Realms of Antiquity: The Shattered Crown

I bought the collector's edition of Realms of Antiquity on release day at the end of 2020, and last year I finally gathered the hardware required to play it on a real TI-99. My friend and I had a blast playing through the game this past summer (manual and cloth map in hand). The gameplay can be a bit slow at times, particularly once you get to the maze-like dungeons later in the game. You should definitely try out the CPU Overdrive setting in the emulator (set ‘enableSpeedKeys’ to ‘1’ in the INI file; press F7 to enable and F6 to disable), which essentially removes the input lag and loading times present on real hardware. It took us roughly 50 hours (not reflected on Steam) spread across about a dozen weekly sessions to complete the game fairly thoroughly. You should probably back up your save file every once in a while, just in case you end up stuck in a bad situation or happen to come across a (rare) bug. Also, avoid verifying file integrity through Steam - I believe that will delete your save file. I would highly recommend Realms of Antiquity to anyone interested in retro turn-based RPGs. The open world is satisfying to explore, the lore and sidequests were interesting, and combat remained engaging throughout the game's runtime (though I did find a few violet spells to be a bit overpowered). Give this game a shot; it's worth the price!

one of the best CRPGs ever crafted. also wild in scope.

This rocks. Full CRPG finally on the TI-99/4A platform. Great game play, great lore, great depth, hundreds of hours of gameplay

Excellent old-school Ultima-vibes game (I'd say it's ultima III with Ultima V-ish graphics and some Ultima II grade silly thrown in here and there) with a very responsive, helpful, active developer behind it.

EDIT: Now that I've just beaten the game, and you're reading this review - JUST BUY THE GAME. If you're looking at the reviews for a retro CRPG then there's not much to mull over - this is an excellent, excellent game. You won't be disappointed. ___ I am leaving this review whilst being part-way through the game. You are set free in a world where you're not sure what is going on and which begs you to explore it. There are no mundane quests (like fetch quests), and seemingly innocuous quests end up being far more interesting than you would expect. The pay off is generally at a longer term time scale, in the sense that you end up completing quests after having explored more of the world. By way of example, there was an early game quest to check out a graveyard which I stumbled upon c. 10 hours into the game. I ended up resolving this quest 30 hours in after having traversed a good chunk of a certain area of the map. This is very good game design as it necessitates exploration. Although you level up and have skill points to use, real power comes from exploring off the beaten path and finding powerful items or relics. There also doesn't seem to be any HP bloat. Another point to good game design. Turn based combat takes places in a separate 8x8 grid and is generally very fast. I quite like it as encounters (random or otherwise) take less than a minute to resolve, with the harder fights requiring more time and strategy to win. Magic is also very interesting - you equip a spell book (which takes up inventory space) which comes with certain select spells from certain colour domains. Your character(s) have affinity to certain colour domains. Of course you can swap spell books during combat but this takes a turn, so it adds more flavour to the tactical combat. Overall, this is an incredibly fun game. Highly underrated - I did not grow up playing games of the TI-99/4a era, so I certainly do not have any nostalgia goggles on. I was just looking for a CRPG which ticks all the right boxes for me (turn-based, fun combat with satisfying exploration), this was recommended to me and now I am recommending it to you. If you get stuck the people over on the Discord are very helpful.

Extremely impressive old-school tile-based RPG. It has colorful tiles that grow on you the more you play, a surprising amount of dialogue considering this was made for the TI99/4A, and a massive world with a lot of interesting maps (some of which are fiendishly designed) to explore and secrets to find. It sports a wide variety of spells, items, damage types, and armor types--it's a far deeper game than the ones originally released for 80s machines. Some areas are much more challenging than others, and you have options in the order in which do finish quests and areas. It has simplified controls, so it's not one of those old school games that uses every key on your keyboard for something. If you grew up with Ultima, etc. I don't think you can fail to be amazed by RoA. And if you didn't, this would be a great way to experience a perfected version of what some of the 80s RPGs were trying to achieve. There's no need to grind, but in the later part of the game, depending on how you have played, you may wish for fewer time-consuming combats once your party becomes too powerful for the vast majority of enemies. The game does provide a few means of reducing the incidence of these. For added difficulty you can play with a reduced party size and forgo allowing NPCs to join. On a blind playthrough, at standard emulator speed, 100+ hours is a reasonable estimate for completion time. Most of this is spent in combat. Pay attention to the readme.txt to learn how to turn off the included emulator's Appmode so that you can speed up the emulator if desired. I would recommend against doing this until you've played enough to have a good feel for how the game works. Realms of Antiquity is a blast, and you're in for a treat!

Outstanding! Now, THIS is an RPG! The shear amount of content in this game is unbelievable. The amount of tactics available to the player (and the baddies) is really impressive. Dev, great job! As I think you can tell, I'm very impressed.

Surprisingly fancy for such an old system—it definitely surpasses what I expect from a TI 99/4A game, although I was not very familiar with that system before this. It has somewhat of a concept of elevation, the NPCs have a decent amount of dialogue, the combat is fun in a 2D grid, Fire Emblem sort of style instead of menu-driven. There is not much sound-wise so you might want to put on fitting music to go with it.

gud

If you like Ultima, and not Shroud of the Avatar, - this is the way to go. An amazing game, it takes me back in the old days. I hope there will be more of this, soon. Thank you for developing such a nice game.