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  Aldorlea Games posted:Remember the 16-bit role-playing games such as Aldorlea Games is a game development and publishing company that specializes in RPGMaker titles. They came into being after a man named Indinera Falls decided that he could make some cash selling some lovely RPGs. The first game he made under Aldorlea Games was called Laxius Force, part 5 in a 7 part RPGmaker series. The game was lauded by the admittedly few critics who got to play it and it was filled to the brim with some of the most misogynistic writing I've ever seen. It received an 84% from RPGFan and a 7/10 from GamersDailyNews. Neither of these reviews touch upon the fact that the game is filled to the brim with horrible gameplay, horrible balance, horrible plot, horrible pacing, horrible characters, and sexism out the wazoo all in the name of creating "old school RPGs for the PC" and overcharging for them. This thread is about Aldorlea Games as a whole (as well as similar sites such as Amaranth Games), but for the OP I would like to focus on what makes the site's creator so awful. Let's focus on Laxius Force: Heroes Never Die. Aldorlea Games posted:LAXIUS FORCE  In Laxius Force, you play as a guy named Random Pendragon and his fiance Sarah Brandalino as they go on their quest to...do something, the game never really specifies until about 5 minutes before it ends and tells you to drop 25 bucks on the sequel. Along the way, they meet all kinds of hideously drawn characters with a wide array of annoying personalities such as "the sarcastic woman who keeps calling people retarded," "the chauvinist who keeps telling the women in the party to mind their place and lick his boots," and "the woman whose personality is entirely based around her desire to gently caress a wolf."    The main game is actually kind of short for an RPG. The main padding comes in the form of backtracking, awful dialogue that is made up of characters constantly repeating each other, horrible attempts at "love scenes," and the sidequests that manage to make even the worst adventure game puzzle look competent. Imagine finding yourself in a village of peaceful lizardmen. The game wants you to genocide them as that is what will get you rewards, but if you don't genocide them, you can get a choice of one of three items. Of the three items, only one has any use, a "feather mattress." You then go to a separate part of the map and examine a specific tile in order to get an egg that looked like it was part of the background. You then use the feather mattress, bringing up a text parser where you type in the exact name of the item you want to use the mattress on. You type in the name of the egg and boom.   Brand new party member who happens to be much stronger and much more useful than the other party members, turning the game into less of a grind than it already is. And boy believe you me, this game is a grind. There are plenty of areas that exist solely for the player to die to things like giant ghosts that cast spells such as "Holocaust" or killer mimics that serve only to blockade you until you grind for an hour and come back. The battle system is so poorly balanced that often times the only character that is any good is Cocka-Cocka there because he receives all of his best equipment as he levels as opposed to the other characters that you have to manually find equipment for. There are dozens and dozens of status effects, many of which do the same thing, and the game's tutorial doesn't cover any of it (nor is there any way to find out about them during the game). On top of that, the game's sidequests often vary in difficulty to the point where you may complete a sidequest for going into a superhard optional dungeon where everybody is sans armor due to being underwater and 5 minutes later you'll complete a quest for letting the main characters gently caress in a lake off screen.    The game's writing is atrocious. Not just because the developer's first language is French, but because the developer is a downright awful writer. Lemme go ahead and tell you about his worst character, Sarah.  Sarah is a blue-haired "Suprem Elf of the Sun" from the "Indinera Woods." She comes from a family of elves that lives in a patriarchal society where every female is taught that the greatest joy in life is to be completely 100% subservient to men. Raised in a society that promotes nudity, Sarah is often viewed as a "slut" for wearing clothing. She is not intelligent, she is not strong, and she is half-angel. Her greatest joys include being Random Pendragon's fiance and dealing with the entire population of men that make casual surprise sex comments towards her and are always talking about how "smoking hot" she is. That's it. That's her entire character. She's by far the worst of them but every other female in the game and the series as a whole is pretty much the same way.    The last thing I'm going to touch upon is the plot itself. The plot of Laxius Force can best be summarized by taking a hammer and bashing it into your skull. It is so utterly pointless that at no point in time do you ever feel connected. The game is split into a prologue and 4 chapters. Of these, the prologue is completely unrelated in every way and the first three chapters can be summarized as "Random and Sarah are bored and want to go for a walk." It isn't until chapter 4 that plot begins to happen, and by plot, I mean one of your party members is stripped of her clothing and axed in half and while the other party members are mourning her death, a dude with a sniper rifle flips into the scene and kills two more of your party members before leaving, leaving you sans 3 characters. You then go to heaven where you are told by the goddess of life "Yveen" a whole bunch of cryptic poo poo that doesn't matter and Random decides to keep fighting on despite the deaths of 3 of his comrades, though he only ever acknowledges two of their deaths with the third person never even getting any final words. Then Yveen says that Sarah is going to go through a special trial to be given magical angel powers, but at the end of her trial heaven's main computer system gets infected by a computer virus called "Heaven Cancer" and you and the goddess go inside to destroy the cancer. After that, Sarah gets angel wings. The End. None of it makes sense and a lot of it just feels like an excuse to pad out Indinera Falls' awful resume of terrible games. The entire game feels like one guy's masturbation fantasies mixed with self-insert fanfiction. I don't know what the reviewers he sent the game to saw in it, but I don't understand the appeal of this game or of any of his games.    That's pretty much it for Laxius Force: Heroes Never Die. As I said earlier, this is actually the 5th game in the series, though it's the first one he charged money for. The other games include Laxius Force 2 and 3 (The direct sequels to Laxius Force), 3 Stars of Destiny (a prequel he made some time after Laxius Force 3 to retcon his plot a little), and Laxius Power 1, 2, and 3 (freeware RPGMaker games that borrow assets from all kinds of different media, from songs by Genesis to artwork from Fire Emblem, as well as mixing in his own drawings that are hilariously inept  ). Among other titles Aldorlea Games have developed are games such as Millennium: A New Hope, Sylia, and The Book of Legends. Among other titles that they have published are games like Dark Souls 2, Vagrant Hearts, Shining Plume, and Last Heroes. I can't say much for the rest of their games, but I've been playing through Millennium right now and while it is, at worst, a boring game with a dumb plot and bad writing, it's certainly a hell of a lot better than Laxius Force, which is probably why Indinera Falls has it up on Steam Greenlight.I personally received both games as gifts from indie bundles in the past and honestly, I feel ripped off. The idea that games like this can be made using the bare bones basics of RPGMaker and sold at extreme prices for profit just bugs me. Who is the market for these games? Who is buying enough of these games to keep the company afloat? They seem to be doing well enough but I can't find a single product there that actually looks fun or interesting to play. If you're interested in taking a look at their catalog of games, go ahead and click the link below. Maybe you'll be able to find the reason they still exist. http://www.aldorlea.org/allgames.php FirstAidKite fucked around with this message at Feb 11, 2013 around 05:26 |
| # ? Feb 11, 2013 04:48 |
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| # ? May 26, 2013 03:36 |
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Sarah is the face of all the world's woes.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 05:04 |
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I was really excited by the thread title because Dragon Quest is my favorite RPG series and I know of very few games that replicate its strengths. This is not what I wanted. 
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 05:05 |
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Renamed thread to better reflect the games.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 05:10 |
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Cocka-cocka is the real main character, and should have his own series of games. Look at him: None of these other chucklefucks can step to him.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 05:20 |
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Clark_Mk_IV posted:Cocka-cocka is the real main character, and should have his own series of games. That rooster is legitimately the best character in the whole of the Laxius Force series because all he does is say his own name occasionally followed by whatever action he's doing at the time. Due to the complete lack of characterization, he automatically is much better than the rest. Louisgod posted:Renamed thread to better reflect the games. Okay I'm down with this.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 05:22 |
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Why can't I stop looking at this.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 05:26 |
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I think I remember playing Laxius Power after seeing it in The Underdogs, back when it existed. I think it got 'Top Dog' status there. Looking back, that really does not mean much. I do not remember playing past the first few lines of dialog. Unlucky7 fucked around with this message at Feb 11, 2013 around 05:41 |
| # ? Feb 11, 2013 05:39 |
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clockwork chaos posted:Why can't I stop looking at this. Monkey only has 4 fingers. Not only that but proportionwise they drew an ape and just put a tail at the end which is anatomicly incorrect, even for an anime ape/monkey. 
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 05:40 |
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clockwork chaos posted:Why can't I stop looking at this. That monkey is totally optional but has one of the greatest abilities in the game. Before each battle starts, he has the option of throwing a rock at the enemy. Or he can choose not to. There is no reason to ever not throw the rock. The great part is how the choice is presented to you. That monkey's face shows up, and the game simply asks: Throw a rock? Don't?
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 05:40 |
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I look at all those drawings and if it's not a traced over image from Record of the Lodoss War, it's Arc the Lad and stuff that Working Designs put out.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 05:43 |
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I always laugh when someone thinks a game like this is worth $25 when highly-polished commercial indies usually aren't more than $5-10.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 05:47 |
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TOOT BOOT posted:I always laugh when someone thinks a game like this is worth $25 when highly-polished commercial indies usually aren't more than $5-10. Fun fact: If a person wanted to play every Laxius Force game, they would have to pay $90 minimum just for Laxius Force 1, 2, 3, and 3 Stars Of Destiny. Buying the guides for the games that sell them (since you'd miss out on a fuckton of game content causing you to have a harder time playing the game) would bring the total up to $104.00 Plus tax.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 06:07 |
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I've watched one of these games in motion and it feels like the makers never actually played their own games to see how torturous they really are. Test your own game? Don't?
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 06:15 |
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You can't make a thread like this and not link me to a brilliant LP of one of the games. My google searching skills ain't helping and I'm certainly not gonna play that thing myself
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 06:35 |
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SNARF SNARF SNARF posted:You can't make a thread like this and not link me to a brilliant LP of one of the games. My google searching skills ain't helping and I'm certainly not gonna play that thing myself I don't think there is one. Nor do I think there will ever be one.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 06:36 |
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Unlucky7 posted:I don't think there is one. Nor do I think there will ever be one. This thread has made it 20% more likable. A LP of the big Laxius Force franchise is in order.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 06:39 |
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SNARF SNARF SNARF posted:You can't make a thread like this and not link me to a brilliant LP of one of the games. My google searching skills ain't helping and I'm certainly not gonna play that thing myself I've been wanting to make an LP thread for it but I honestly can't find a good method of dealing with it. If you edit out the tedious battles and backtracking, you just end up with lovely dialogue. The game isn't just terrible, it's also tedious when you aren't stuck in a long conversation of characters repeating each other and boss battles with sprites that are just photoshop filters with arms attached. Bosses like these      
FirstAidKite fucked around with this message at Feb 11, 2013 around 06:46 |
| # ? Feb 11, 2013 06:40 |
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SNARF SNARF SNARF posted:This thread has made it 20% more likable. Well I sure as hell not going to waste time and money just so I can be e-famous.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 06:40 |
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Unlucky7 posted:Well I sure as hell not going to waste time and money just so I can be e-famous. Now, now, wouldn't you want to share the utter terribleness of this saga with everyone else? That's what this site is all about after all! LP's can have a purpose other than getting those sweet youtube bucks or e-fame.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 06:43 |
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I got Laxius Force in some indie bundle too and found it to be pretty bad as well. The dialog is so bad, and the author really seems to love racism and sexism! I think I remember a line where some NPC says to you "what are you, some sort of friend of the family?" as a response to something you say. I eventually reached a part where I could defeat the normal enemies but the boss would wipe my party effortlessly and it was a part of the game that would have been a nuisance to go back and grind, so I gave up. Somehow I feel it was for the best.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 06:45 |
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http://www.aldorlea.org/officialsite/phpBB3/ Looking through the forums, it certainly seems to be popular and not just some lovely obscure website made by some guy who had nothing else to do with his time quote:Total posts 207699 • Total topics 5436 • Total members 3730 quote:Most users ever online was 144 on Fri Mar 11, 2011 8:08 am That's a pretty devoted fanbase interested in some sweet RPGMaker gaming
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 06:47 |
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Original_Z posted:I got Laxius Force in some indie bundle too and found it to be pretty bad as well. The dialog is so bad, and the author really seems to love racism and sexism! I think I remember a line where some NPC says to you "what are you, some sort of friend of the family?" as a response to something you say. I eventually reached a part where I could defeat the normal enemies but the boss would wipe my party effortlessly and it was a part of the game that would have been a nuisance to go back and grind, so I gave up. Somehow I feel it was for the best. I don't recall this. Do you know if you were playing the standard version or the mature version? The developer released a "mature patch" without any patch notes so the only thing I noticed it did was include a pedometer, take away the ability to change your party anywhere, take away the ability to view what quests you are working on, and adding in a few bikini items so that you can dress up your party members in sprite-changing bikinis so that you can complete certain quests and also so some NPCs will stare at them and give you items for wearing bikinis.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 06:48 |
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SNARF SNARF SNARF posted:http://www.aldorlea.org/officialsite/phpBB3/ This is one of the things that made me absolutely blow a steam valve on the streams kite did of this game over the last few months. I'm a programmer myself, and I take the quality of my work extremely seriously. That this two-bit hack could rub his bare, hairy rear end on the keyboard and come out with something that people actually pay for is both confounding and insulting to me. Nerdy blowouts like that are what got me the avatar you see over to my left though, so I already paid for that.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 06:51 |
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TheLastRoboKy posted:I've watched one of these games in motion and it feels like the makers never actually played their own games to see how torturous they really are. Because they are people who equated mindless grinding for engaging gameplay back in the 80's/90's and never let go.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 06:57 |
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Coolguye posted:This is one of the things that made me absolutely blow a steam valve on the streams kite did of this game over the last few months. I'm a programmer myself, and I take the quality of my work extremely seriously. That this two-bit hack could rub his bare, hairy rear end on the keyboard and come out with something that people actually pay for is both confounding and insulting to me. Speaking of your avatar and your various stream tantrums, what is your personal opinion of Sarah? After all, she started off as a character in Shining Force 2 before the developer decided to write a fanfiction game about her where he made her into an original character that was his self-insert's lover and stuff. Surely after all of the poo poo she has said, all the poo poo she has done, and all of the poo poo that she represents in this game, I'm sure you have quite the opinion of her.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 06:58 |
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FirstAidKite posted:Speaking of your avatar and your various stream tantrums, what is your personal opinion of Sarah? You rear end in a top hat. YOU KNOW THAT BET I LOST? THE ONE WHERE I HAVE TO SAY SOMETHING NICE? YEAH, gently caress YOU, BUDDY, I AIN'T SAYIN' poo poo.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 07:00 |
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Wait, wait. Did that huge block of spoilers in the OP mention a sniper rifle? I thought this was a loving fantasy game! Unless this subscribes to the Final Fantasy version of "Fantasy." Also: quote:Phantasy Star IV? Can't believe they have the gall to compare this to PS4.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 07:04 |
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I saw the first two Aldorlea images and thought they weren't too bad if a little anime, but I was willing to cut it some slack. Then I scrolled down to Laxius Force and I haven't stopped laughing since.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 07:04 |
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I've seen a lot of this sort of thing and I'd mainly just convinced myself that the people who review these sorts of games positively despite their bullshit have a vested interest in their success. Either they're hobbyists themselves working in RPG Maker who want to see more games made in their chosen engine succeed (regardless of, well, anything), or they're small reviewing startups so desperate for readership that they'll try to get an in with whatever fanbases they think are available. It doesn't really hold up to the facts, but the alternative is admitting that this is what 80% of the indie games scene is, snapping my pencil in half, and sobbing deeply into my sketchbook.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 07:23 |
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I dunno. Between the monkey, the chicken, and that sweet anime Unicorn I gotta say this thread is selling me on these RPGs.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 07:27 |
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If nethack has taught me anything it's that having a cockatrice as a party member is a really bad idea.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 08:15 |
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When you can buy quality AAA RPGs for $30. Why in god's name would anyone waste $28.99 on this trash? asguaard 
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 08:19 |
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Who the gently caress would name a kid random? Dude with a name like that is begging to be mocked.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 08:25 |
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Seriously what the hell is this supposed to be.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 08:27 |
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I haven't taken a look yet, but how do they match up to Forgiveness, the Christian RPG trilogy?
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 08:27 |
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Louisgod posted:Seriously what the hell is this supposed to be. It looks like a character from gazillionaire, but with none of the charm or charisma.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 08:30 |
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Louisgod posted:Seriously what the hell is this supposed to be. Coryool. He was a party member in Laxius Power and Laxius Force and you can find a video games room in Laxius Force where you fight all of your party members from Laxius Power except they're all in bikinis except for Coryool here. He is in his 40s and only goes along with the party because he likes booze. He's dumb and because he is dumb he is immune to magic, but that's okay because he can cast his own magic and his blood contains black hole enzymes that make him invulnerable to magic and instant death attacks. His character is "I like booze and women, if I hang around with this teenager I'll be able to get more booze and women."
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 08:35 |
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I first encountered this nutjob a decade ago. Looks like he's actively gotten worse now that he can't rely on graphics ripped from old Squaresoft RPGs.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 08:36 |
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| # ? May 26, 2013 03:36 |
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What actual good has come out of RPGMaker? I'm honestly curious. The only thing I can think of is Yume Nikki.
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| # ? Feb 11, 2013 08:40 |
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