Scarmonde

Played this after seeing it reccomended by St. Rev. Really liked it. * Playthrough 1: Got to immolis with paladin, thief, sage and duskar. Rekt. * Playthrough 2: Thought through mechanics more with pal, thief, sage & hunter. Got all the way to post game boss at around levels 80-60. Rekt. * Playthrough 3: Dancer. Named her Myria. Enjoyed the best Breath of Fire game with 100% evade and wrecked absolutely everything with ludicrous EXP boosts. Won post-game at level 190 Feels good man, 69 hours played (nice). Time for the random dungeon!

Very impressive by a solo dev and very well worth your time. It doesn't unnecessarily info-dump you and very much expects you to pick up mechanics as you go along and learn about the story (if you care) by talking to the NPCs out of your own free will! The pixel art is mostly very good with the highlights being the character portraits and the lows being some of the world tilesets. It really isn't as scuffed as an initial view of the steam screenshots might suggest. At the very start of the game you assemble your party and have to stick to it until the end of the game. This makes it seem like the initial choice is the most important one, but the game is made to be beaten by probably any party composition with a pleasantly moderate challenge. Expect the early game to be the most harsh as you get your bearings. The biggest problems are that there is no guaranteed way of avoiding random encounters or quitting to main menu mid-battle. The random encounter system makes backtracking a nightmare and you can get into a situation with one of your tanks where you cannot do anything due to a status effect and just watch it autoplay to no end.

This game is both fun and the most painful grind ever. If you like everything to be hard mode and feel like an old 8-bit RPG, play this. It has a lot of game and it's done pretty well. The class system is really nice because it allows you to make a character pretty much anything you want by the end of the game. Items don't really trump just gaining levels, both are really important to progress. Levels go above 99, so you can become super overpowered if you wanted to grind a lot. You get items to put in to skills/spells you want. The battle system is what makes this game so brutally hard and fun. You will need to either be way over levels you could beat bosses and major battles at or set up for the fight with gear. Wanted a game where status effects not only matter, but they may be the only real way to win some fights? This is that game. This game almost forces you to have a person to absorb damage like a tank. Without one, this game will become crushing when enemies seem to start to target important people, like healers/dps. Bosses routinely get multiple attacks. Your party will also rely on items a lot, both in and out of battle. MP is very limited, so you need to plan around this and use items in a lot of later boss battles. You might also fall back on revival items and using a tank as an item user for status cures and refreshing MP. This game really makes every aspect of RPG type games shine instead of what most games do, which is make the end pretty much a single spell/attack and heal a couple of times. This game makes you try things more than once with different set-ups and forces you to try status effects at some points. It's much harder than a normal 8-bit RPG, but that's what makes it so fun, forcing a player to play a lot of major battles like they're the hardest fight they've fought in any game.

After completing both main- and post-game with a full party (Paladin, Thief, Bard, Mage) and solo run (Warrior), I can say I like this one a lot it's real good.

named party after 2 of my closest friends and my girlfriend. played through most the game making combat and gearing decisions exactly as they would with her watching the whole time. struggled through the optional boss in the third act. beat game, started post game content. girlfriend ended up being a lying cheating ♥♥♥♥♥. game was good enough for me to come back and finish the post game content regardless. bonus points for being able to rename characters. play it. very good classic JRPG https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3742447046

[h1][b]6/10[/b][/h1] Cool retro style dungeon crawler RPG that hurts itself by having horrible menus, which affect everything including combat. I think the pros do slightly outweigh the cons here though, especially since many of these types of games force characters and classes on you whether you want them or not. The choice and subclasses here are a plus. [h2]Pros:[/h2] - Great party building options, overall. Apparently you get subclasses later and can even load up multiple subclasses on a main class - Music has a cool retro NES-era feel - Combat is pretty good (besides the menus) - Gives strong Final Fantasy 1 / early Ultima game vibes [h2]Mehs:[/h2] - Color palette is too muted - Magic Orb acquisition rate is too low [h2]Cons:[/h2] - Can't remap anything or use WASD for movement - Severe class identity issues for half the classes. For example, Monks just get some of the same elemental magic that other classes get. Thief mostly gets magic other classes get. Etc. It's just weird and doesn't give them any identity - Menus are extremely aggravating to navigate since everything requires 2 presses. So menu -> magic -> magic again -> learn ability -> learn ability again -> class -> class again -> ability -> confirm ability on class... all that just to learn something? Why? - Too many button presses required to just attack in combat. Should be an Autoattack option - Aggro system is very weird and not explained - Not enough speed options for combat. 4x is nothing. We need 16x at least if not more - Poor enemy variety Editing after having played quite a bit: the subclass system is more limited than I thought. There's usually not much incentive to add anything other than raw damage, limiting your choices. Kind of disappointing since I was really looking forward to subclassing.

Somewhere in between Final Fantasy 1 and the gameboy Final Fantasies, it's an 8-bit dungeon crawler that wants you to get into the meat of customizing your stats and ability loadout within that format. Gear isn't always a straight upgrade. There's multiple ways to build each class. You get a huge selection of classes right out of the gate. The overall difficulty level is modest if you're used to NES rpgs and maybe a bit hard if you're not. It's a very particular type of game done well, although I do have some small complaints. You're in and out of menus a lot doing healing. Resources are actually pretty tight. You can absolutely pick the wrong starting team comp, and some classes are way worse than others. Mage, of all things, has been atrocious, whereas thief has carried my party on its back. Because of the slow progression, you will not notice this before it is too late. I do think Scarmonde could have benefited from some modern rpg features like after battle heals and non-random encounters, as this would have let its design shine a little more. But it's genuinely fine as is. If you're feeling that retro rpg hunger, this is a good pick. If you haven't played a retro rpg before, this might be a little rough as a start, but not impossible. Either way, the dev seems cool and I hope they'll elaborate on what's here with another title. Edit: Not entirely bug free. I got a white screen off of selecting a heal spell and pressing a directional button on the same frame during my out of battle menuing. I could still move around and select things, but the screen was white and I couldn't see anything. 2nd Edit: By far the weakest part of the game is its random encounters. They slogify everything. You don't want to explore when you have to do fifty random encounters to check a corner you missed, and this game is so mazey that you constantly have to be checking the corners you missed. The second weakest part is probably that your party design flattens out by the mid game. Once you've figured out that you need someone who can steal, someone who can cast armageddon, someone who can aggro tank, and someone who can heal, you kinda end up at thief paladin sage + one wildcard and every combat ends up being how quickly can you get out armageddon. Still, the rest of the game is fun, and these things don't drag it down too much. A sequel that learns from this could be a top ten retro rpg. 3rd Edit: Holy cosmic horror batman. I do like how this challenges what would otherwise be fairly uncomplicated NEStalgia, but I also understand there's a good ending somewhere in the game even if I'm not going to go hunting for it. By the end of my playtime the game was starting to drag a little, but I like the boss fights and lore quite a bit, and the equipment and class customization is great. All told, I stand by my original assessment. This is good if you like retro jrpgs, and it's a great pick on a sale.

This is a perfect little game for when you don't want to think too much and you just want to dive into some oldschool, turn-based JRPG action. Very little in the way of hand-holding save for some early advice, and then suddenly there's way more options than you were planning for. A bunch of different classes to put into your party, or you can go it solo -- and oh yeah, there's a random version of the game that it doesn't even tell you exists that you can just... go into, instead of the main quest. This game is simple, effective, and does what it set out to do well.