Tales of Nebezem RPG: Red Peril

Great little cheap game. Totally worth the money. I am a fan of all of their work. Support this small developer so they can make more games in the future.

So, some time ago I posted a review of a partial playthrough of Red Peril and gave it a good review because I liked the Tales of Nebezem series and at that time the game didn't have any reviews yet. I wasn't able to complete the game at that time but I went back and restarted and finished it over the last couple of days. I was 4 hours into it on my first review, Steam says I have 18 hours now. I must say there was not nearly enough plot to justify 14 hours, which is why I have changed my review from positive to negative. I believe the author put a lot of work into this game particularly into balancing, since it keeps about the same difficulty throughout. Also the in battle skills are all generally interesting. But you'd have to really love this kind of jrpg turn based combat to enjoy this game. Because I as I already said there is hardly any plot at all, and this is surprising because that was a really strong point about Elemental Link that made up for the relative lack of difficult puzzles. The writing itself isn't bad. The characters have almost too much personality. But their characters never develop anywhere. I think maybe this is due to them not really interacting with the plot and having an effect on it. They follow the trail of the arsonist, they learn their identity and motivation, they defeat the arsonist. Who they are as characters never comes into it, not to affect the plot or to be affected by the plot. Their having personality only exists to allow them to provide commentary. (which is itself nice since there are 8 possible characters, though only 4 will be seen in the game). This set up reminds me of Seiken Densetsu (Secret of Mana) 3. There you chose a main character and two sidekicks from a choice of--I think--6 total characters. But in that game, the main character provided the main storyline for the game and each sidekick contributed a substantial sidequest to the experience. I think in many ways it was the most replayable RPG ever because all those combinations were really different experiences. This game could have use a similar system were different events in the world triggered for different characters, as opposed to the same events just triggering different dialogue from them. I've kept my original review below, because most of what I say there is still true, and it addresses the plot and battle system in more depth. I still love the Nebezem world and will buy the next title, but I do kind of wish I'd better spent my time than put 14 (or 18 total) hours in here. I usually wait to finish a game before I give it a review, but I thought I'd make an exception since this is a long game and it doesn't have any reviews yet. I will update my review once I've finished the game. Tales of Nebezem is a great series of adventure games on Kongregate. This is the second of two premium games in the series. The first, Elemental Link, was a story driven adventure game which strangely had less of an emphasis on puzzles than the Kongregate games, but it still served up an interesting story to which this is a close sequel. You will be interested in the plot of this game if you've played Elemental Link. So far the game is about one of the gray people from the end of the previous game who works as a guardsman and whose house was burned down by an unknown arsonist. You quickly find out that the same thing has happened to other people and you take up the culprit's trail. Interestingly. for both the main character and the first two companions you are given a choice between two options. I'm not sure how much difference this makes to the overall plot, but it makes a lot of difference to the dialogue. I think that probably in the long it will make the whole game replayable at least one time. The gnomes are back, and this time they are particularly interested in what's making wildlife attack everyone who comes near which brings us to what makes this game different from the others in the series: the addition of combat. The combat is turn based without positioning and reminds me of earlier Final Fantasy titles. I'm not a big fan of this style of combat and I wouldn't be playing this game if I wasn't invested in the series. It just feels like you do the same thing over and over again in every fight. However, the magic system is interesting with different schools of magic working better against different enemies. If your character isn't magic, you have skills that you can use like spells but that require you to be attacked by the enemy so taunt is more useful in this game than in any other similar game I've played. I think if you like this sort of combat this game should be different enough to appeal to you. I just long for a world where grind was a thing of the past. I haven't seen a lot of puzzles yet, which is disappointing, but I have hopes they are coming. The main reason to play this game so seems to be the story, and the interesting characters inhabiting the world. I sure hope the robot from the most recent of the Kongregate games shows up soon. :)