The Sacred Tears TRUE

This is an outlier among the sea of samey RPG Maker games out there, as nearly everything in the game appears to be hand-made, from the nice battle screen graphics, character portraits and music. The card-based battle system is also unique too, and the character dialog is pretty decent too. Though, what makes me not want to play this game is, as I said above, it uses the RPG Maker game engine, and all the jank that comes along with it. I really don't want to run around in the flat, ugly and barely-interactives worlds that are constrained by this engine anymore, nor do I wanna see the janky in-game cutscenes/scripting that it brings. I guess the other reason I don't really want to play is the battle system. It's unique, yes, but it looks like it's overly luck-based, and the game did a terrible job explaining how anything worked. As I said, the assets in the game are great: The battle screen has great looking environments, characters, and character portraits. Pretty good music too, along with hand-drawn cutscenes. But screw RPG Maker.

Lovely game with a lot to explore and a charming cast

Just another RPG game that you should probably avoid.

Tears turned to magic. One drop made me a hero. The next made me lose my keys. Perfectly chaotic.

Terrible RPGMaker game that does some things pretty decent, but the combat system is incredibly scuffed.

Its two bucks. Yeah, it feels like some kid's school project in gamemaker, but at least they put some effort into the story and a unique, if somewhat questionable, combat system. Tabbing out kills the sound. Playing games like this is like reading online fanfiction "novels". I don't have time for it, but if you do, there are worse ways to drop two bucks.

Quite the little gem here. The Sacred Tears TRUE is a game that focuses the tree rather than the forest which I feel really enhances the experience. The story is nothing ground breaking as it is fairly generic, it follows the day to day happenings of the MC and how the MC goes about achieving his goal(s). The world around the MC keeps progressing even when the MC is not directly involved. The cast of characters are fairly fleshed out, we are given enough information about them to understand that they have their goals and ambitions. They are also involved just enough in the story to help enhance and progress the story rather than becoming a hindrance to it as it is not their story, it's the MC's. The game was very easy as I literately beat 90%-95% of all the combat encounters using the first three cards while the rest of my cards were for boss fights only (barely even used them for the bosses). The card based combat system was quite enjoyable, I see other people say how the game's RNG based combat system is holding it back. I disagree with them on that. The combat system requires a bit of predicting on the player's part as being able to predict the opponent's card could be what saves you from a fatal hit or not, if you don't like predicting you can literately just face tank through all the attacks, but that will cost you a little bit of healing items. I did encounter a few bugs and things that I wish could be improved on, but seeing how the game came out on August 10th 2005 I'm not going to complain about it. All in all I'd recommend it, like I said quite the little gem. Apologies about the vagueness, I didn't want to spoil anything for anyone planning on trying the game.

RPG Maker strikes again! This is one of hundreds of low effort retro-pixel JRPG ripoffs spamming the Steam catalog, made with the RPG Maker video game construction kit... in their own words, "Our easy to use tools are simple enough for a child." A little more effort went into this one than most get, but there are still fundamental problems. Take the role of thieves in a para-fantasy universe. There's some semblance of a story here but it's muddled by godawful retro pixel graphics. While changes have been made to the stock RPG Maker combat system, they don't improve on the stock RPG Maker combat system... it's still a terrible, weak mockery of the old FF games. Ugly retro pixel graphics aside, the developers also failed by including graphics that aren't retro pixel. This defeats the purpose of trying to be retro. Also, resolution and controls are fixed, and the fullscreen mode causes a crash (why don't indy shovelware devs ever test their junk before inflicting it on the Steam store?) so this game falls beneath minimum standard for PC. Gamers who want a good retro JRPG experience would be better off playing the originals, like Final Fantasy, Star Ocean or Chrono Trigger. This is just a sad exercise in putting a lot of work into making something terrible. Imagine if the developers had made a proper 21st century RPG instead of this retro crap.