Blog rpg games

These include:. Some, like Shadowrun, involve cyberpunk. There are even those which abandon the tabletop altogether, instead taking part in costume and in a more active manner. These are called LARPs. Players of these games meet in person in private or public places to add more live-action to their role-play experiences. This typically involves costumes, mock combat, and long periods of staying in character.

As with tabletop games, these can cover many different subgenres. Classic LARP games revolve around fantasy, romance, and even real history. As many forms of gaming adopt RPG mechanics or inspiration, the genre has grown and evolved. If you want to play an RPG in you could find many different subgenre hybrids, including the following:. These are games with combat which is more focused on real-time action. In an action RPG , you might control your character's movement and attacks whenever in combat.

Outside of combat, you could still level up, change and equip skills, and otherwise, rely on in-depth menu systems. Collectible RPGs are a form rapidly gaining steam as RPG mobile games, though they have existed long before smartphones.

Pokemon was a strong early example of this, as collecting a powering up a team was a huge part of the game. Though they did hope to investigate the spooky tree drawn on the map on their way. I rolled for heavy rain, so with storm clouds rolling in from over the mountains, our goons set off. Their first stop was a Crossroads, where the goons found a Veteran Watcher cursing and hammering, trying to fix the knocked down direction sign. The goons offered to help fix the sign. Powell, chatted with the veteran watcher about rumors in the valley and learned that the watchers believed the windmill nearby was haunted.

So naturally, after fixing the sign and fortifying it with uprooted trees our goons headed straight towards the haunted windmill.

Powell, himself a ghost, hoped to meet a kindred spirit. One of Beyond the Borderlands many strengths is the way it describes hexes with what you see as you enter. Walking through farmland overgrown with weeds, our goons arrived at some abandoned peasant huts. They decided to search inside to investigate the source of this supposed haunting.

Finding only dust and old farm tools, Howard grabbed a pitch fork and Powell loudly set about hammering a banged up shovel back into shape. Loynis, too large to fit in the house, waited outside and Mo, wormed their way back outside to look for any signs of life. Mo noted that there seemed to be no animals around, not even other worms or ants. Though the storm clouds were still a ways off, as Powell hammered, a dark shadow was cast inside the peasant hut, as though the sun was suddenly obscured by clouds.

Most of our goons high-tailed it out of the house, only Gigi, brawny and courageous, remained with Powell. A Skeletal Spectre floated out of the wall, and Powell, unperturbed, immediately started chatting with it.

Asking it why it remained in this place and what could be done to lay it rest. The Spectre was happy to see another ghost and the two got to talking. It explained to Powell that all the farmers of these fields perished in a raid, abandoned by the Watchers who were supposed to come to their aid. The game put players in an alternate , one where the oil crisis continued on and worsened.

The story involved a trio of rogue drivers, a nuclear conspiracy, and a lot of car combat. The tone was somewhere between serious and silly, but it worked. All of the cars in this game were based on classic American vehicles, adding a touch of realism that would be important for the genre going forward. The game would later get a spiritual sequel in Vigilante 8. It featured all of the qualities of an RPG, including basic stats and an upgradable car.

Much like the game that inspired it, this game was all about taking a customized vehicle out on the road and fighting other drivers. Racing Lagoon was, at the time, a fairly weird game. It was also absolutely a racing game, with a huge emphasis on street racing. The story was gripping and the street racing was legitimately able to compete with the racing in dedicated racing games. While few games ever dove as deeply into the plot well as this one, many games did try to follow in its footsteps.

While not terribly successful, it helped to pave the way for those that would follow. What was important was that players could purchase upgrades, get better cars, and race against one another in massive crowds.

This was one of the biggest racing games made at the time. There was a lot wrong with this game, but the sense of speed was incredible. Midnight Club: L. Remix was one of the best attempts at making a truly open-world racing game.

Featuring a massive Los Angeles, players could race almost anything on the road — and drive one of 45 vehicles. This was a game that embraced every aspect of Car RPG progression.

Not only could players get a series of better vehicles, but almost everything in the game could be upgraded. Players could even upgrade the interior of the vehicles, and the photo mode was made for showing off. Remix was a great game that strained the technical boundaries of contemporary consoles.

It set a gold standard that was hard for anything that came after it to meet. Another racing MMO, this one lasted for a solid five years. Do any of you have solutions for mapping or navigating top-down games that I'm overlooking?

The Sword of Hope. Released for Game Boy Japan ; U. Difficulty: Easy 2. As I mentioned in relation to The Final Fantasy Legend , I never owned a handheld gaming device, and there was never a time when I was interested in one.

Even today, when I have something of a smartphone "problem," it doesn't extend to playing games on the device. I just find it too limiting. But I can certainly understand the appeal of something that keeps you entertained when you can't be at your console or computer, and I was surprised to find both Legend and Wizardry: Suffering of the Queen to be more advanced mechanically than I thought would be possible with such a device. There's a power vacuum in the kingdom of Riccar.

The Sword of Hope , one of the earliest handheld RPGs it was released the same year as Final Fantasy Legend , though later in it , is more what I expected from the platform: a highly-linear, single-character game with a lot of grinding and limited mechanics.

It would have passed the time if I was in a situation where I needed time to pass, but I can't imagine picking it up if I had anything else to relieve the boredom. Having said that, I'm curious how readers who have owned handheld consoles used them. Did they occupy your attention on an average day at home, where they competed with depending on the household computers, regular consoles, televisions, and books? Or did you mostly use them "on the road" when other alternatives weren't available?

The game is set in the land of Riccar, where an evil dragon was long held in check by a magic spell that involved the titular Sword of Hope thrust into a painting of the dragon. Whatever created that situation sounds more interesting than the plot of the actual game. But the dragon managed to get into the head of King Hennesy of Riccar and slowly corrupt him, eventually convincing him to remove the sword.

Once freed, the dragon summoned an evil god named Mammon, who turned the people of the land into trees. Cliff Huxtable has had enough. The player character is the king's son, Prince Theo, born under a prophecy that he would put things right.

The king tried to murder Theo when he was an infant, but a knight named Pascal rescued the baby, fled the castle, and raised the boy in the forest. Meanwhile, three wizards named Martel, Shabow, and Camu cast a spell to seal the king and his castle underground, limiting any further harm he could do. The child, now grown, sets out to find the Sword of Hope and deal with the dragon.

There is no character creation process. The character starts with copper armor and a "probite" sword, which sounds like something I should swallow for better digestive health. His attributes are dexterity, stamina, and agility. He begins with only one spell but gains more by finding scrolls and leveling up. He has some wheat, which restores hit points, and "herb," which restores magic points.

The Old Man Pascal has a few words of encouragement before he sends you out of his hut into a forest. The Shaman also has a crystal ball that imparts advice, and the starting "Teleport" spell returns you to the shaman if you're in trouble.

Finally, visiting the shaman is the only way to save the game, which is done through a code rather than an actual save. Screenshots of the game will look like it's three-dimensional, but it's not. You can't turn. Instead, you move from one fixed scene to another like an adventure game. The controls are simple: you use the arrows to move a selection cursor around the bottom half of the screen, which includes both movement options and other commands.

A typical screen. I can move in any direction, but there are enemies waiting in three of them. Although this looks like a first-person view, it's not. You can't rotate to face the other doors or behind you.

The three commands that you can execute in any area are "Look," "Open," and "Hit. Instead, they serve as interchangeable "mess around with" commands, and you essentially have to try all of them with everything to be sure you don't miss anything.

Throughout the game, you do such nonsensical things as "opening" a rose to find a hidden path, "hitting" a wall to uncover a painting, "opening" a dwarf to talk to it, "hitting" a chest to be healed, "opening" a vine to find a seed inside, "looking" at the same vine to climb it, and so forth. After putting you through all of that, the game has the gall to occasionally act affronted when you try to do something like "hit" or "open" a person.

You have to try everything in this game. Combat comes along frequently. Sometimes you see enemies on your little directional map, represented as black dots. Other times, they just show up. They can appear up to three at a time and more can join in battle in subsequent rounds if there are fewer than three. Your only options in combat are to attack, use an item, cast a spell, or flee. After choosing the action, you and the enemies go in an at-least-partly-random order of initiative.

Successful combat delivers experience and gold. Combat options against two cyclopes and an ape. I found the number of experience points needed for the next level to be completely unpredictable. At each new level, you get fixed upgrades in the three attributes, max hit points, and max spell points, plus one new fixed combat spell.

Non-combat spells are typically used to solve puzzles and must be learned form found scrolls. The shopkeeper. Prices go up as you level up. The opening area only has 19 areas, including a shop where you can buy wheat, barley, herbs, and a suit of silver armor. You can carry a maximum of gold in the game, so you want to visit this vendor when you get close to the maximum.

But you can also carry only a maximum of 7 wheat, barley, and herbs, so ultimately you end up wasting a lot of money and the economy really might as well not exist. The opening area is small. The other maps only get a little bigger.

On every forest square, you can "look" at the trees which are actually citizens to get a whispered hint. The major goal of the area is to find a tree in the town square and intuit that you want to "hit" it to get it to reveal itself as a treant. After a few rounds of combat, in which it's only susceptible to magic, it tearfully hands you the key to Martel's domain.

Episodes like this are repeated in the other domains, and you ultimately acquire the two other keys. Throughout the game, you progress by visiting locations in a precise order and doing things in a precise order. For 2, I'm not just talking about the nonsensical use of commands that I already mentioned. Even the plot developments don't make a lot of sense.

When you first visit Martel, he insults you, and there's a suggestion that perhaps he doesn't believe that you're the prince. Maybe some players would think, "I must convince him! I didn't much care. But after I explored his domain and found no way to move forward, I began to wonder if Martel was supposed to give me something. Martel lectures me on cultural norms. There's a chapel in Martel's domain, and one of the tree hints is: "Haven't you heard of seeking inspiration at the worship site?

I guess that was fair--cast "Grace" in a chapel--but what came next was a little unintuitive. Casting the spell got me a magic charm, which did nothing for me by itself. I had to turn it into a "ruby charm" by using it in the room with the chapel's pipe organ. How I was supposed to know this, and why it worked, is a mystery known only to the developer. I'm surprised Nintendo didn't quash this. I had heard about a "ruby charm" earlier. One of the tree hints is that the player's mother, Queen Remy, kept a ruby charm.

So using the Ruby Charm somehow proves that I'm the son of the queen, which led Martel to upgrade my sword. He then asked that I help his pigeon, who seemed to be suffering from an ailment. The solution was to "hit" the poor creature, which caused it to lay an egg, called the "W egg" for some reason, which I took.

In these situations, I always wonder whether the story elements and puzzle solutions make sense in the original Japanese, or if you know Japanese tropes, or whether they were just as bizarre in the Japanese release. I also wonder about the language. The translation isn't laughable, but it occasionally leaves out an article, or mangles a plural, or uses a word or phrase that just doesn't work right.

It's hard to believe that such issues were impossible to detect and fix; it would have required the input of only a couple of English-fluent playtesters. Part of me wonders whether the slightly-off language isn't in fact a strategy, a way to repeatedly emphasize the "Japaneseness" of the game and thus excite the imaginations of players who in the s were increasingly demonstrating a philia for all things Japanese.

In this world, the quality of something goes from "probite" to "3 star" to "extra" and to, finally, "adage. Whatever the case, the game proceeds in a linear fashion.

In Martel's domain, you make your way through a graveyard and down to the bottom of a well the well has about a dozen screens; it's a big well. You open a chest, which releases a giant slug, who has the key to Shabow's domain.

Shabow's domain is a bit larger than the first two, and you have to inspect every stone and tree for secret passages. One of these gets you behind a waterfall to Shabow's house.

Shabow says that you're not strong enough to wield the Sword of Hope at least he did at my level but says he'll help if you bring him a moon fragment. You have to find your way through a cave maze with lots of one-room passages to find the chest that has the moon fragment.

It is guarded by a happy-looking "shadow. I'm going to wipe that grin off your face. Shabow takes the moon fragment and then tells you he doesn't actually know where the Sword of Hope is.

He raises the quality of your existing sword to "extra" this is apparently better than "3-star" and asks that you talk to his pigeon "look" , who has apparently fallen in love with you and thus happily hands over her "B egg" while imploring, "Please don't forget about me, ever. A giant lizard in Shabow's domain has the key to Camu's domain. You've got to free a fairy and answer a bunch of random questions from her in the correct order to learn that a vampire back in Martel's domain has a unicorn horn that's keeping Camu locked in a pagoda.

I am proud to designate Hope the only RPG in which you free an enchantress from a pagoda by retrieving a unicorn horn from a vampire. Camu is grateful for her release, upgrades your sword to "adage," and suggests you "open" her pigeon to get its egg; the pigeon naturally objects and instead just hands you the "R egg.

There were about 8 questions like this. I just answered randomly and reloaded until I finally got what I needed. Returning to the Old Man with the eggs brings forth some revelations. First, it turns out that the sword you've been carrying all along is the Sword of Hope also, confusingly, called "Wish" , but it needed the three eggs--representing wisdom, courage, and love--to unlock it. The Old Man then reveals that the millstone in his house conceals the way to the underground castle.

This sentence hurts my brain a bit. You have to navigate an underground maze to get to the castle, and here you find the most obnoxious enemies in the game, druids. There are a few dozen monsters in the game, and mostly they're just interchangeable meat sacks, albeit some with spellcasting powers.

They include giant moths, skeletons, goblins, apes, lizards, orcs, centipedes, and hags. Druids are so annoying because they have spells that drain your health and magic and give them directly to the druid. I died far more at their hands than from any other monster.

Dying just resurrects you in the old man's house, so it's not a huge deal. Eventually you find your way through the caverns to the castle gates. They're locked, but if you plant a seed pod in front of the gates, it grows into a vine that lets you climb into the second floor.

You can meet the spirit of your mother if you use the ruby charm in her room. She tells you to search actually, "hit" the throne for a secret--literally a spell called "Secret. In a room in this mirror world, you find a room with a painting on the wall which you expose by hitting the wall.

This causes King Hennesy to appear and attack you. Hennesy's death transitions directly into a combat with the dragon. Both are tough, and immune to magic, so you have to beat them by basically alternating physical attacks with healing spells.

Squaring off against my father in the final combat. There was a bit in the final battle with the dragon that I didn't quite understand. I guess the dragon wounded my left arm, causing me to contemplate the birthmark there and to realize it looks something like a sword. Switching the Sword of Hope to my left hand activated some latent power that ensured that every attack made against the dragon was a critical hit. He still wasn't easy.

Once you kill them, the denouement has Hennesy awaken from his stupor. You return to the surface in triumph, the land is freed from darkness, the wizards left the castle from underground, and everyone is happy again. I admire how hard they tried with the graphics in the end-game screens. What I didn't cover in the above narrative is all the grinding that has to happen between key boss encounters in each of the areas. I ended the game at Level 25 out of a maximum of 31 levels.

Playing through the actual plot took about half the total time; the rest was spent on grinding.