I don't know what it is about 2024, but it's a year where people keep linking me RPGMaker games that put new-release titles to shame. Ruina: Fairy Tale of The Forgotten Ruins, is a solo jam by one inspired fellow named Karekusa who casually decided to use the RPGMaker 2000 engine to make a western-style CRPG which kicks ass and is all killer, no filler.

The game doesn't make use of fields and maps made of tiled sprites the same way most RPGMaker titles do, nor do you actually walk a character around with the arrow keys. Instead, the steerable player avatar is a selection cursor, and the maps are all hand-drawn pictures with selectable points of interest on them. You select a point of interest, and are presented with a narration (and possibly an image) of what you encountered there, kind of like a tabletop RPG session or a narration-decision segment in Pillars of Eternity. Your choice of character background and the party members you bring with you translate into having different skills which can be applied to an encounter. The maid from the noble household, for example, can pick locks and spy ambushes before they happen. But she won't have a clue how to decipher ancient scripts.

After an encounter is resolved, more of the fog of war from the map is cleared, more points of interest are revealed, and you go scope out what awaits next. You repeat checking out encounters, fighting, exploring, and filling out the map until you either run low on resources and go home to town, or find a checkpoint like a big boss fight. It's a simple gameplay loop which is executed smoothly, which rewards players for pushing further in a single dive with some minor bonuses, but you won't (or shouldn't) feel punished for losing out on them if it's your first time through and you keep getting your clock cleaned. Mechanically, the fight system is no-frills RPGMaker fare applied cleverly. Regular encounters are usually about packing the right damage type to sweep before you take too much attrition, which is fine, and Boss encounters are where the sauce really lies. There's usually a hint about how to hand the major antagonists their own asses, hidden in the themes and lore you'll have collected over the course of the game. One early-game boss seems insurmountable, a figure from myth who can't be harmed by weapons of war. Nobody said you couldn't huck a cauldron of bad cooking at him and poison his ass, though. Or find a party member who can rip people apart with their bare claws. Or get the Mage band together and nuke him. And so on.

The storyline is much more compelling than your typical dungeon-dive, so let's not spoil anything there. Some specifics depend on which origin story you pick for your main character, but the main mystery remains the same past a certain point. Again, this feels more like a TTRPG tale than a breezy console JRPG, both in terms of the tale told and the cadence at which detail is given. I found it compelling enough to stay interested until the end, which I guess doesn't sound like high praise? But it was enjoyable. Your party members are all very well-defined characters, I only found personal quests for a few of them. I might've missed some, and they're not all equally interesting or dramatic. One of them in particular felt much more of a big deal than the rest. Vague, I know.

What makes this all stick together so well is the presentation. Everything in this game is hand-drawn, so there's a unified and unique style present in all the maps, areas, character and enemy portraits. The game's resolution is low, owing to RPGMaker 2000 being an ancient piece of software, but I didn't find it mattered much. I found the character designs were really enjoyable, especially the brooding huntress you can add to your party, and some of the maps and CG scenes have a fantastic charcoal & watercolor vibe that lends itself well to the slightly dreamy vibe the game puts forth.

There's more I could talk about, like how breezy and easy it is to craft new equipment and break the tightly-controlled power curve and feel like a sick badass, but this has run on long enough. Ruina is a very good CRPG-style game made in RPGMaker which is now available in English and you should play it if you like RPGs, RPGMaker menus won't instantly kill you, and you feel like experiencing a fresh take on the 'the labyrinth is haunted, dude, now go clear it out' formula with some cool twists and a nice little cast.

Starting with the point, I've only done 1 out of the 4 'route' or 'classes' you could choose for the game, the sage route. I will go back over time to finish the other 3 but for reasons I'll point out later, I'm not all too keen to go thru them at the moment
Honestly the fact this game was made by one single person is kind of baffling. Karekusa put a lot of thought, feeling, and passion into the game I don't know how long this took but major props to the sole creator, deserves all of it and hope since the game was made they've gone onto doing something they love. The raw fantasy setting, vibe and lore is insanely cool with nice OST accompanied to it. The Sage route offered a lot of what I was asking going into the game. For a RPGmaker game and not being the biggest fan of them, the gameplay isn't bad (though does get boring at times). I don't want to get into spoilers but the mystery and plot of the route was great, the game gave me way too many chills just cuz of everything surrounding it. It is kind of a choose your own way/route story which was nice at times but also something I did not enjoy always. The game is about as non linear as Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, it says its non linear when it kind of isn't. The lack of direction at times was quite frustrating and found my self at an impasse a few times which felt more tedious and annoying than fun. It still funnels you to a concluding point but I don't think it does the best of keeping the non linearity at the same time, giving me multiple headaches. it would be incredibly frustrating for me to play all 4 routes back to back hence why I'm deciding to take breaks. Some fights are weirdly placed where your not ready for them at all or if you don't have this specific item, you're basically fucked or in for a marginally harder time. That's about the only cons I have but it comes out as a net positive and would genuinely recommend this to anyone looking for a fantasy setting game to play

If you like fantasy JRPGs at all, if you like more "table-top"-y RPGs, you should go out and play the Ruina translation when you get a chance: https://dinklations.wordpress.com/2021/01/30/ruina-fairy-tale-of-the-forgotten-ruins-english-version/

I'm sure there are other games like it (some aspects remind me of what I kind of understand about Unlimited Saga), but Ruina feels more approachable than that.

Light Spoilers:

I love the prose in Ruina - as you inspect points on hand-drawn background maps (e.g. a illustration of a town, a forest, a dungeon), it describes the area and you sometimes fight or choose to press on, and it shows more of the map. So it's kind of in-between a text adventure (think colossal cave?), a D&D session and a typical JRPG. Battles are pretty hard and you're encouraged to try to set "EXP High Scores" via clearing events/battles, which will give you skill points for your jobs. This gives the game a really interesting texture - you prep at the surface, then warp in to whereever you were exploring and try to make it through like 3-4 events without dying.

Of course this has some frustrating moments of dying after a cutscene and having to sit through it again later, but I think it mostly works. It's nice when you manage to chance it through more battles than you expect. And there are some great twists with this map traversal that are worth playing for!

Basically, because the game 'zooms out' to a view of a whole realm or dungeon, you get this storybook sense of place/time. Where you're scaling a snowy mountain, but through these brief vignettes and glimpses, rather than a literal, build-out mountain space.


Complaints:

This is an RPG Maker 2k game, which means a few things - for one, the fonts and resolution are gorgeous. Like Nepheshel there's some great atmosphere to the limitations this engine has.

My main issue with Ruina - which I'm not docking any points for, but just be advised - are how fiddly everything is. I don't know if this is just RPG Maker 2k (Nepheshel was like this I think), but there's no visual feedback as to why your attacks are doing zero damage vs 150 damage. It's clear there's SOME elemental system and maybe slash/bash system at work, but you basically have to take notes to figure out whether this is the case for a given encounter. Because of the way the game's progression is set up, this can get really tedious. If I want to try a new party layout, I have to reload and walk back to the encounter.

So usually dungeons feel a bit random, almost? I'll steamroll through some fights, hit a wall and be stuck for a while. Usual JRPG fare, but RPGM2K's menus are terrible - they don't clearly show elemental or weapon type info (some character skills are locked out unless using certain weapons). Every item is just dumped into this gigantic list. When you want to craft a new item, there's no info shown on it. So you have to craft the item, check the stats, then reload if it's useless... crafting materials are also fairly random and it's hard to know if one material you're using is also used somewhere else. So it makes any kind of real planning a huge slog.



Big Spoilers:

So I didn't actually clear Ruina yet. Despite the fiddly difficulty, there are just great moments - the way that the races' towns reveal themselves to be inside artificial domes, or how you warp back and forth between past/present exploring the "Present ruins" of a city and the "past version" of a city experimenting with some dangerous alchemy. As you do this you have to sleep and save down in the ruins, and when you do finally return to the surface, there's been a time skip! Everyone in the town is surprised you're alive, and the political situation has changed, the air is weird. It's a cool game.