For story driven ones i liked To the Moon, that others have mentioned, Finding Paradise, OneShot, and The coffin of andy and leyley (which is still ongoing). Some that have combat but are still focused on a story are Omori, and End roll. Almost all games where you go eventually go into someone’s mind, i’m noticing now.
I only played RPG Maker games when RPG Maker 2000 (and 2003) were the only ones available. And just recently tried out some later releases with the Open Source implementation of RPG Maker 2000/2003 called EasyRPG using RetroArch. :D As someone who is oldschool, my favorite games I played are Vampire’s Dawn and Chocobo Panic (and Chocobo Panic in Space). The Chocobo games aren’t RPGs at all, and are stylized Pac Man like games. There are a few German games I played (but never finished) and don’t remember the names anymore, mostly horror themed adventures… :-(
There are some modern RPG Maker games that look pretty “professional”. Need to play one to see how things have evolved.
They continued to work on the game years after its bad reception. They could have stopped and ignored it. But they worked on it and gave lot of free updates that changed the game dramatically. Other companies would ask money in form of DLC in example. The launch was a disaster and they deserved the hate. But the “redemption” is a different issue and they earned the good will.
Demons Roots is probably the best RPG Maker game I’ve played that was actually playable as an RPG. (So, not counting things like To The Moon which other people have already mentioned.)
I wasn’t a fan of most of the sexual content in Demons Roots, but taking the whole thing as basically a giant love letter to fucked up doujinshi stories – i.e. to unpolished indie writing with wild genre bending plot twists in addition to the hentai stuff – I can accept it for what it is. The game has that RPGMaker wabi-sabi; it’s not especially well-crafted software… but the combat was OK (unlike a lot of indie RPGs), the music was good – a mix of original and mostly well chosen asset packs (I still listen to some of it occasionally!), and, without getting into spoilers, it did a couple of very memorable things…
Pretty confident “Look Outside” is an RPG maker game. I cannot recommend it enough. It is an immaculately written game, and oozes passion and personality.
and somehow it wins “Best Ongoing Building” every year.
Except it doesn’t. It’s been nominated for Stream’s Labour of Love award six times in the past ten years, and never won it. In fact it’s never won any Steam Awards. It won Best Ongoing at the Game Awards twice, out of a decade of being ongoing, and it won a similar award from PC Gamer once.
To The Moon (XP) is pretty good. The Legend of the Philosopher Stone (RM2K3) is a personal fave although its incomplete and cancelled Final Fantasy Endless Nova (RM2K) is only a FF in name and is also really good.
Then there’s the ones everyone’s talked about; Ara Fell (originally), In and so on
I agree, and a big part of that is that everything they’ve added over the years just feels bolted-on.
I tried to give it a shot a little while back and tried to do one of the things that was initially promised you could do, be a trader. Pretty standard space game fare. Only to find out it’s a pretty pointless and broken experience because the way you do interstellar trade in that game is by putting goods in your pockets and walking through portals that exist in every single space station. You never even get in your ship lol.
The game still just feels like a tech demonstration of a bunch of disparate systems that fail to integrate with eachother in any meaningful way. They’ve made the puddle much wider over the years but their outright refusal to make it any deeper is absolutely nuts.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne