Formally called Dark Souls - when I was a kid I couldn't find a single guide for this game because a certain behemoth happened to have the same name, though I knew nothing of FromSoftware at the time - and while I'm still most intrigued by the story, ye old RPG Maker stuff has not aged well. XD
Tough one good thing is that the old Alt + Enter trick for getting such games to full screen still works, otherwise this would be unplayable on a 1080p screen.
I did find a walkthrough this time, but this game came out I think in 2009, by now that version of RPG Maker has got to be ancient and it shows, it's so painfully basic, Hell old Pokemon games have more battle animations than this.
Plus from what I've seen in the walkthrough I'd be backtracking to Hell and back and I simply don' have the patience.
Either have packed dialog to keep me interested or have the sense to have small areas, they're not impressive this long down the road, the indoor light is so white, it nearly hurt. Please, have mercy on me and my time and keep areas in such games small and streamlined: loads of NPCs, nice, but all of them say like 1 line and I'll never have anything to do with them again, that's not engaging at all and it's not engaging, it should at least be small and simple to navigate, so I can get to the next trigger for the dialog I'm actually interested in fast.
But no. E.g. why have turns in a cave just to hide a pick up item at the end of a series of turns? That design is basic and bad, all it does is artificially make me do more random battle with no real purpose, there's not added value to it.
As a kid, I wouldn't know any better and might have struggled on, if only I had a proper hint on where to go.
As an adult 1 I know better I know such amounts of backtracking through nice looking environments, but boring battles is just not worth it, it's not in any way fun, it's tortured with visuals in battle being there, but not being engaging or impressive in any way and 2 my time is more limited and more importantly, I don't have to play something I'm not enjoying.
As it stands not only are you required to backtrack, you're required to backtrack to visually unremarkable spots where you've fought bosses before - this would sting less had any of those locations been distinguishable, recognizable in some way to have that "Aha, I remember that spot. Over there by that tree/rock/X." moment where you'd at least recall the landmark - and unless you have a photographic memory, you will have no earthly idea where that was and often the game will not tell yo where to go either (e.g. where in the Hell the black market was hidden made me drop the game as a kid as I didn't have enough ingame resources to wander anywhere for long enough to look in every direction accessible to me, even areas I wasn't meant to be in).
I could try to forgive this if a guide had been included with the game, but as it is, it's just badly made from the perspective of the player.
The way it is now, a few misspellings aside (it's not mostly a few phrases not quite right, I know what the character meant to say, I'll just notice the mistake because my education has drilled proofreading into me), I would love to read the story in book format for the same price as the full one of the game.
As a game, I simply cannot recommend this torture. I should feel like I can't wait to see the story, but all I see is the very lackluster combat and the tediousness along with the backtracking is just "No, I can't take one more moment of this."
Now as much as it sounds like I'm bashing on the game, it's not the worst out there, it is serviceable: it has no game breaking bugs I've noticed and it has the lullaby music (still one of my favorite pieces of music, even though it has probably been used in nearly every RPG Maker game ever made), it just hasn't stood the test of time AT ALL and I'm shocked at this.
It's not that the game is the bottom of the barrel, far from it, far worse RPG Maker games exist where I'd struggle to read anything because the translation would be so bad, the only misfortune this game has is that I'm attempting to play it as someone with far higher standards than the game can hope to meet with its time locked limitations - for the time it came out it would be good, maybe even great (especially for what feels one of the very first commercial projects for a developer or a starting out team), but it's just too tediously boring to me now.
So yeah, get on a VERY deep sale, if you'd like to see and experience an artifact of a bygone age, or if you have the magical ability to power through the most boring gameplay for the sake of a good story (if so, my hat off to you for retaining what I've lost somewhere along the way), but otherwise steer clear of this title.
Given how poorly SOME RPG Maker games have aged (far from all, some hidden gems absolutely are out there), I'd honestly request of any developer using the software to make it known what version of the program they used, if I knew what limitations to expect, I'd know what games to avoid because the program used to create it is just too old at have any appeal whatsoever to me.
