A downloadable game

One thousand years ago, the evil Queen Zola attained immortality and conquered the world. Four brave heroes rose to the task of defeating her, but were unable to deal a decisive blow to the immortal queen. With the last of their strength, the heroes sealed Queen Zola away with magic, ending her evil reign. But now, those who worship the evil queen have begun to move, and if nothing is done, the evil queen may rise again...

It's up to you to save this world! Find strong allies, and equip yourself with powerful weapons and magic, so that you may battle against the fiends that seek to revive Queen Zola! And if you fail in your quest... this world will certainly be devoured by darkness...

Eternal Tale: Seal of the Four Heroes is an 8-bit, retro-inspired game designed with RPG Maker MZ. If you are looking for a nostalgic trip back to the good ol' days of the 1980s, look no further than this exciting tale! Currently, you are able to play through the entire first chapter of the game in this demo, which will take approximately 2-3 hours, though the full game is expected to have 5 chapters in total.

Included with this download are a few extra documents - a full game manual (EternalTaleInstructionBooklet.pdf) that should answer all of your questions about the game's mechanics, as well as a strategy guide (EternalTaleStrategyGuide.pdf) that provides a full walkthrough of the demo's contents. There is also a mock magazine ad (EternalTaleMagazineAd01.png) included as well!

To play the game, remove the game cartridge from it's case and insert it into your Mintenmo Amusement Console, then press the power button unzip the folder and open game.exe!

I would appreciate any comments and reviews for the game! After all, your comments can only help me make the game better! If you discover any bugs, typos, or generally bad design choices, please let me know! 

A full list of the game's credits, including all who contributed graphics, plugins and so forth can be found at the end of the game manual included with the download.

StatusReleased
Rating
Rated 4.0 out of 5 stars
(2 total ratings)
AuthorTakuma Gao
GenreRole Playing
Tags8-Bit, JRPG, Retro, RPG Maker

Download

Download
Eternal Tale (Demo) (Ver. 1.0).rar 107 MB

Comments

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Hello,
Last week I played your game on stream. Overall, I thought it was fairly mediocre with a sudden jump in difficulty.

Eternal Tale features some nice attention to detail to maintain the "lost NES game" aesthetic, such as making some screen wipes/fades have a limited number of fades.
I think one of the biggest problems with this game is how wordy it is. It took far too long before I felt like I had been finally set loose on my adventure to save the princess. It feel like everyone just had too much to say when things could have been cut back a lot fewer words and sentences.

There is a funny dichotomy between this game and the game I had played just before, as both games present themselves as "lost NES games", both use the same asset pack, but the game before had so much more interesting content and got to it faster. From the very beginning the player is able to make compelling choices: the gender of their character, the class they play as, and they even have starting cash with a variety of weapons to equip allowing the player to decide what weapon will suit them and their class best. Exploration was rewarded well which meant all of these small little choices the player could make lead to a more compelling version of Eternal Tale, and I wish it was Eternal Tale that followed a similar formula, instead of spending long amounts of time talking, and railroading the player through the decisions they could make.
While talking about the previous game: I want to give the dev of Eternal Tale the same feedback I shared with the dev of the other game: this asset pack seems to have become quite popular as a number of games are using this asset pack. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, other than the fact that it only serves to detract from your game's originality. If one lacks the artistic ability to make wholly original assets, then I at least recommend taking the assets you purchased and spending some time in a photo editor to edit the assets to be unique to your game, such as adjusting the color profile or rearranging details on some tiles, merging tiles with different sheets, etc.

The game also unfortunately lacks WASD keyboard in put. There are a variety of keyboard config plugins that are free and take less than a minute to set up in a project. There is rarely an excuse to not include basic key-rebinding so that players can play the game with the controls they are most comfortable using.

If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game.

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Great work! And now really for the NES ;-)

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Wonderful NES/classic FF1 aesthetic!

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Thanks! That's what I was going for! Well actually, FF3, but it's close enough!

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Hello Takuma, 

I have played some of your game and I must say you should be proud of what you made. It is very authentic to nes rpgs to the point that it could almost be a lost one, but the 'crustyness' of those old games is polished off in this one. The guides/instruction book feel the same way have a high degree of production value. I can tell you had a lot of fun putting this together!

It was fun exploring a lost nes game, and think this game deserves more visibility. The only real suggestion I would make is to have an option for enemies to give more exp/gold for players who want to not have to grind for money/exp. 

Thank you for the praise! :D As for the extra EXP/Gold thing... it's funny that you mention that, because there's a cheat code system in place... I just haven't revealed the codes yet :P