The Evolution of the Role Playing Game, FE4-Style Proof of Concept, or Chaotic Evolution
Story:
In the distant mists of time, the role playing game was born. From Dungeons and Dragons, the ultimate progenitor of the genre, games such as Wizardry and Ultima branched off from there. In turn, these games in turn were the inspiration for Dragon Quest/Warrior. And it in turn spawned titles such as Final Fantasy, which had many descendants of its own. All of these influences ultimately form a family tree of role-playing games, all ultimately deriving from the first D&D ports on the computers of the 1970s.
But something is wrong with these venerable titles. Heroes from across the universe woke up to find themselves at the beginning of their adventures. Some force has drawn the many villains of all existance to begin to collaborate. The natural process of evolution was under threat. The Light Warriors could no longer easily defeat Garland: he knocked them all down to another world.
By chance, the Fighter of the Light Warriors was sent to Alefgard as one of Erdrick’s descendants set sail for new shores, and they ran into each other…
This is a one-chapter hack representing the “first generation” of a compressed FE4-like. The second chapter made it no further than a map being created and an important mechanic being largely completed. I’d have much preferred to have brought things to a logical conclusion, but as always, I spent too much time procrastinating. What this does feature are…
- 24 characters from RPGs preceding the SNES
- A chapter with multiple checkpoints
- 30 “support conversations”
- Various powerful weapons
I rushed this out and stayed up for way too late to get as much dev time in as I could. It’s riddled with placeholder text and half the intended game isn’t there - in fact, I ran into two game-breaking bugs grabbing the screenshots. But as the deadline’s passed, it would be cheating to fix these. Feel free to give what’s there a spin: I took the time to experiment a bit (even if some of those experiments take the form of applying “Militant Edge” names to half the weapons).
Credits in appropriate file. Consult the readme for further details.
Known Issues:
Summary
Black Mage dying triggers a leftover War of Lovers death quote and ends the chapter.
Banutu can’t walk indoors and him getting into combat with animations on freezes the game.
Screenshots:
Download: