Playing the Super Nintendo's Forgotten Home-Made RPGs of the '90s (Part 1)

How did that go? Well, four months later, KanjiHack announced they were fed up with receiving hundreds of half-baked, poorly-formatted games and were deleting all but the ones that were actually finished, which left them with exactly... one game. Shortly after that, the makers of RPG Maker submitted something of their own: a cease-and-desist letter. KanjiHack promptly shut down, and all those user-made SNES RPGs were forgotten forever. Or, well, until now.

Thanks to some digging on archive.org and a visit to an all-German Discord (shout out to Spatzenfärber at the RMArchiv & Makerpendium server!), we were able to find eleven English-language home-made SNES RPGs from the '90s. While playing through all of those historical artifacts across two livestreams, we were witness to things you wouldn't normally encounter in games with the Nintendo Seal of Quality, like crude jokes, ham-fisted attempts at social commentary, misspellings, underage substance abuse, and, of course, some weirdly horny stuff. Here's part one of our attempt to summarize each game, for posterity:

"Atonement" by RPG Advocate (05-08-1998)

Original description: A young girl sets out to establish friendly relations with an old enemy.

Right off the bat, the earliest game uploaded to the Vault (and, apparently, the oldest surviving RPG Maker user game ever) starts with a girl being told to strut her stuff in front of "important dignitaries" in order to improve her kingdom's trade relations. Emphasis on relations. The protagonist is Maia, an image-obsessed young princess who spends so long doing her make up in the opening cutscene that we seriously thought game had crashed.

It really dosen't, Maia.

Maia is told to go see her father, the king, who needs someone to travel to the neighboring nation of Yatari and prevent a war. Since all the dignitaries present decline to do it for various reasons (one guy says he's "allergic to Yatari food"), Maia volunteers to go there and "smooth things over." The way this is presented almost makes it sound like the start of a 16-bit porno. Fueling that impression is the fact that, if you snoop around the king's library, you'll find a flyer directing you to a website hosting what sure looks like erotic Final Fantasy VI fan fiction (we didn't read enough of it to find out for sure).

But, for better or worse, you never get to that part. After fighting some generic monsters in a field, you reach the city of Meese, which can be thought of as a sort of social commentary on recent changes in industry and commerce. We know this because as soon as you step in, someone comes up to you and says:

In Meese, Maia finds overpriced item shops on one side of town and people begging for money and complaining about the busted sewage system on the other (wonder what that's supposed to be commentary for?). There's also a guy who gives you a random series of directions with no context, which suggests this town might have a mental health problem, too. While on the poor side, Maia has to fight off a pack of "gangstas," who are represented as four-armed swordsmen wearing robes because this game has no "guy with baggy pants and du rag holding a machine gun" sprite.

Maia finds out that there's been a rockslide just outside of town, which means that in order to progress you have to retrieve some dynamite from a warehouse. Unfortunately, that warehouse also happens to be the place where this town stores all of its monsters and RPG enemies. Before going in, a dick named Kyle (such a far-out fantasy name) joins your party without asking because "a pretty lady like you" has no business going there alone. This game would be 1998's GOTY if you could just kick Kyle in the nads and leave him there, but sadly you're given no choice but to put up with his ass.

(Thank goodness this game's graphics aren't detailed enough to make it obvious if one of the characters has a boner.)

The "warehouse" turns out to be big dungeon that has to be navigated in a specific order, otherwise you activate the "security system" and get kicked back to the beginning. Once you figure out that you need to follow the directions that random guy in the town gave you (sorry for doubting your mental state, random guy) the main problem becomes that this poorly-kept building is infested with an enemy type called "TURD." You can't take two steps without stepping on a turd. As if dealing with Kyle wasn't bad enough.

Early on in the dungeon, you get a glimpse of a treasure chest at the other side of a wall. After a while fighting turds and other enemies, you can reach that chest, open it, and find your reward for all that effort: poison gas. Now, on top of all the turds and Kyle, you're also poisoned, which means you'll be taking damage with every other step and the dungeon will be unwinnable unless you're playing in dev mode and have infinite health. Even so, the screen-flashing "poison" effect is so annoying that you'll wish you could die. Hope you made a save state before spending the past half hour punching turds!

Three floors into this deadly, no doubt foul-smelling dungeon, you run into a human character who's just chilling there. It turns out he's the brother of a beggar who asked you for money in the town. If you gave the beggar money, his bro, who apparently has magic powers, will completely restore your HP and MP, remove any "bad status," and even let you save your game. We didn't feel like making a new save and replaying the entire dungeon to find out what happens if you cheap out, but RPG genre conventions lead us to assume that he turns into some sort of muscular demon who deals 9999 damage.

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After that, you finally reach the dungeon's boss: a blue guy named "Medulla" who spouts gibberish words at you (presumably meaning "What did you do to my precious turd collection?!"). If you best him, he drops the dynamite you came here to collect and, at last, you get to clear the way out of the town! And then...

...nothing happens. There's no exit behind the "rocks" (which actually looked remarkably like barrels). In fact, if you use dev mode to get to the other side of this town in the overworld map, it's all empty. This is as far as RPG Advocate made the game. You got your hands dirty, in the worst possible sense, for nothing.

According to his Makerpendium wiki page (WARNING: German), RPG Advocate was a polarizing figure in the community who on the one hand helped translate various RPG Maker titles, but on the other was kind of a dick (was Kyle a self-insert character?). It seems that this SNES demo evolved into a PC game called Phylomortis: Atonement Gaiden, which later got two sequels called Psychopoltical Drama Phylomortis II: Triumvirate of Dystopia and Phylomortis: Avant Garde. Based on the gameplay available on YouTube, they are about as intelligible as their titles suggest. But Maia is in them, so we're glad to know she eventually made it out of that shitty town.

"Daxara" by Adol (05-16-198)

Original description: Geren travels from Castle Harmony to learn of the origin of appearing monsters who are robbing the world's Shards in order to end it.

Like 40% of RPG Maker games from this era, this one starts with a knight being told he has to go talk to the king, who is a kind man. We know this because not one but two people tell you "The king is a kind man," though they're both within the king's earshot so there's a chance they're only saying that to avoid being shackled in a dungeon.

King Kind tells you that someone has attacked a shrine for unknown reasons, so you need to go there and find out what the hell. As you leave the castle, some lady named Sarah says she heard about your mission and asks to come along with you, because she's just very passionate about shrine-related crimes, we guess. If you say "Yes," she joins your party. If you say "No," she also joins your party, but first she says "You're such a funny guy!" Way to be a Kyle, Sarah.

Once you reach the shrine, you run into enemies like "Thing," which look exactly like red turds (please consult a physician if this happens to you), and "Battling," which suck. That's their power: they suck.

There are a few chests around the shrine, some of which contain an item called "fluid" that you probably shouldn't be touching with your bare hands. Soon, you reach the end of shrine and find the mysterious attacker: it's some sort of dog-person called "?" who says you're too late, because his minions have already stolen the Shard that was in this shrine and will use it to "destroy this pitiful world!" Oh no! If only you hadn't been delayed by Sarah... is she an agent of "?"?

Anyway, once you fight dog-person "?" he suddenly becomes a fish-person called "Sinister." We are already witnessing the fabric of reality disintegrating due to his meddling with the kind king's shrine Shard.

If you manage to defeat Sinister ? the Dog-Fish-Person, he drops some more fluid (ewww) and some flesh that you're supposed to show the king as proof that you killed him. Does the king distrust you so much that he forces you to carry around the decomposing flesh of his enemies as proof? That's very unkind of him. The worst part is that once you get back to the king, he doesn't even acknowledge all the bloody flesh you brought him. Instead, he sends you to another town to deliver a note to some sort of mythical being named "Colin."

That sounds like a pretty urgent mission. So, naturally, as soon as you reach the other town, you get distracted by side missions. For instance, one guy tells you that "strange things" have taken over his basement, which is bad because that's where he keeps all of his coffins. If you agree to go into the coffin collector's basement, he says "You won't regret this!" Then you go down and instantly get ambushed by sworded skeletons that can kill you with one blow.

So that was a lie.

Once you decide to move on with the game, you can talk to Colin, who tells you that the rest of your epic adventure awaits on the other side of a door and gives you an item called "Colinkey." You might think you can use the Colinkey to open the Colindoor, but nope. You can't do shit. This is where the game unceremoniously ends: with a closed door and the disquieting certainty that you will never know what's on the other side. (Unless you check with dev move, in which case you learn that it's "some unfinished maps.")

"Forever..." by Kypdev (05-17-1998)

Original description: A boy heads off on a series of quests.

In this one, they don't even have to tell you to go talk to the king. Your character, Kyp, wakes up in his bed saying "Damnit! I am late!" and you instinctively know that the thing he's late for is going to talk to the king. Note that Kyp is so manly that he sleeps in his armor.

Before leaving the house, you can talk to your family: your mom, who tells you to dress warmly for your mission (I'm wearing clothes over an armor, mom), your dad, who wishes he could join you but says his adventuring days are over, your cat and dog, who bark and meow at you respectively, and your baby sibling, who magically vanishes as soon as your mom exits the room.

There's a church next to your house, and if you go in (maybe to seek solace for the sudden disappearance of your little brother or sister) the minister will confess to you that he isn't really religious. He's just in it for those sweet minister bucks and the tax-exempt status.

There's also a bar, and if you enter it you'll find that your dad has gone there to drown his sorrows and is already shitfaced. Now you have to live with the shame of being related to such a freaking lightweight.

The most sordid part of all this is that if you talk to the bartender, he'll tell you to "have a drink," even though everyone knows that alcoholism has a genetic component. Also, uh, doesn't the game's description refer to Kyp as a "boy"? He's just very bulky on account of carrying an armor around all day.

Anyway, after fighting generic monsters in a field, you reach the castle and... hmm, what was it you were supposed to do here? Let's see if anyone around can remind you:

Something tells us we're supposed to talk to the queen. Once you do, she says "Please talk to the king," so you do that too, since she asked nicely. The king, in turn, asks: "Wilst thou aid my kingdom and bring peace?" If you say "No" (maybe you'd rather investigate the case of the magical disappearing baby), he tells you to "Leave mine eyes, coward!" but he must be suffering from dementia because if you talk to him again, he'll greet you like the first time and ask the same thing. If you say "Yes," he tells you to... talk to the queen.

Kinda feel like we're getting jerked around here.

The queen informs you that thy task, should thy choose to accept it, is to rescue their daughter from a rogue knight. To begin the quest, she asks you to go search in a specific tombstone in the castle's cemetery, which would suggest that perhaps we're a bit too late to save the princess. But, before doing that, let's see what the diverse cast of characters has to say now:

After maximizing your luck stat, you go check out that tombstone the queen mentioned, which is actually the entrance to an underground passage leading to the island where the princessnapper lives in a tower. Upon climbing the tower you get to confront the evil Misaka, who laughs at you and calls you a child. Yeah, a booze-drinking, armor-wearing child who's about to kick your ass.

Misaka doesn't take being defeated by a muscular little boy very well. In fact, he's so embarrassed that he makes like a baby and vanishes.

The princess, Dana, is so thankful for being rescued that she magnanimously announces she's joining you on your quest. Wait, wasn't your quest to rescue her? That's not so magnanimous then. By the way, if you get tired walking up and down the tower, for merely 1G you and Dana can curl up inside a talking pot that somehow serves as an inn. A tempting offer, but we passed on the chance to spend the night together Chavo del Ocho style.

So, what's the game gonna be about now that you retrieved the princess? Nothing, because once you go back through the underground passage, you get a message saying "end of beta," followed by RPG Maker 2's default end credits sequence. We can find no evidence of Kypdev developing any further versions of this game, or any game. He's just Kyp now, presumably.

Did you know you can only insert 30 images in a Tumblr post? We didn't until now, so... to be continued in another post, which will hopefully take less than 26 years this time.