If there's one genre of game that dominated my pre-teen years and onward, it's the humble and occasionally not-so-humble JRPG. Though the majority of my fellow UK RPG fans got on board the JRPG train for Final Fantasy VII -- the first core Final Fantasy to actually make it over to Europe -- I managed to book my ticket early with the SNES game Secret of Mana. I've delved into my JRPG past often enough before now though, so suffice it to say it's the one game genre that's closest to my heart and the one that I've always championed for better or worse. Currently worse, if I'm being honest, though things seem to be turning around with games like Xenoblade and Bravely Default leading the counter-assault.

But I'm not the only one to have grown up with bleepy anime teenagers saving the world, and it would be fatuous of me to suppose that pre-FF7 console RPGs were a niche thing that few Western gamers ever appreciated. There's been a remarkable presence in the Indie gaming industry for games that deliberately recall the 8-/16-bit era of JRPGs, choosing those older aesthetics to tell stories of their own. Most of these are earnest efforts from fans that come about due to (relatively-)easy-to-use game creation software like RPG Maker, though it seems like the few that make a name for themselves are games that are in some way warmly satirical of that era: their often poor translations, their clichés and tropes and their occasionally absurd stories and settings. This is quite clearly evinced by the success of the Zeboyd games, or Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, or Half-Minute Hero or, hell, even the recent South Park: The Stick of Truth.

So here's three games I checked out that use old JRPGs as a base for something all together strange and different (and somewhat amusing to an extent). I guess in a sense this is me giving my usual May Madness Zeboyd shout-out -- I covered Cthulhu Saves the World for May Madness More -- even if I don't actually have any Zeboyd games to showcase this year.

Hero Siege

The game: Panic Arts' Hero Siege, a twin-stick shooter top-down RPG.

The source: The Indie Royale Debut 8 Bundle

The pre-amble: Hero Siege is an action RPG like Diablo that borrows the twin-stick shooter format to make things a bit more chaotic than normal games of its type. The player selects one of several hero types and strolls through arenas trying to kite enormous groups of enemies around picking them off, perhaps even leading them through traps in the environment to eliminate them faster. The game's packed with numerous roguelike elements to boot.

The playthrough: So right from the offset it's apparent how rough this game is. The pixel art is adequate but not exactly sterling on the blown-up, low-res settings that the game seems to use as default (you can really tell it's a iOS/Android port). The voice acting is beyond awful, though there's a certain B-movie charm to it as well. The game is plagued with glitches both minor and significant, from visual bugs to stuff like the level-up screen occasionally having an obfuscating pop-up that won't go away and enemies with one HP more than they ought to for whatever reason. It's also got a lot of slow-down and the slightly slanted top-down view occasionally makes it hard to accurately line up shots for some of the ranged characters - you have to aim at a monster's feet more often than not, especially when they start becoming enormous.

But honestly? I had fun with this game. It doesn't demand a whole lot, and isn't overly complicated, but it's managed to get that frantic twin-stick shooter part down pat and the RPG-ish additions only serve to enhance the twitch gameplay. There's been a few games of this genre that include leveling up skills and spending money to purchase power-ups (I dare say the grand majority of recent ones, excepting those that are explicitly Arcade-based like Geometry Wars), but the game adds a few interesting roguelike wrinkles as well. For one, you can occasionally visit dungeons which tend to feature slightly different configurations than the usual big arena with monsters pouring in, and the many traps you can lead monsters into can be your undoing as well if you aren't careful. There's that old Roguelike favorite of having multiple colored potions with unknown effects that change every playthrough. There's statues and relics that can give you permanent bonuses, though there's often a risk involved.

Moreover, Hero Siege feels like one of those games that you kinda have to study a little before you get good at it: Dungeons are generally bad news if you aren't a high level (or a good player) -- I played as a Viking, a Marksman and a Pirate, deciding I had a preference for ranged units, and they all got wiped out by daring to descend into the dungeons that would occasionally appear and encountering tough boss characters at the end; certain heroes work better with certain tactics, and require some min/maxing before they start to shine -- a ranged attacker doesn't need as much defense stat, for example, because if you're playing them properly you'll be staying out of everything's reach; kiting enemies into traps is a far more effective way of eliminating them than depending on your own weak weapons when starting out.

Hero Siege isn't going to be a game that will keep your interest for more than half an hour at a time, and due to the way its built would probably be a lot more preferable on a mobile device, but it's not quite as shoddy as initial impressions might suggest. As backhanded as that compliment is.

The verdict: I think I got a decent idea of what this game is already. It's a short bursts type of thing, so I doubt I'll be playing it extensively at any point in the future.

One Way Heroics

The game: SmokingWolf's One Way Heroics, a roguelike RPG.

The source: The Indie Royale Debut 8 Bundle. Again.

The pre-amble: One Way Heroics is a standard turn-based roguelike with a twist: rather than descending various floors of a randomized dungeon, the hero is pegging it across a randomized landscape that, every turn, falls into an all-enveloping darkness shifting in from the left. The player has to make their every step count, making decisions such as whether it would be best to head to a dungeon in the north or a town in the south for supplies. Enemies, treasures, mysteries, NPCs and obstacles lay in every direction.

The player can generate their own map by either creating their own "seed" code or letting the computer generate one for them. After every adventure, the player can spend the "heroic points" they earn for doing well on new classes and perks in the character creation screen, as well as drop off priceless items they found in the dimensional vault for the next hero.

The playthrough: I really like this game. A lot. It's hard to find a roguelike I'd like to drop any amount of time into, but this game scratches the same kind of itch as Rogue Legacy did before it. Though entirely a classic roguelike in most senses of the term -- it's graphically perfunctory rather than remarkable (the anime portraits aren't bad though), everything only moves when you do, there's items you can't always identify without a scroll and there's hunger and stamina and equipment durability meters to keep an eye on -- the game's emphasis on doing well enough to create enough advantages for the next hero to come along makes every quest (even the unsuccessful ones) feel like it's heading towards something, and there's a lot of tips and lessons you can piece together by remembering past experiences (especially deaths) or asking your fairy guide for advice. For instance, you'll start to get a good feel for each terrain, including the kind of items you can expect to find, the enemies you'll face, the frequency of dungeons and towns and the scarcity of healing/food items.

Though it has very little in common with the game from a mechanical perspective, One Way Heroics reminded me a lot of Half-Minute Hero - it has a very goofy and self-aware sense of humor, especially regarding the weird gimmick that drives the whole game, and the top-down JRPG 16-bit-esque veneer is clearly chosen to homage the game's venerable inspiration sources as much as it is a conveniently low-tech means for a less artistically-enabled Indie development team to still create a fine-looking game.

Honestly, I kind of feel like this game popped out of nowhere and just killed it for me. It may run out of steam further down the road (I've already beaten it and spent the points I've earned on what seemed like half the unlockables), but I suspect that it contains a hell of a lot of features that will slowly trickle out as the player gets better at the game and discovers more about how it works. I've actually managed to beat it, but only once and only on the lowest difficulty. With all its unlockables and the near-endless number of dimensions one could generate with an eight-digit code, One Way Heroics is beginning to look a bit like A Valley Without Wind or Disgaea for sheer depth; there's this unshakable feeling that I still have a long road ahead if I want to see everything the game has to offer. Time will tell if that feeling pans out, of course.

The verdict: Another one of those "short bursts" types of game, I suspect I might visit One Way Heroics again. I just unlocked a class/perk combo that makes me way better at unlocking chests, so I can't wait to see what I can find.

Two Brothers

The game: Ackk Studios's Two Brothers, an action RPG/adventure game.

The source: Groupees' Retro Groupees 2 bundle.

The pre-amble: Two Brothers is a top-down RPG adventure game that has chosen to present itself as a Game Boy game, complete with greenish monotone (but not always?), tinny sound and small viewing window, though still graphically sharper than those games ever were. It's a throwback with a lot of affection for the Game Boy era, but has a considerably deeper emphasis on its unusual story than the often rudimentary RPGs it venerates and seems to be a lot more than just a simple nostalgia trip.

The player assumes the role of Roy Blocker, inventor, explorer and adventurer, and his fascination with the afterlife after he dies unexpectedly on his most recent expedition that (probably) also took the life of his doting wife. Roy becomes obsessed with the intense colors and sights he saw of the next world, while also digging deeper into the mysteries of the land of the living he still inhabits.

The playthrough: So immediately upon starting the game, I got trapped outside the world and couldn't do the prologue sequence with Roy and his wife that leads on to the rest of the game's plot. What's even more telling than the fact that the game glitched out the very first sequence is that I assumed it was all deliberate. What little I recall from Giant Bomb's QL back when this game was added to Steam sometime last year was that it was almost oppressively weird and un-user-friendly, and having a trippy intro sequence where I was outside of everything seemed all too apropos to the game's core peculiarity. Nope: the game just messed up and I had to start over before it began working properly.

Two Brothers is kind of a mess, but in the same sort of deliberate, knowing way that The Real Texas was (which I covered a little while back for Desura December and came away from equally perplexed). There's something to be said for an Indie game developer choosing to recreate a very specific feeling of being young and playing a particularly strange JRPG and reaching a point where they become completely lost and bereft of purpose. I can also understand why memories like that would endure longer and harder than any other. It's easy for me to recall back to all the times I've gotten stuck in SNES RPGs in the past (Terranigma's a good example, and EarthBound never really went out of its way to make itself explicable either) and the few Game Boy JRPGs that saw Western translations -- Final Fantasy Adventure, the Final Fantasy Legends series, Sword of Hope -- were somehow even less fathomable. So when I play Two Brothers, I'm not seeing a game being deliberately abstruse for the hell of it like I am with The Real Texas, but rather I see a game that's trying to revisit what it was like for a young gamer vainly trying to come to terms with an enigma of a game that probably didn't make all that much sense in its native language, let alone the resulting Engrishy text of an ineffective translation.

Of course, I could be reading way too much into this stylistic choice and this could all just be the result of having some rather strange individuals behind the world-building of Two Brothers. Maybe it was intended to be more straightforward than this, to have more of a message about RPG tropes like the meaningless of death in a world where the player can always rewind time and try again or what would happen to a world should it suddenly shift from 8-bit monochrome to 16-bit full color, which is what I've read from other reviews and impressions about the game. I've spent a lot of time following what I believe to be the correct path, paying rapt attention to whatever tutorials and lessons the game imparts so that any lack of comprehension is not necessarily of my own unobservant doing, as is so often the case with LPers who ignore instructions for the sake of expediency or being entertaining. And so far, there have been flashes of a Final Fantasy Adventure in there, and its relatively novel mix of Zelda puzzles and RPG combat that made it so engrossing back when I was a JRPG-fixated youth. It just feels as if the final barrier to overcome before I can start truly enjoying Two Brothers in earnest is deciphering what the hell its deal is. Not even Anodyne was this weird.

The verdict: At this point, understanding this game is going to become a special project of mine, to paraphrase Josh Brolin's character in No Country For Old Men. I'll put it aside for now, but eventually -- just like I plan to do with La-Mulana -- I'll put a big block of time aside to try to figure it out. Surely there's some sense behind all this fish and color and giant panda and pelican bar nonsense? I'll make sure to post a follow-up at some point if I do play more of it. Spending just an hour or so to solve the mysteries of Two Brothers ain't going to cut it, not even close.

The Moment of Truth

Definitely One Way Heroics this time. I was pleasantly surprised, given that it looked like another RPGMaker game with a gimmicky premise to set it apart. It's never clear from screenshots with games like those (in which I also include the aforementioned Barkley Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden) just how well-considered its mechanics are. Plus, I'm already liking its Disgaea-levels of customization madness and how the denizens of that world takes all the contrived weirdness in stride. It seems like a game that could potentially keep my interest for hours, for as poor quality as some of its graphical aspects may be. A rinky-dink timesink, even. (I think that last statement means we're done for today.)

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