The Dragons' Twilight

Very fun game, clearly a labor of love; I'm very interested to see what other games Landy makes, while there are some "amateur" aspects they are all done in service of the game. If you like JRPGs that actually take a story seriously and don't mind some rough edged, absolutely play this.

I would give this short but mostly sweet RPGmaker game an 8/10, while keeping in mind this is not a professional studio offering and was largely made by 1 person who may or may not have any formal training. I think the asking price is fair and strongly recommend it on sale. The good: No forced filler content, the story moves at a brisk pace and there's no real grind unless you want to do some grinding Characters and events are mostly pretty interesting The perfect sized cast to choose from for party composition, once you unlock everyone Very simple controls A fairly easy to understand gear/stat system It's fun enough that you may not notice the time passing, I would frequently intend to play for 20-30 minutes and only exit the game hours later The okay: Fairly generic story with what felt like a predictable ending Somewhat underveloped characters, a few of them feel pretty complete by the very end but most don't. Some needed just a bit more development and plot relevance, others a lot more in order to have satisfying arcs. There's an optional but recommended grindy section near the end of the game where you gather some of the best gear available through very difficult boss fights. It is implied that you need much of what is available for the final quest. This should have come with more plot and character development delivered naturally, rather than it largely being a checklist of items to get with the occasional little bit of extra dialogue. Only a few character designs are nice to look at, I would have loved to have been able to grab a few screenshots at times but couldn't get it to work. Maybe a me issue. The bad: Absolutely obscene difficulty spikes at times. I'd played Dark Souls remastered for the first time in May of this year, and there were parts of this game that were every bit as frustrating. To build onto that, lots of the frustration came from awful RNG with enemy attacks applying debuffs, mostly ones that cause your character to skip a turn or multiple turns, sometimes even attacking your own party in the process. Additionally, some enemies have moves that straight up kill a character. Everyone can be revived or cured, but if the party member who can do those things without wasting items is the one who is affected you might just be screwed. There was one point where I had my party at nearly full health, then all of them got hit by such debuffs and I could only watch while they were all brought down to about 10% health. Sometimes you can be doing great then just lose because the enemy repeatedly targeted the one character you needed them to not attack. I almost quit a few times because of this kind of thing. That doesn't just happen in the late game either. Spelling errors everywhere Overall I did really like this game, and for what it is I'm pretty impressed. It fell just short of greatness in a number of areas. I suppose the biggest compliment I can give it is that I played Dragons' Twilight while I was looking for games in my library to uninstall and free up hard drive space, and not only did I finish this one instead of banishing it to the "idle for trading cards" or "not for me" collections within half an hour, I decided it's one I want to keep installed as I can see myself wanting to replay it in the future.

A great game, a good length, no sense of grinding, the progress was mostly good to keep up with the story. For those who enjoy FF and similar JRPG you'll love this.