To Aerthen

The writing is poor and the characters each have exactly one trait that determines all their interactions. But the knowledge of old RPG systems that went into this is very high and it was a joy to tease apart and learn how to build a team that excelled. Appropriate to the graphics, this is more of an excellent NES Dragon Quest than a plot or character driven jRPG

Overall an interesting game, kind of cute, nothing too crazy on story though (the comedic aspects of it are ok but get tiring sometimes and get in the way of any kind of epic tale or experience) but has a decently balanced gameplay experience. 10 to 15 hours gameplay, not much in the way of replay value or post game stuff (a few optional dungeons before the final boss.) Balance is overall pretty decent: gear can change how characters play and theres options in the way you build a party and get thru obstacles. Every once in awhile you have to adjust your plans, and old gear or going to go buy new gear/adjusting party for status management is a thing. I didn't find any real useless party members, each sort of had their own use (though theres definitely an easy way to make one of the optional party members rediculously overpowered). More or less general monster encounters can potentially be deadly in late game, but you can also run away from any encounter, and gear and party adjustment can change how you deal with monsters if you are grinding for drops/exp. Theres also an optional dungeon where you cant run and need to learn to deal with things, though its a shame it isn't really expanded on. Really could use some post game or new game plus though, especially with challenges / difficulty adjustments or being able to use the half-stat & xp items early, or requiring them for things. Achievements may help with this later, if/when added.

GOTY 2023.

Tried this after finishing Scarmonde, which is a fantastic game. Sadly, To Aerthen is not a fantastic game. I don't regret paying for it, because I'd happily pay for Scarmonde twice. Anyway, go play Scarmonde instead of this.

Thumbs up with a BIG Asterisk This game is to me less an ode to older JRPGs but instead modernizing certain aspects of the experience while maintaining the roughness and jagged edges the genre used to have. Having played Venaitura, their previous game, this is all the more clear. This is a game for RPG enjoyers who love fiddling with dials on their characters with oodles upon oodles of equipment, and fussing with their party composition. The modernized bits: You can run away from pretty much every encounter you want, as long as you are within a level band of the enemies. You can get surprised, but it's very rare. Resource management is less stressed in this game with decent checkpointing with heal spots, and Save Anywhere. Characters, in general, feel balanced enough that you can justify all configurations throughout the majority of the game. Some characters ARE better than others, but you can truly play to your preference and wanted difficulty. Grinding is a choice - with good composition, action management, or just learning the fights beforehand and reconfiguring your equipment, I don't see anywhere that's a true "wall." Difficulty: This game I feel is of medium difficulty if you are not used to JRPGs, in the sense that the game will throw status effects at you, enemies will have exploitable weaknesses, etc, and you are expected to gear for them. If you grab all the treasure chests, this normally will be fine. What's not modernized: - The encounters, because they are optional, are sometimes a lot spookier than the boss fights. You can get locked down if you don't prepare for the change in status effect du jour of a new area. - You will be wandering. Someone will say "it's too the east" and while usually this is a decent enough signpost, if you stop playing and reload, you may not remember what you were doing, and there's no one to talk to. I feel like venaitura was a lot more forgiving with this because there are NPCs worth talking to. - Dungeons are long, winding mazes. This is a take it or leave it thing, I think it's annoying but because you can run away almost unpunished, I suppose it's fine. Near the end I was getting very frustrated with how elaborate these branching paths were. - You can bust your characters. Let's just say there are party members that don't play by the normal rules of equipment. But even normal characters can be optimized for absurd damage. Now here's the asterisk: The writing in this game -is- bad. While it's fine to have stories where characters do not grow or change, it means usually you have defined personalities bumping into one another and how they react to different scenarios. The problem is that every character reacts the same way, every time, in every scene. One character will act genre savvy, the others will range from mad, to bemused, to tired. That's it. Every once in a while someone will say something witty but the hit ratio is far off and by the end I was very tired of everyone talking. Which sucks because every character, if you think about their one line summary, IS interesting. Why YES, I do want to hear about an adventuring couple that's married and happy. Yeah, I DO want to know what it's like being a sibling to someone you find out is from space. Yeah, I DO think it can be funny to be someone who essentially is a god running around and not caring about mortal affairs. But nothing comes of it. And I will say this - old school jrpgs may have been light on story at the time, but many of them DID try, very very hard, to evoke something even with their limited character limit. Final Fantasy 4 is not the wordiest game, but it still manages to write evocative characters who think and feel, despite not always having enough time to drill down to everything. The closest thing I can compare the story to is "what if we take the comedy aspects of Slayers but apply it to jrpgs," in that folks know what's going on (semi-genre savvy), but still play it straight. In this game, the characters are TOO savvy, and not interested enough in the stakes, or are forced to bend to one character so badly that I actually come to really loathe them. Basically, expect to skim dialog after the halfway point. It seems like their next game has withdrawn away from telling a more direct story, which may be for the better. I enjoyed Venaitura's cryptic to a point story. But that is just one asterisk. I know that in an RPG, sometimes you really do hope for a good story + gameplay, but this game is just a long chain of goals to get to the next thing so you can find more toys to play with in your party.

My full playthrough: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGG8_9Thpy4JUZTJziO4TWRv78f9h3CY1 To Aerthen is a retro-inspired turn-based RPG that definitely doesn't take itself overly seriously. Heavily inspired by the older Final Fantasy titles, as well as games like Lunar, you'll find yourself quickly being dragged into stopping Xormoth from taking over the world! His minions don't want that, though. Lasting around 15-20 hours, depending on how much exploring you do, you'll hit all your typical area types, and fight a whole lot of enemies. Encounter rate is decently high, but it works out for making sure you are well prepared for the bosses, even if you choose to run from some! Speaking of, the escape rate is 100% (with very few exceptions), so if you're overwhelmed you can quickly get out of danger. No auto saving, however, so make sure you're saving often. I did find some spelling errors along the way, but the dev has been good on working to swat these down. My one note I will make on this is that the music does seem a tad imbalanced. Some tracks are really loud, and are then followed by tracks that are way too quiet. On the whole, this is definitely a more hidden gem in terms of smaller games. Good length if you don't want something overly long, with a good cast of characters that will allow a wide variety of strategies in combat.

This game is good enough for a Yes, but it really doesn't live up to the glowing comments in the other reviews. Good - RPG mechanics/balance - it's very standard fare but the balance remains "good enough" through the whole game, thanks to good ramping up -- gear gets very strong with lots of different effects, and so do enemy attacks. Massive amount of gear to minmax if you so choose, especially if you steal a lot. - Graphics/sound - standard but excellent, using prepackaged assets -- but very high quality ones. Bad - Story - not the most generic fantasy RPG story, but a lot of it is pretty close, and the creative bits don't actually make any sense - Dialogue/exposition - this is subjective, but oh boy, the dialogue in this game is something else. There's a lot of it, and almost all of it is party members bickering with each other with the exact same dynamic the entire game -- always with extreme statements, lots of capital letters and exclamation points... you have the irresponsible boy everyone is frustrated with every 2 seconds, the constantly angry woman, the emotionless evil overlord who speaks in all caps, 5 different generic recurring villains who make the constantly angry woman angry... the saving grace is that none of it actually matters, none of it makes the plot any more interesting, so once you have your fill of bickering you can hold down A and ignore it

My first thougth was...nice, looks like an old 8-Bit RPG....but after 2 hours playtime it was more like...oh, another dungeon with endless fights that only stretch the playtime...and at 3 hours it was enough for me and I deleted all files.