Empire

I can honestly say, I bought this out of random, and I thought it had good potential. Never did I think just how good it'd be and how much I'd like it. This was well worth the purchase and I love this games absolutely. Solid 9/10 for me. To further on this review, the Dev was extremely cooperative with the community. Clecota is definitely worth their salt as a Game Dev. I've spent 21 hours, to date, on this and I plan on more. I love that every party member has its uses, and you can freely change within battle, and sometimes it's needed.

Its a huge game and worth the money. But depending on your love of JRPGs, its a mixed bag. Pros: The story is very good. Because a JRPG is basically a story book on rails, this is a must to keep me engaged in one. Its actually good enough I've avoided moving forward in the detailed community guide which is also very good. I'm only using it right now to ensure I mop up discoveries before chapters pass - you can double back to get everything you missed eventually, but the story does cut off access to areas for finite periods, so it pays to thorough. This is connected to another pro - the fighting is challenging. There are healing points regularly spaced so you aren't stuck literally mashing the attack button to save resources to boss fights. The trade-off for this is that skills matter, and because skills are tied to your equipment - you learn skills over time by wielding different gear - you can't afford to miss anything as you move through the plot. Overall, its a fair balancing mechanism but for me is linked to the Cons of this game. Finally, there's a lot of content. Like Doom and Destiny, there's content that will carry you all the way through to level 99, including lots of end game content, making the game absolute steal for the price. Cons: Extreme grind. You have to earn AP to learn skills from your gear. Most all monsters only give 1 AP and it can take up to 120 AP for to learn a skill. This in itself would be manageable, but there are essentially two sorts of mobs - basic mobs that you can kill quickly and appear in groups of up to six, and minor bosses that take time to kill and only appear in groups of 1-2. This means you can either spend time killing inconsequential mobs endlessly that only occur in select areas, or try to grind minor bosses. If the dev reads this, I would increase AP for the minor bosses to 3. Its a simple fix and would prevent doubling back to the starting area to grind inconsequential mobs for AP. The dev has added items that award XP to speed level up. But levels isn't really the problem, its the AP. Levels would matter less if you could acquire passives as you go...in this respect the game mechanics don't feel fully integrated. Its close to being very good, but as you tell by how much i've written here, its a bit frustrating in its present state. And that really gets me to the final con...as you play you're going to be frustrated, not because you're playing another poorly conceived RPG maker game, but rather because you're playing something that is so close to being a near perfect entry in the genre, but isn't. Bottom line. Worth the money due to the price point. Nearly worth the time for the story. Devs please incorporate something like the suggestion above and you'll have made a masterpiece.

Its one of the best rpg maker games i ever played.I can recommend this amazing game to everyone that likes a GREAT story and game play.Many hours to go,and i don't won it to end.

Fun game! Reminds me of all the solid RPG's from my childhood and haven't encountered any bugs yet.

It's a very nice game so far. More players should leave reviews if they like it!

Pros: well crafted old school jrpg style, turn based combat, with interesting story Cons: you're gonna have to grind, even with the alternative means of gaining experience kindly provided in the game. sample grind scenario: you are heading back to help defend the empire's tower where you are dropped off by ship and the only way you can get to the tower is through a canyon. there's one potions vendor and no equipment vendors, mind you, and you're given no advance warning by the game before your taken to this gauntlet you must run. everything seems okay, random encounters are fairly easy to moderate, so you feel you're at a decent level for where you are, and there's a couple of save/rejuve locations so that's cool. however, blocking your exit is a boss that can kill anyone in your party with a single blow or perform a group attack that brings all your characters down about a third with each hit. the only way to beat it, is to grind out random encounters until you have the collective power to take out this boss (the earth tyrant). let's just say it takes a while. and i wonder how many more bottlenecks like this are further along. it does say something about the intrigue of the story that i was quite willing to grind it out, but some people might not want to deal. i also picked this game up for 49 cents on sale, about as killer a deal as you can get. i hope the folks at Clecota consider making more titles in this style, as i'm a fan going all the way back to chronotrigger.

real great rpg better than octopath traveler

Empire is a traditional JRPG but it's very well crafted and one of the best RPG Maker games around on Steam. What I in particular loved was the fact that you can switch party members DURING battle. Switching party members (from active to non active in your team) is off course not something new but it's the first time I've seen a JRPG where you can switch them during battle. The battles are imho very well balanced, they can be challenging but never overwhelming and the developer divided the skills nicely over the party members so that they all feel different. The system is made is such a way that you will constantly be swapping party members depending on the skill needed and the tactics that you wish to apply. The fights in this game are a joy as a result. The developer created a very nice option that you can change at any time during the game to turn enemy encounters completely off or turn them at 50%. This is a very usefull tool, when you feel like grinding you can put in on 100% when you don't feel like having encounters you just turn it off. To compensate players wanting less (or no) encounters / battles the developer has put a system in place so you can level up without fighting, this is done by finding posters on walls in locations and ripping them off the wall: this grants experience that you also can gather the traditional way (via fighting). It's a very clever system but it doesn't compensate enough to level up sufficiently so you're going to have to some fighting for XP eventually and bosses off course can't be avoided by turning the encounters off. The bosses can in fact be extremely tough, some may seem too strong at first but... once you discover their weak spot (often a particular element like water, air, fire, ice or earth or poison helped to beat the first major boss easily after he seemed too strong, well he was not at all once poisoned). What I did not appreciate is that at the very end of the game you are forced to grind to the maximum (level 99 for each party member with all upgrades) for the final end boss: that is imho just not done, it prolongues the game too much and goes directly against the fact that you could have chosen not to grind and to have few encounters during the game since the end boss forces you to grind anyhow but you will only experience this problem if you play the game until the end which is 50-55 hours (yes quite a massive game length) including side quests. The story is, although generic fantasy stuff, very well paced. The main character in your party (and the only one that you can't switch during battle since he is the lead actor of the game) seems to have a troubled and very dark past but he doesn't remember anything from it but people around him seem to know stuff about his past. During dreams (nightmares more correctly) the lead character is having flashbacks but it doesn't become clear to him what happened to him in the past and who he really is until others reveal it to him in the final quarter of the game. The ambiguity around the lead character and that he sometimes does action that are not exactly 'good' (on the contrary, he seems quite selfish at times) gives a very interesting drive to the story. It keeps the player motivated to discover more and the story is paced so well that it immerses the player in to this world. The developer only used standard RPG Maker material (not that this is an objection to me, you still need to be able to utilse them well) but managed to use it to craft a story driven RPG that turns out to be quite epic as well. The soundtrack, although nothing special and stock material as well, improves during the game and the tunes are well chosen for each section. The world feels quite large and in a way it is since this is a 50 hour game with multiple locations but with your boat, that you early in the game, you can easily travel anywhere. The game doesn't contain any mazes or any complex dungeon so you'll never feel lost and never experience navigation problems. The developer (I assume just one person) is very dedicated to his creations, he clearly has a love for traditional RPG's, and he is active on the community forum to help out, he even posted an excellent walkthrough guide. I do advice him to create a better looking logo for his (probably independent one man) company because it is not so proffessional to have an amateur looking company logo (with a blank page as background) whilst the game is actuall very well crafted. I am certainly curious to see what this developer will come up with in the future since he's very dedicated and knows how to tell a story (even if it's just a generic one). Obviously a lot of time and effort were invested in creating this well balanced JRPG so if he manages to apply the same kind of effort in future games we can expect more small budget gems from him imho. To summerise: this is a great, epic traditional RPG with well paced storytelling and it's a great addition for the library of any old school RPG fan. Even though it's an RPG Maker game this game offers huge value for money. 7.510

A classic RPG - great story, interesting, well fleshed out characters, turn based system, upgrading equipment, quests....really a 9/10. There is a little grinding involved, but it never got tedious for me, as sometimes it can. Took me over 70 hrs to play (I'm a completionist). Thank God for the developer's guide, but you can miss things, and that can really impact how you do further on in the game.