does get points for some nice original portraits and cut scene art, which help to make the game world feel distinct).

The game remains $22.99 direct from the Aldorlea Games website, but costs a mere $14.99 on Steam. Given that pricing scheme, I think the clear choice is to snag it on Steam if you’re interested in this one.