Chronicles of a Dark Lord: Episode 1 Tides of Fate Complete

I am only 6 hours in, but definitely worth the 5 bucks I paid for it if not more. Not too far in but there are a few things that jumped out at me right away: 1. It's very much like Dragon Warrior 4, and it borrows concepts from Final Fantasy. They don't try to reinvent the wheel, which is a good thing, eg the thing that revives a dead ally is called a "phoenix feather," that which cures poison is an antidote. Simple and good. 2. tl;dr - You can avoid battles when you want to /tl;dr. The battle system is turned based, and each character's time bar fills up at a rate based on the character's agility. Time stops when a bar is full. Encounters are not random on the world map or in encounter zones. Instead, a "battle bar" fills up with each step you take. When the bar is full, there's a battle. If you stand still for a second or two, the bar will begin to empty until it is. 3. The characters and their abilities are good and balanced, and they don't contain fluff or spam. 4. They did a good job of taking the elements of classic rpgs that drive you nuts / are overdone / are unrealistic out, and instead put in refreshing updates to an older genre. I don't want to give out spoilers but the protagonist is a bad ass, not some wet behind the ears kid who just had his mind blown learning that he's the savior of the world or some whiney teenager with "teen angst." Npcs for the most part don't have duplicate dialog, meaning every npc you talk to has something different to say. They've completely removed unnecessary hyper-morality that is common in old school rpgs. The story and dialogue are interesting but not overbearing. There are many, many more examples of times you will find yourself smiling just because they did something better than it's been done in the past. 5. Lesbians I have only a few criticisms of the game at this point, and none of them are "bad." 1. Character sprites in battle are the same as they are on the map, while enemies' sprites in battle are elaborate. I would have made artfully elaborate battle sprites for each of the characters to give them more depth, personality, and make them more likeable over all. 2. There are two areas in the game so far where it seemed to be "laggy," which doesn't make sense because it's basically a super nintendo game. One area had "fog" which seems like it could almost make sense, but the other was in a castle i beleive. 3. If you turn off all three sound options (listening to music, at work, etc), there are two sounds during battle that are still heard. Issuing battle commands and critical strikes. As you can tell from these "criticisms," there's nothing not to like about this game. Buy it. I don't often write reviews, but this game only had two at the time of this writing, so i wanted to endorse a good game. I will update this review once I have more time in.

Overall, this game is decent. It's a typical "bad guy wants world domination" thing, and there aren't any big plot twists or surprises in the bland story. The characters are very different than what you'll find in a typical jrpg, but they lack any real depth. Your party members are all important people, monarchs, badasses, with you the greatest of them all, but you're never given any serious backstory on any of them, and the game only takes a shallow dive into their personalities. The game also seems to favor women a lot, with plenty of lesbians and only one male in your party, but that's fine. So what makes the game worth playing? Well, the combat is solid. Characters' abilities are all useful, items are often essential, boss fights are common and tough, and occassional grinding is a must. If the dev could take this battle system and expand on the story and characters to lend more meaning and emotion to the fights, this game would be fantastic. Hopefully the sequels improve that way. tl;dr: Usual story, different but shallow character types, solid combat. It stays entertaining enough to play to the end.

Having finally completed it (the Final boss is nearly impossible), I can say this is actually a better than average RPG (even more so considdering it's price), At first I was pretty "meh" about it but about 5 hours in, the story really pick's up and builds to a climax rivaling that of old JRPG'S ala Final Fantasy's. (leaning more toward's 3,or 5) The Music for this game is actually also really good (you will have the battle theme stuck in your head for week's) and so is the art direction and spell effect's Combat is standard Turn based, with character's able to act once their "battle gauge" has filled up, but feels quick battle's never seem to drag. Also a REALLY good plus for this game is the lack of Random Encounter's, instead you have a Battle Bar that fills while not in battle with every step you take but stopping cause's it to go down slowly basically allowing you to control wether you want to battle or not (you still need to of cause due to the boss fight's) and you WILL need to level up cause some of the boss fight's are utterly brutal, exploiting your weaknesses and barrageing your party with high damage attack's, basically get used to ressurect and look after your Healer, she WILL save your life many time's. Character's are a step above generic RPG protagonist's ( Your family and Wife can fight with you) rather than the normal boring cliche's "Silent Main Hero" "Love Interest who get's kidnapped" etc, they feel like they have their own personalities without feeling like cliche. p.s you can also blow up Teddy Bear's... cause sure why the hell not :) Update: The Rebirth Update is actually quite a good enhancement to the game, adding better looking battle sprites, spell effect's, Resolution option's and I think although I might be wrong, new music as well, also the performance of the game is now silky smooth when before it was quite choppy if you chose to play fullscreen. With the Steam summer sale on, and this game at the moment being £1 by all means get it :)

Very boring. You need to level up level up and level up. And it is very slow to level up. Boring story, too strong boss.

Not Recommended

Love this game I thought I'd completed it got the titles and all then I'm back in the game for an extended play absolutley brilliant Easy story to follow and if you do a little grinding the monsters aren't to bad either. Lots of replay value, I missed tons of side quest so guess what I'm off to play again yeah.... Edit: four replays and finally got all achievements including Tanya YAY Off to play episode 2 hope it's as good if not better

I am playing this game now and am finding it pretty fun. The pacing is a little weird. You kinda go from boss to boss pretty quickly, and just have to level up right before you face them. This is my first RPG Maker game and its really not bad. Good dlalogue overall, cool bosses, and I actually like the characters you get to play as. Worth a try for less than a buck, for sure.

Wow. I had a lot of fun with this game. You'll be fighting lots of bosses and there are extra stuff after the ending. I recommend it because of the plot, it's well written, I even learned some vocabulary. The grinding to level up may bother you, also at the begging of the game the small patterns of enemies bothered me, I did not really notice after that. I do not consider Magus evil, he is pretty cool, I like him, he has his motives. Congratulations for the great RPG.

Tags: Topdown - RPGMaker & Party RPG Additional Tags: Delete Local Content & Remove from Library TLDR: Evil themed RPGMaker is poorly executed. Very grindy. Boss battle difficulty suddenly spikes. In this title you are a Dark Lord that vaguely looks like he is part of the Uchiua clan. Every continent is just a cylinder shape cut in two or three parts. Each containing a castle. Formula goes that you walk from castle to castle, talk to nobility, talk about an incoming war, and a cutscene happens in which you fight soldiers or the antagonist. You get attacked on the regular and the battles mostly involve spamming Area of Effect. The dialogue gets thinner and thinner as the game progresses and by midgame the dark lord is mostly just a polite gentleman. All conversations revolve around family memebrs of the Dark Lore recognizing each other with polite greetings, letting foreign head of state know they are being attacked soon and the like. Each transition from castle to castle usually has a dungeon and a boss battle. I ended up fighting a guy called the Harbringer which had a ton of health points and had this highly damaging AoE as well as disables. It was a little bit much so I abandonned play then. There is also a guard at a treasury that asks for a password and is just completely overpowered. To make matters worse the game has been remastered and the dev rather than simply upgrade his existing customers to the new game, decided to resell to his existing customers. http://store.steampowered.com/app/603080/Chronicles_of_a_Dark_Lord_Tides_of_Fate_Remastered/ Conclusion: The evil theme was intriguing, there are a few odd choices here and there like the woman-only kingdom and the multicultural kingdom but those are the first two you see and as you go out in the world they become much less original, not that anything was really explored in depth anyways. In the same vein the dark lord kills random citizens or force chokes them early game but quickly discontinues any evil behavior. So the game just becomes thematically confused. The constant fights quickly become tiresome and the main story arc is netiher well fleshened out nor is it delivered often enough to keep you interested or hooked. I will take a look at the sequel to see if things have gotten any better but this is a fairly obvious disappointment and the overall quality makes this a hard pass. Removing local content permanently and hiding from library for declutter.