Sacred Earth - Reverie

A faceless knight looks over the horizon as the Demon Lord easily routs humanity’s armies. This knight can only stare at their visage, but the first thought that comes to their head is not revenge, but contemplation. Why were they there? What are they doing, and for what? The knight hearts, months later, that humanity is arming more forces for another attack against this adversary, spurred by a hero equipping a legendary sword. We are never told more about that hero, because the story is about a knight who goes to the demon lord to find the truth. Sacred Earth Reverie is technically the fourth game in the official Sacred Earth series. RPG Maker titles headed mainly by the user now known as MirageV, with this game made with rest of the Sacred Star Team and credited Pocket Mirror co-creator VisuStella. I say official because the RPG Maker account hosts 6 titles of various canon (I haven’t found out what is or isn’t, but the ones on itch.io are the most canon I’d assume). The games design goal is clear when you get a little into it – they are Visual Novel hybrid JRPG titles with a focus on compact storytelling. As the description for the second game, Desire, puts it: “[it] is a visual novel that adopts certain aspects of RPGs seeking to throw off contemporary shackles of constraint given by the genre's predecessors. With useless fluff done away with, Sacred Earth: Desire seeks to provide an entertaining experience without the frustration present from standard RPG conventions”. This design philosophy can be felt almost a decade later with Sacred Earth Reverie. Walking around is highly truncated into just moving room by room, fights are fairly short (and deadly!), most of the runtime is the visual novel prose and dialogue. A first run will likely run less than 10 hours long, but the game has 6 endings in total (sort of), and a New Game+ mode that should likely stretch to maybe 14/16 total. As a story, Sacred Earth is shows a world that has been heavily impacted by the protagonists of the previous titles. I haven’t played them, but while this game makes regular callbacks to these characters it is mostly in the tone of history, and memory, and not necessarily an in-joke that only you would get if you played the past games. I say mostly, there’s a few cheeky bits that I know are direct in-jokes. But I think starting off with this one works very well, the game is all about this very high fantasy setting gone through a technological apocalypse/collapse of civilization, long lived people who remember the past that has been largely forgotten, beings keeping promises or holding grudges for generations. It’s a fairly abstract and high concept plot but the game’s tone is very old-school fantasy anime, but without the worst bits. Characters bicker and crack jokes even with the final boss staring at them in the eye, Slayers style, but like Slayers they also know when to get a bit serious. The story works, my main complaint was mainly that there are so many characters that don’t exactly do much in the main plot and relatively not much time is given to the party members and the character arcs for each member are sort of divided between the endings (with the true ending tying up MOST bows at once). I also think that the main character is in constant lore delirium (reverie, even) because so many forces are telling her status quo shattering info every half hour or so. Still, it’s a very strong story, and I liked most of the characters. The story doesn’t have a single direct message, other than letting the viewer think about history, how it’s made, kept, ignored, twisted, etc. As for gameplay, it’s very good. Reverie uses what to me is one of the best ways to do JRPG combat, and that is with flexible initiative/turn order mechanics based on speed. There are many buffs, debuffs, effects, combos to be made and it’s a very in-depth addicting, flashy and fun system. Every character mouths off their big cool move names with extremely eye-catching effects and you can set off these chain reactions that do devastating amounts of damage to bosses by not letting them get a hit in. Problem is, they can do the same to you, and they don’t really have to worry about resources as much as you do. Bosses in this game is a pain in the ass, top to bottom, and eventually you find that at the highest level you pretty much need to go into a fight pre-buffed with items and then buffing yourself up as best you can because the bosses start off immune to delays and will combo into their stuff almost all the time. It’s not uncommon for bad initiative rolls to result in a party wipe on higher difficulties. On lower difficulties, this is less of a problem if you build right but it can still happen. The brief immunity to turn-skip attacks on bosses was a relatively recent addition that, understandably is so you don’t find yourself on the upswing TOO soon but at the same time encourages a similar kind of flow. So once you get into the thick of things, you find yourself doing the same things/with the right tactics just sometimes you roll bad and can’t get your ball rolling. A smaller issue is just that, there’s a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of effects. Stacks on stacks on effects and using a controller for the game isn’t the greatest, I just used my mouse/steam deck pads to hover over since it’s a lot more reliable but it also causes issues with menus on controller. The point being that bosses will throw a metric ton of things that you won’t understand, sometimes with overlapping effects with buffs that can get confusing. I still played to the true ending though, because despite that, managing all those things together was so very satisfying and I was already hooked to the game. I recommend this game to Trails fans, Tales of fans, and Visual Novel hybrid JRPG fans (Persona, Utawarerumono, Riviera). For newcomers who enjoy light hearted characters (or just like the… provocative designs) and wild settings with DEEP lore, I suggest sticking to easy. The 150+ item gallery of art from the creators, to what I imagine was fanart or commissioned art shows how much love and care was put into this game’s creation. This passion and dedication shows in the final work. It’s definitely worth a look. P.S. Audio and music for this game is phenomenal. The voice acting is professional, at least in that anime dub vibe to it so it fits right into other VNs/JRPGs. And graphically there’s a lot of pretty CGs. I definitely had to blink twice at some of the designs but overall I think it’s beautiful. I especially like the portrait B stuff.

pretty good game and characters. this game it's mix between visual novel + point and click + RPG Maker. but it's look like focusing on visual novel more. because there dialogs to read so much. but story I'm not sure how to rate this. because I still not finished game yet.. (but pretty good indie game RPG.)

i found this to be very enjoyable as someone who likes turn based rpgs i had started out planning to 100% it but am not sure i will any more and thats not a negative of the game im just not sure i can bring myself to get any ending other than the one i have since it was from what i can tell the best ending for the character that drew my interest to the game to start with. regardless of the few flaws i noticed where proofreading seemed to be needed and an odd interaction with one of the combat mechanics i do love this game very much will give it a 9/10 would give 10/10 but not enough kanna /j

The game is really awesome. I like it a lot. Kanna is legit wife.