Upon first glance at A Story of the End: Revere, you may see some similarities to RPGs of the 16 bit era and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. A Story of the End was created using the RPGMaker MV tool, a notorious tool that either garners love, or hate depending on the experience you may have had with it’s created games. Steam frequently features RPGMaker games for better or worse. A lot of these games are rushed to the store and feature horrible writing, and cheap production value even for a low cost. There are good RPGMaker games on the market, and with some tweaks, it appears this game could be one of them.
A Story of the End: Revere starts off in a small village, where the main character Troy wakes up in a bed being tended to by a humanoid creature that resembles a rabbit. Troy was a part of a squad that had just massacred a small village, but Troy himself saw the error of his ways and decided not to join in the massacre. He was found shortly after by our new Half Human/Half Rabbit friend. The game starts once Roland enters and decides to trust that Troy is not among those who wanted to massacre innocent people. Roland and Troy first decide to undertake some quests from the quest board, which was a neat feature that displayed mini quests for you to undertake.
Most of the quests were fetch quests and involved gathering drops by random encounters. I loved the idea of these miniquests, but to my disappointment as soon as I collected the needed items for the quest, I was immediately rewarded instead of realistically taking the needed items to the quest giver. After finishing all the quests, the real story starts, where some folks from the village go missing. After leaving the village to try and find them, I encountered the most shocking scene in the game thus far.
At this point, things had really began to pick up and I wanted to see where this was going, after a boss battle shortly after this, the demo concluded. The game has a few neat features not found in many JRPGs, such as a way to stack commands in battle, and a way to change how frequently you would have random encounters outside of town. You can also change a setting to have as many or as few encounters as you’d like from having an encounter with almost every step you take, to NEVER having encounters. This demo shows a lot of promise, with just a few bugs/gripes such as, no explanation when Troy transforms into another being in the boss battle, it doesn’t tell you how to attack the boss (protip: You need to click repeatedly on the boss) and occasional weird clipping errors such as using a west exit yet appearing on the east side after a screen change. The story seems interesting, and dark despite using some fluffy humanoid characters. This game shows a lot of promise, and if the developers take their time and show it some love, could really make this a fun game. When it arrives in stores, I recommend checking it out!