Used a romhack that restores the difficulty back to the original Japanese release.
Contrary to my initial expectations, Exile is barely an RPG. It's a basic 2D "hold right and kill enemies with sword" gameplay loop, with lite RPG elements such as experience points, and top-down towns in which you buy equipment for the road ahead.
What's baffling about it is that the way it starts, will completely lead you to believe that you're in for a party-based RPG game. You start off in a town, and your main goal is to gather three party members for your journey. The game makes a point of telling you one of these party members has brute strength that could be useful. "Oh, like a tank-type character! Sure!" One of them looks like a mage, probably gonna cast some spells. It seems a bit odd that you can only buy equipment for your main character and no one else, but I figured "hey, less management sounds good."
So, your expectations are set this way, only to be swept under you like a rug. The moment you get to your first dungeon, all your party members get left behind as you fall into a trap. "Alright, fair enough, looks like we're starting off with just one character for now." But then you get to the later dungeons, and your protagonist just tells your party members to stay behind. Well then, why in bloody hell are they here at all? They're useless! And they stay that way for the rest of the game, they journey along with you, but fall back at the first sign of danger, leaving you to do all the work. That one party member's brute strength the game wanted to point out? Never actually gets used. It's like something got unfinished here, like, the game was supposed to be more than what it turned out to be.
So, there's no party members, there's no overworld to traverse, there's no Inns. What's left, is a very streamlined experience - and I don't mind streamlined - but this one's streamlined to a point where everything's moving at an insanely fast rate, with little room to process or develop any potential mechanics. You visit some towns for a bit of story, you visit some dungeons, none of which require anything else from you but to hold a direction and occasionally swing the sword, and by the time 3 hours pass, the game's already over. And I'm sitting there, wondering to myself, "That's it? Where's the other 4 hours?"
That goes for the story too. I feel like something interesting got set up here, and it had the opportunity to deliver a politically intriguing tale between different factions of Exile's seemingly screwed up world, but none of it leaned into things hard enough to matter in the grand scheme of things, certainly not enough for me to remember all the made-up names it introduced in the first 30 minutes of gameplay.
The writing itself switches quality depending on whether it utilizes voice acting or text to convey its story. The voice acting is surprisingly competent for an early 90's game, and delivers some of the best written moments of the entire experience.
Outside of the voiced cutscenes, the writing alternates between mundane and almost childish. I'm aware of Working Design's infamous tendency to rewrite things in their localizations, and it's not so bad here, but you'd still be excused for thinking some of these lines were written by a teenager with no sense of characterization. The moment my hardened assassin protagonist saw a bloodstain and said "GROSS!", was the moment all my immersion in this world evaporated, and I just started poking fun at the little things.
In short, Exile features monotonous gameplay, a disappointingly underdeveloped world, and a story that shifts between interesting and laughable in its execution. A real shame, this one. I can't say the gameplay can be saved here, but I really wonder just how much of the story could've been saved if it was translated with more care to the original script. After all, when this game kills off two major characters off-screen and tells the protagonist to just get over it, I doubt much care was placed at all. Perhaps I'll find out the differences one day, but knowing the obscurity of this title, it might be a long time.
Contrary to my initial expectations, Exile is barely an RPG. It's a basic 2D "hold right and kill enemies with sword" gameplay loop, with lite RPG elements such as experience points, and top-down towns in which you buy equipment for the road ahead.
What's baffling about it is that the way it starts, will completely lead you to believe that you're in for a party-based RPG game. You start off in a town, and your main goal is to gather three party members for your journey. The game makes a point of telling you one of these party members has brute strength that could be useful. "Oh, like a tank-type character! Sure!" One of them looks like a mage, probably gonna cast some spells. It seems a bit odd that you can only buy equipment for your main character and no one else, but I figured "hey, less management sounds good."
So, your expectations are set this way, only to be swept under you like a rug. The moment you get to your first dungeon, all your party members get left behind as you fall into a trap. "Alright, fair enough, looks like we're starting off with just one character for now." But then you get to the later dungeons, and your protagonist just tells your party members to stay behind. Well then, why in bloody hell are they here at all? They're useless! And they stay that way for the rest of the game, they journey along with you, but fall back at the first sign of danger, leaving you to do all the work. That one party member's brute strength the game wanted to point out? Never actually gets used. It's like something got unfinished here, like, the game was supposed to be more than what it turned out to be.
So, there's no party members, there's no overworld to traverse, there's no Inns. What's left, is a very streamlined experience - and I don't mind streamlined - but this one's streamlined to a point where everything's moving at an insanely fast rate, with little room to process or develop any potential mechanics. You visit some towns for a bit of story, you visit some dungeons, none of which require anything else from you but to hold a direction and occasionally swing the sword, and by the time 3 hours pass, the game's already over. And I'm sitting there, wondering to myself, "That's it? Where's the other 4 hours?"
That goes for the story too. I feel like something interesting got set up here, and it had the opportunity to deliver a politically intriguing tale between different factions of Exile's seemingly screwed up world, but none of it leaned into things hard enough to matter in the grand scheme of things, certainly not enough for me to remember all the made-up names it introduced in the first 30 minutes of gameplay.
The writing itself switches quality depending on whether it utilizes voice acting or text to convey its story. The voice acting is surprisingly competent for an early 90's game, and delivers some of the best written moments of the entire experience.
Outside of the voiced cutscenes, the writing alternates between mundane and almost childish. I'm aware of Working Design's infamous tendency to rewrite things in their localizations, and it's not so bad here, but you'd still be excused for thinking some of these lines were written by a teenager with no sense of characterization. The moment my hardened assassin protagonist saw a bloodstain and said "GROSS!", was the moment all my immersion in this world evaporated, and I just started poking fun at the little things.
In short, Exile features monotonous gameplay, a disappointingly underdeveloped world, and a story that shifts between interesting and laughable in its execution. A real shame, this one. I can't say the gameplay can be saved here, but I really wonder just how much of the story could've been saved if it was translated with more care to the original script. After all, when this game kills off two major characters off-screen and tells the protagonist to just get over it, I doubt much care was placed at all. Perhaps I'll find out the differences one day, but knowing the obscurity of this title, it might be a long time.