Knight of the Earthends (Android)
Jul. 22nd, 2024 07:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroThis world is limited by the EarthEdge walls, but there are legends that in the past that wasn’t true, and that the Linchpins of the Heavens are the key to removing those walls. That may or may not be a good thing, of course, because it seems like the king, military, and the church are conspiring to do it without telling their best knight what’s going on. (You are, of course, that knight; and it seems likely you’ll have to fix whatever the conspiracy ends up breaking.)
The last KEMCO/WorldWideSoftware game left that I hadn’t played, and it feels more “primitive” than most of what I’ve played lately. (It’s labeled as copyright 2010-2014, so that makes some sense.) The visuals are very zoomed-out and the characters are tiny (but the dialogue and menus are perfectly readable) on my Retroid Pocket 3; so this was clearly intended to be played on a tablet rather than a phone. It reads the controller inputs fine, though.
The dungeons are all extremely similar; they basically have a single tileset that’s used for caves and ruins, one for all the forests, and one for most of the towers. There are some hidden passages but no puzzles or particular challenges. I'm actually reminded of Final Fantasy 13, where there's an obvious straight line to the boss and then side paths for treasure.
As far as I can tell, there’s no IAP options or benefits at all. There are also no side quests or optional quests at all, just a couple of postgame dungeons pieced together with assorted assets from elsewhere in the game. And it’s very short—around five hours without the postgame stuff.
Your main character is a knight and she’s accompanied by a human-like golem and a strange unicorn girl they find in the first forest area. Each of them get a different set of equipment and skills: The knight gets standard storebought equipment and skill books, but can combine up to three learned skills into a pre-set combo attack. The golem needs to buy upgraded body parts, stat upgrades, and new skills from a specialty store; and needs to choose at each upgrade whether to be physical-focused or magic-focused. The unicorn girl absorbs groups of monster skills (via specialty XP) as a sort of class system, so she has a dozen different classes to swap between on-the-fly (including mid-battle!) that each has its own skills, MP pool, and status immunities.
The translation is acceptable but awkward, with strange turns of phrase and weird characterization that flows from the odd language choices. I think they were in fact trying to make the golem taciturn and sarcastic; but I’m guessing the unicorn-girl flipping between “confused innocent,” “secretly well-informed spy,” and “extremely lecherous kinky lesbian” depending on the scene was not the original intent.
SPOILERS:
There is, as expected, an entire world outside the Earthedge wall. The unicorn-people sealed up the humans inside there 600 years earlier to stop the races from fighting, because humans kept starting wars. Raud your golem buddy was actually originally human, and was bribed into participating in terrible experiments because the king promised to revive his dead fiancée (which he couldn't and didn't). The military commander is the son of the previous unicorn-person spy and that's why he has the power to destroy the linchpins; he kills the king, steals a powerful golem and views to destroy both races as revenge. He and the priestess merge with the golem to unleash its true power but you defeat it, and the party goes on to bring peace to the two races and the recombined world.
Overall: Short, not bad but not great. The systems are pretty decent and the story is stock; but the lousy translation makes the characterization borderline nonsensical. I could have picked a worse WorldWideSoftware game to end on, certainly.
The last KEMCO/WorldWideSoftware game left that I hadn’t played, and it feels more “primitive” than most of what I’ve played lately. (It’s labeled as copyright 2010-2014, so that makes some sense.) The visuals are very zoomed-out and the characters are tiny (but the dialogue and menus are perfectly readable) on my Retroid Pocket 3; so this was clearly intended to be played on a tablet rather than a phone. It reads the controller inputs fine, though.
The dungeons are all extremely similar; they basically have a single tileset that’s used for caves and ruins, one for all the forests, and one for most of the towers. There are some hidden passages but no puzzles or particular challenges. I'm actually reminded of Final Fantasy 13, where there's an obvious straight line to the boss and then side paths for treasure.
As far as I can tell, there’s no IAP options or benefits at all. There are also no side quests or optional quests at all, just a couple of postgame dungeons pieced together with assorted assets from elsewhere in the game. And it’s very short—around five hours without the postgame stuff.
Your main character is a knight and she’s accompanied by a human-like golem and a strange unicorn girl they find in the first forest area. Each of them get a different set of equipment and skills: The knight gets standard storebought equipment and skill books, but can combine up to three learned skills into a pre-set combo attack. The golem needs to buy upgraded body parts, stat upgrades, and new skills from a specialty store; and needs to choose at each upgrade whether to be physical-focused or magic-focused. The unicorn girl absorbs groups of monster skills (via specialty XP) as a sort of class system, so she has a dozen different classes to swap between on-the-fly (including mid-battle!) that each has its own skills, MP pool, and status immunities.
The translation is acceptable but awkward, with strange turns of phrase and weird characterization that flows from the odd language choices. I think they were in fact trying to make the golem taciturn and sarcastic; but I’m guessing the unicorn-girl flipping between “confused innocent,” “secretly well-informed spy,” and “extremely lecherous kinky lesbian” depending on the scene was not the original intent.
SPOILERS:
There is, as expected, an entire world outside the Earthedge wall. The unicorn-people sealed up the humans inside there 600 years earlier to stop the races from fighting, because humans kept starting wars. Raud your golem buddy was actually originally human, and was bribed into participating in terrible experiments because the king promised to revive his dead fiancée (which he couldn't and didn't). The military commander is the son of the previous unicorn-person spy and that's why he has the power to destroy the linchpins; he kills the king, steals a powerful golem and views to destroy both races as revenge. He and the priestess merge with the golem to unleash its true power but you defeat it, and the party goes on to bring peace to the two races and the recombined world.
Overall: Short, not bad but not great. The systems are pretty decent and the story is stock; but the lousy translation makes the characterization borderline nonsensical. I could have picked a worse WorldWideSoftware game to end on, certainly.
