Einlanzer

[b]If Einlanzer was released during the 90's instead of today, it would be hailed as the RPG that all others are held to as the standard of having a great story, effortless game play progression and abundance of content and emotion. [/b] For this old gamer, my absolute favorite RPG's of all time where the classic JRPG's of the 90's and on top of that list was always the incredible journey of Final Fantasy II with Cecil fighting against his brother Golbez who was amassing all of the worlds Elemental Crystals. I have played just about every JRPG since then, hoping to ever get that feeling I had as a child (who am I kidding, I can still play FF II and get that feeling again). It seems like with all the ones I have played since the advent of RPG maker games never fully delivered. Some where very good, others just did not do it for me. For 25 years I kept searching for a game to even compare to how FF2 made me feel. Einlanzer hooked my attention with it's claim that it has tapped into the lure that was created with all those great JRPG's of the time so I took a chance to try this game out. [h1]Einlanzer Is That Game![/h1] From start to epic finish, Einlanzer is true to it's word. In good old JRPG fashion you are the dumbfounded new hero thrust into having to save the world from an enemy so powerful that they can crush even the gods and the every existence of the entire universe itself. Although the game's story does not go from what I would say "ordinary" to very good until about Act 3 or 8 hours into the game, it is still enough to keep you very interested as the rest of the story develops. You can tell Einlanzer takes a nod from what made the best JRPG's of the 90's the best of the best. The main enemy employs the use of generals who during the main story block your hero and his companions attempts at every intersection along the way. These generals are vastly superior than all of your combined forces and many tragic defeats and loss of life occurs as your hero's begin to contemplate just how impossible their plight really is. In addition to the enemy employing his own heroes to stop yours, you will also encounter the growth of your party as they go through this experience together. Friendship, betrayal, comedy, sorrow and even love is eloquently transformed during powerful and even mundane moments in the game. It all leads up to the revelations of the source of the power the main enemy has been using to become so powerful and the epic battle to save the world. In all my years of playing these types of games, no final boss battle has ever had such an epic and terrifying last battle aside from Sephiroth in FFVII. But the best part is, the game does not end there. You still have one very powerful last few minutes of the game to finalize what you started. Also, did I mention that the decisions you make can profoundly change the course of the game all the way up to the very end giving it lots of replay value to top things off? [h1]What to expect for experienced JRPG players[/h1] Although the story starts off a little slow and somewhat predictable, it transforms once it gets to the meat of the game at around Act 3 or 8 hours into it. The writing in this game is wonderful and borderline genius. Everything pushes forward the story in a simple to understand linear fashion of the games of old after a somewhat confusing dream that your lead character, a Swordbearer named Victor has while on guard duty on the day the beginning events of the Einlanzer story unfolds. The progression system is also spot on with very little need to grind to be able to progress in the story unless you want to. Visually you can expect SNES graphics, but for us fans of JRPG's that is not much of a concern for us. Plus, any who play a lot of these like me will notice a good amount of standard RPG Maker assets like seeing the same monsters you would in other games. Again, not something that really annoys me, but sometimes I may go to old habits in other games if the enemies weaknesses are different. Although there is a ton of content in the game, side quests themselves are impossible to miss as every location unlocks during certain parts of the story. Bad for grinders, but like I said, there is really no need to have to. Even though there is not much "open world" to enjoy, I do not see many situations where you would wish to put the main story on hold for long because of how enthralling it is. Especially as the game progresses. [h1]The only Cons[/h1] - Like pretty much all JRPG's, if you have a ultra-wide monitor, there is no way to make it look non-stretched - Only a few decisions made in game greatly impacted the story. Most just changed something very narrow and not important - Music was good, but not the best. Music in some parts seemed out of place, but most of the time it fit very well - Some grammar mistakes here or there. But not enough to be distracting - Some of the characters in the game could had been left out, combined or killed off as they did not seem to play a very central role like some of the others *****No Part 2 or new game planned from this studio yet! I am drooling out the mouth for another! ****** EDIT - I take back the last two sentences :)

Well, there are a lot of games on steam that make promises like "inspired by games like Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy VI". These games lie, they are often just generic, boring and devoid of all effort. But not EInlanzer! This game really lives up to those expectations. It is equal in length and depth, and it's developer has put a lot of effort into it. Since I bought the game, there have already been two seasonal events, which is very rare for rpg-maker games, and there might be more, so they care a lot about their game. If this was realeased in the 90th, I'm sure it had been a huge success! So I definitely recommend this game to any old-school rpg fan. It's in fact one of the best rpg-maker games I ever played.

I am an old school rpg enthusiast who love RPG Maker games. I pick up this game a few days ago, and have been playing non-stop eversince. The graphics are really pretty and there are numerous original music scores. On top of that the storyline is very interesting and immersive. The game world is very large and I can recruit a team of up to 10 members, each of which have a unique vocation that come with a set of unique skills as well. So far, this game is relative bug free, which means that there were probably extensive beta testing prior to the release. That is good, as I really do not like to play early access games where I have to wait for the final version to come out. However, the case of Einlanzer, the game is very well polished and well balanced, so I do not expect any disruptive patches that might disrupt my game play. I am also a completionist and like to get all the steam achievements. Since there are moral decisions involved that will affect the game play and possibly the different endings,I realised that I have to play this game at least twice. This make it all the more fun for e, and I can easily forsee myself spending 100 game hours to hunt down all the different achievements. So, for all the fun times, I feel that this game is really a worthwhile buy that will give me many hours of enjoyment. I highly recommend this game to any old school gamer who like a well made, detailed oriented, epic RPG.

The game wasn't all that good despite touting it's in the veins of the classics from the 90s. I'm sort of surprised other reviewers put it in the same leagues at classics like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy. For one thing, it has abunch of stock images, not much original arts, then there's music which is a big part of a jrpg experience as well weren't that impressive it got pretty repetitive and tiresome to listen to. Controls was fine but you're left with the default with no way to change it. No idea if a controller even works as I couldn't get it to work. So I was stuck playing it keyboard style. The window screen size was pretty bad. You're either stuck with full screen mode with close-up look at pretty bad looking pixels or a very small windowed screen. It doesn't say but I measured it and converted it to be around 440x350. Combat doesn't show your character, besides their portrait, only shows the enemies. It's sort of hard to figure out who'll attack first as it doesn't have any visual queu. You'll figure out eventually which characters goes first and plan around that, or by checking their agility stats. But not for the enemies. Atk animations aren't all that, they're ok, only issue I got with it is that you don't visually see your characters atks so it can get confusing who went, as you select all your characters moves first before they each go. Noticed lots of enemies have high evasion. You'll see quite abit of missed atks throughout your journey. Not alot but a decent amount to get annoyed with. The NPCs here are quite annoying. You can't go through them so often times you get stuck in place until they move out of the way. It doesn't help that the areas you're in are mostly crowded in ways to get you stuck if an npc blocks your exit. I had to reload a couple of times because the NPCs would just not move. What's the worse one I got? There's an npc at this place called the colliseum that becomes a fan of yours and literally follows you around and literally blocks you from ever getting away. The way how some of these areas were designed don't make sense to me. I'm fine with the towns and dungeons but it's apparent in places like the castles. How you get to the throne room to the soldiers quarters to the cooks room etc just feels weird. Maybe I'm just not as imaginative but they just feel more like rooms and obstacles placed here and there more than being there naturally. This feeling I have also extends to parts of the world map where towns, mines, dungeons, etc are located in relation to the world map's scale, to each other, and to the story. What I mean by this is that they were all placed more for their distance away from each other rather than how the story plays out, and directly clashes with how far they really are placed on the world map. Now the main reason I dropped the game was that I had huge issues with the story. It was honestly quite bland and boring and how certain parts played out just had glaring plot holes that didn't make me enjoy it much. These plot holes made the story pretty unbelievable to happen and when it stops feeling believable, I stopped caring for it. -------Spoilers-------- As Sword Bearers the party should be quite a strong elite troop, yet they lost their sacred sword so easily in the beginning. Then they proceeded to get toyed and walked all over afterwards by these same people when they meet them again. Later on an event happens where they get captured, tortured for days, and mind control. Nothing graphic was written. It did show that they were resilient to being torture as they didn't give up any valuable info. I don't get why they're such weaklings as well when this clearly shows they're an elite troop. Besides that part, I had huge issues in how they were captured. Basically a party member leaves the group because she knows they're gonna get captured but didn't think to warn them to get out, instead lets them get tortured for days just so she could sneak in and steal back a ship for the party to use afterwards. There's also side quests that sends you off pretty far that just didn't make sense in relation to the world scale, basically what I said earlier. So they became less believable to me. There's more issue that I can't think of at the moment. -------Spoilers end-------- I play jrpg for their story, I don't care for the graphics or the gameplay as much as the story in them, or else I wouldn't be touching such a game. But these plot holes were too much for me and I just had to drop the game.

A lot of the time displayed on record is having the game open in the background or waiting for npcs to move out of my fricking way. Still, it took me almost 80 hrs to finish the game on hard difficulty and I still have something left to do, if I can muster the energy that is. Which brings me to my main point. This is a barely positive review. I couldn't bring myself to give it a negative one after thoroughly enjoying the gameplay for many hours, but oh boy did this game seriously outstay it's welcome. I'm gonna start with the basic. The writing was okay for the most part, few lines oozing with cheese. Some of the characters were well written, some were whatever and others were there just for the different skill set. Music was good I guess, one funky theme even caught me by surprise, but there is just not enough variation for that much game time, especially when it comes to combat which is 90% of what you will be doing. After the first 10-20 hours I had to mute it to maintain my sanity. I'm actually not complaining, all of this is pretty good for an rpgmaker game created by a small team. They did good. Now about combat, which is 93% of what you will be doing. I enjoy pushing game mechanics to their limits, especially in rpgs. Random encounter in rare occasions can go wrong, but after you get a complete party they get easy and almost all of them can be dealt with in the same way. When it comes to bosses, on hard difficulty this game offers a decent challenge, at least for the first 4 chapters. A bit of that challenge is pure annoyance and another bit is rng, but I really enjoyed most of them (on the first 4 chapters that is). The rng part originates from the fact that bosses play twice each turn and seem to randomly pick 2 moves from their attack pool. This, especially during the first part of the game, can sometimes destroy you while being completely out of your control, if for example the boss decide to spam it's strong aoe twice on the same turn when you are not yet buffed. And now my serious issues start. Here is the short version to spare you from the reading. At this point in the game everything is easy to beat and at the end it has an extra 30 hrs of walking back and forth fighting random encounters. It feels like a government experiment made to test your patience and perseverance. The root of all evil are random encounters. 99.9% of the time you cannot escape, I don't know if this holds true in every difficulty, but on hard you can't get away unless to really outlevel something, which is practically never. It's expected for them to comprise 98% of a game like this, but you are forced to fight WAAAAAAY too many of them. I can't stress this enough, after chapter 4 ♥♥♥♥ random encounters. Dungeons in this game are non linear, have ton of loot to get by exploring and most of the time have no shortcut to the beginning. This means you will be walking back and forth all over the place if you want to collect all the loot, not to mention some of them force you to, just to open the way forward, and after beating the boss you will have to walk all the way back to the entrance. The same holds true for walking back and forth on the world map. This all may sound usual and expected, but here come chapter 5 and 6. Previous chapters had the same issue, but it could be overlooked as a minor annoyance. Up until then I was young and naive with only 30 hrs in, thinking I was reaching the end. But alas I was wrong. The last 2 chapters just bloat the game. It felt like it run out of steam, but for some reason it just needed to go on, just like this review. The writing in my opinion took a turn for the worse and I didn't even care. First of all it seemed like the encounters became more frequent. Getting a new one every 2-3 steps became pretty common, when it never even came close to that during the first 30 hrs. Then the quests start to really waste your time by making you walk unnecessarily back and forth. Here is a path: Ship -> Town -> Ship -> Town -> Castle -> Town -> Evil Castle -> Town -> Castle -> Tree -> Castle -> Town -> Ship -> Someplace -> Ship -> Town -> Castle -> Town -> Ship. Ignoring the quest on Evil Castle, the walking simulator quest on Tree and unskipable at least 30 min of talking at Someplace, each of the above transitions is like 5 guaranteed encounters. That's 100 encounters just because your ship can only land on 2 tiles on the map. Plus a similar amount of encounters during the 3 quests, there goes my day. Chapter 6 is even worse. You have to walk to a central area, walk 6 long distances to kill something totally necessary and of course walk back again, walk to a boss, then walk another long distance to another boss (during which you find an item which reduces the encounter rate by 50%...fuuuuuuuuu), walk back to the entrance and then hunt down and kill 6 or 7 times the games comic relief character. WHY¿ No matter how much I try, I can't properly convey the amount of time you waste trying to reach your destination. Other games like this have mechanics such as a crystal in each area, which after you find can deactivate and reactivate random encounters. That way you can explore in peace and, most importantly of all, run quickly through the area again if need be. Einlazer could really use a similar feature. I'm currently in the game's secret, self proclaimed super hard dungeon, that I only noticed existed after finishing the game, desperately looking for that promised challenge. But even with the item that cuts encounters in half, I'm still drowning in them as much as ever. You want to go grab something from outside and come back in? I guess you found what you will be doing for the next 40 minutes of your life. I'm really trying to reach the end boss, but I've run out of fumes. This game was really fun until it wasn't. In the end it just became a never ending chore.

Having played hundreds of RPGs in my life time (now 37), This games story makes it in my TOP 3 best stories ever told on a PC/console platform combined. It was able to provide me with a 50 hour experience (spent a majority of hours offline) in which i laughed , cried and felt a range of emotions which i had not felt for a long time. This game reminded me of the epicness i experienced when I had first played Phantasy Star 4 as a teen on my mega drive. Yeah its an RPG maker game. But at this price its basically a steal. You owe it to yourself to play this game.

Story not great. Controls terrible. Gameplay has unpredictable difficulty spikes, which seems to be a trend for rpgmaker titles. You can choose your subclass - that's a cool customization but, that's pretty much where 'build' ends. Every single rpgmaker dev out there compares their game to classic titles. Don't buy into these promises. It's a reference to the tools, not the experience, ime. Get the other one this dev made - it's an amazing, unforgettable game.

Put alot of time and effort in this game as you can see from my hours into it, all I can say is I dont see how this game is related to any other RPG games I've played. I cant say about Final Fantasy 7 since I havent played it (although I heard of it and seen it myself), but Chrono Trigger? No. That game knows how to be fair and challenging at the same time. This game I tried to tolerate through and I fail to see it. You cant choose stats when you level up, most of the time later in the journey you get items that are practically useless, and eventually down the road, you'll come across enemies and bosses that can easily clean you out in less than 3 rounds, you have to be lucky to survive that. Thats one of the things that also annoys me the most through the game, luck. You'll need it or else as said, you'll find yourself cleaned out in less than 3 rounds. The pacing was fine, in the beginning its seemingly fair and it does get challenging but also balanced. But later on it gets more and more ridiculous where you just want to just give up and move on. I had moments and struggled through, this game should have ended sooner than I expected and was told it was suppose to last about 40 hours of playthrough. You can see my hours, but admittedly I did some grinding too along the way, but its because I had to stockpile my inventory. This game is not balanced. I love the challenge, but balancing is the important aspect in the game. Granted, we dont want an easy game because otherwise it'd be boring and pointless. But we also dont want a game thats far too challenging to the point where we would give up. I cant even say if I ever consider this game a "challenge", which as said earlier, its unfair. Never through my time playing RPG games have I encountered a game that can clean me out in 3 rounds. Ever. The equipment are almost useless, only very rare ones are actually useful and any commons dont really do much. The sad part is I rarely sold them because I hoped they would come in use in the future if I ever needed it, but turns out they are still useless because again, I get cleaned out in 3 rounds. Theres no items that'll save me from it, and the abilities of the characters while useful, I hate the stats. And the fact I cant actually choose which stats to boost up and it comes with items instead, already throws me off. TL;DR? This game is unbalanced, dont get it unless you are prepared to die in 3 rounds at very later in the game.

After a lot of thought and reversal of my opinion, I have decided to give this game a recommendation. This is the first review of any game I've ever made, so forgive me for any amateurishness. This isn't some quick, witty review, this is an honest and elaborate personal assessment. I actually had to cut it down for Steam’s character limit. On Steam and the indie game world, there is a large amount of RPGMaker games that are low quality asset flips, barebones personal projects, and other low quality games. Einlanzer is not one of these. NostalgiaAddictGames has made something worthy of attention. I believe at time of writing that Andrew is the sole developer of the game, and if this is true, he has exceeded what I would reasonably expect from a solo developer. Admittedly, I've only played through the game once and did not do all of the side content, so I will try to only stick with what I experienced. Still, the game advertisement promises a 40+ RPG, and it truly is that. The length is not the problem though. THE GOOD I was very impressed with the level of coherent writing and worldbuilding present in Einlanzer. Characters with powers in battle are often shown using them with the same rules as in battle. For example, characters using Raise spells on allies during story moments; being set on fire being a comedic gag because it's simple to just heal them with magic. Types of magic are aligned with certain gods, and the antagonist role of Yvalak is reflected in the anxieties of the party's Black Mage. The rules involved with the gods and how their influence affects the world and the magic system was very consistent and Andrew obviously paid close attention to it. The characters and general storyline are generally typical JRPG fanfare, but the characters are better than simple one-note personalities. I was personally very connected to the characters Galadin and Abel. They all seem to fit a general mold of an archetype, “street-smart wise-cracking Thief, introverted/nerdy Mage, gentle, benevolent healers,” etc. The gameplay is very general turn-based combat, but I was surprised with the amount of skills and spells every character was capable of using. Every party member has a myriad of different attacks, supporting abilities, and others. Status effects and stat buffs are incredibly potent, and even many bosses can be afflicted by them. Whenever you get a new party member, you immediately are asked to select a subclass. I was recommended to pick the default subclass, as they had the best skillset for that character. In the case of hybrid-style characters like Abel and Galadin, the other subclasses seemed to be a focus in one of their two aspects, such as melee or magic. Also, the party generally all travel and level up together, so most of the time you can swap out characters between battles without a significant loss of power. You are limited to 4 characters in a battle at a time, but there are up to 10ish available characters. The world also allows an impressive level of exploration fairly early on, and there are some good rewards for looking at small islands and other secret areas. Its openness rivals even early Final Fantasy titles. Also this is purely subjective, but I used to actively dislike Dancer archetype characters in RPGs, but after depending on Lucille in the lategame, I have come to really appreciate them. THE NEUTRAL The presentation of the game uses stock RPGMaker assets like monsters, tilesets, UI, and characters from a character creator. I do wish that the game had an original visual style. Other RPGMaker games such as Hylics, Middens, and a personal favorite, Disc Creatures, all use an RPGMaker engine for the game, but have original art assets. I am willing to let it slide though in the Neutral section because despite the stock assets, Andrew has enough creativity in his writing and worldbuilding to give life to the stock. Bizarrely, the game has seasonal events that activate around Halloween and Christmas, perhaps other holidays as well. For a singleplayer, narrative driven game, this is well… odd. I can’t speak for their quality because I have not played the event dungeons, but their inclusion is just kind of weird for a game like this. It’s one original thing I suppose? THE BAD Let’s talk about difficulty. At time of writing, there seems to have been a rebalancing update in the last few weeks, so I don’t know if this will negate anything in this review. I played through the game on Normal difficulty, and was not overleveled or underleveled. In the latter half of the game, enemies and bosses become absolutely brutal. I mentioned earlier that status effects and buffs are potent, and this applies to the frequent use of them by bosses and enemies as well. In Einlanzer, you live and die by status effects. There’s a high level of RNG that dictates what actions bosses will do, and depending on what they do, your party can be killed in a single turn. Enemies and bosses after a certain stage of the game all have the ability to do 2 actions, sometimes a Multiattack. You will often take insane amounts of damage with status effects applied on top of them. Enemies and bosses having 2 actions wouldn’t be so bad if players were allowed this as well. Without Abel subclassed as Time Mage, party members only get one action per turn. I found Abel’s partywide Haste II buff, as well as the Slow II debuff, to be absolutely essential to survival. The obstacles in the game were insurmountable without it. The Haste II buff allows 2 actions only 50% of the time though, and the 100% rate version of the buff is only single-target at level 90ish, so it would generally be a waste of a turn. So ultimately, bosses have 2 actions that can sometimes wipe your party in one turn if they spam a powerful AoE attack, and the players often only have a 50% chance to have 2 actions. This seems unfairly punishing to the player. Keep in mind this was on NORMAL difficulty, and I probably would have given up had I not the stubbornness to see the game through to the end. Each boss is harder than the last, and towards the later third of the game, I felt the game becoming a slog. Every time I fought a new boss, I couldn’t believe how the bosses could become any more challenging. I can say with no exaggeration that this is the most brutally difficult JRPG I have ever played, and for reasons I don’t think is quite fair. This is aggravated by the difficulty of the lategame, but the game feels very padded. It is a 40+ RPG of course, but so much time is devoted to dungeon crawling, it makes me yearn for a minigame or something to spice it up. If Einlanzer can possibly put you in a dungeon for your objective, it will. CONCLUSION While there is a lot to critique Einlanzer on, there’s also a lot to appreciate. Few games have ever made me feel such love and hate. I am willing to give Andrew and any other members of NostalgiaAddictGames some slack because of their very small, solo developer size. It’s clear Andrew put a lot of love into this rough gem, and I find that admirable. Ultimately, after initially having the opposite perspective, I have decided on recommending it to veterans of JRPGs. On Normal difficulty this is NOT a casual game, and I can only recommend it to someone if they can put up with as much ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ as I did. At times Einlanzer made me burst out laughing with character’s banter, other times I was cursing out a boss for wiping my party with two of the same Tsunami II spell. I love this game’s world. I enjoyed the writing, the worldbuilding, the characters, the class system, and the atmosphere, but I don’t think I will ever have the willpower to play through it again. This game absolutely broke me. I got it on sale for 75 cents, and I definitely got my money’s worth fifty times over. If you've gotten this far, thanks for reading and I apologize for the length, but there is a lot to say about this game, for better or worse.

Not gonna lie this game had a potential. It could have been a really good game, but there are just some factors that I cannot overlook. Pros: + You can choose one of three classes for your new party member. + You can swap your team members almost any time you want (only before the battle) + Almost no missable content (execpt for one side quest and achievement). + Good/Bad Karma system. Cons: - Most of the stuff is made of basic RPG-Maker textures. - Hard mode is poorly balanced - it IS beatable but some boss fights tend to be very RNG. - Some of the classes are not 100% finished and balanced. - Seasonal events that can't be accessed anymore. - Repetitive music (most of them are also standard RPG-Maker BGs). While I see why so many people like this game, I cannnot overlook some of those issues. If you want to have fun with this game play on easy or medium.