Continuing our look at that brief period in human history when people were creating RPG Maker games on the SNES and posting them to the ancient internet (1998-1998). So far, we've seen four-armed gangstas, a turd-infested dungeon, characters randomly disappearing or turning into other characters, and so, so many instances of the words "talk to the king." Check out Part 1 here or over on Tumblr.

Note: These games can be downloaded at archive.org or rmarchiv.de (or archive.org's archived version of rmarchiv.de, if it goes offline again).

"Ductarr: The Rise of Rebellion" by j0e f0lts (05-20-1998)

Original description: The young mage Eoj Stole tries to recover clues to his fathers mysterious death that leads to a global adventure.

This one has an opening text crawl! Fancy. Sure, two out of the five words in the title are misspelled, but the effort is appreciated.

Sadly, the main character isn't a problematic music conductor named Lydia Ducktár but a guy by the equally bizarre name of Eoj Stole. Eoj is a "troubled young mage" who enjoys standing on tall mountains and taking psychedelic drugs, based on the trippy light show that ensues after the intro crawl is over.

We're told that Eoj is thinking back to "the events that took place just days ago." Then he says "It all began when I was only 8 years old." Does that mean he was only 8 years old a few days ago? Is this another game starring a swole adult-sized little kid? Either way, we then flash back to little Eoj being late to some sort of church event, but can you blame him? He's 8!

Then we find out that the thing he's late for is his dad's funeral. So yes, you can and should blame him.

(Is the mom sobbing or insulting her son/herself?)

The priest says that Eoj's dad was "a master of the magic arts," but evidently not that much of a master if he's dead now. After lots of singing in another language (meaning a single caption that says "lots of singing in another language") the priest abruptly announces that the funeral is over. He probably needed the church for bingo night or something.

We cut to ten years later, when Eoj has just turned 18. His mom celebrates this important milestone by kicking him out of the house as soon as he wakes up.

But don't worry: you can still sleep in your old room... if you pay your mom, because she spent no time in turning that shit into an Airbnb.

"Resting is important! But you know what's even more important? Paying up, motherfucker."

Your mom is at least kind enough to let you ransack the treasure chests in the basement before you leave. She also tells you to "go visit your father," which could be a polite way of telling you to go to hell. If you take that in a more literal sense and stop by your dad's tomb, your clumsy ass somehow causes the hilt of his sword to fall off and you notice a letter inside. The letter reads:

(Note that there's no closing quote mark, which means that technically all of the rest of the text in this game is part of the letter.)

Eoj takes these semi-nonsensical words to mean that there might be a clue to his dad's mysterious death at a place called Moi Island, so he decides to head there. He also decides to steal his dead dad's sword, possibly so that his mom won't notice he broke it and charge him for it. You get to try out the broken sword pretty fast, since as soon as you step out of the safety of Eoj's town, you're attacked by adult mutant warrior dogs. Luckily, they may look intimidating but they only deal 2 damage, the puny little bitches.

Getting to Moi Island involves going through a place called "Slime Cave," which is full of treasure chests. Treasure chests... full of slime? Nope, some are empty but others actually have useful items and money in them, which is a nice surprise (unless you're a big slime enthusiast). After exploring for a bit, you come across a blue M&M-looking creature called "Meanie" sitting on a throne, who immediately proves his name right by delivering a Tarzan-like death threat:

You're then thrown into a fight you can't back out from. If you defeat the Blue Meanie (don't let the Beatles' lawyers hear about this game), he says "You no more treasure! Unn......." and disappears, as does every single treasure chest in the cave, including the ones you haven't gotten to. Hope there wasn't anything important there! Apparently, the correct course of action was to ignore the blue blob sitting on a throne and just continue pillaging the chests.

Next, you take the stairs to exit the cave, only to realize that you've exited the game itself too, since this is the end of the demo. And we never even met Duck Tár (woo-oo).

A final message from the developer prompts us to check the KanjiHack website for the finished version of the game (just checked; still nothing) and asks that you "E MAIL ME AT THERE PAGE W/FEEDBACK." He also informs us that "THIS IS MADE BY JOE YOU CAN NOT USE THIS WITH OUT MY PERMISSION." Uh, please don't sue us for screenshotting your game 26 years in the future, Joe.

"Evilion" by Shadowtext (05-21-1998)

Original description: Two young people set off to restore peace to the world.

You start with two characters in the middle of a map, right next to a castle. Hmm, wonder what you're supposed to do in there.

It was "talk to the king"! Never could have guessed it. Once you do so, he asks you "How fared your adventure?" What adventure?! We just started playing. Your character, Karel, replies that monsters are planning to "destroy everything," which in the king's opinion is "terrible news!" He commands you and your friend, Ochal, to go to a place in the south called Oderell. Guess the king also had to go somewhere really bad, because as soon as he finishes saying that, he vanishes. (That, or this is a Tyler Durden-type situation and you were talking to yourself.)

If you head south from the castle, you run into a town called Ojarel. You might think that the dev forgot how to spell "Oderell," but no: if you talk to one of the town's residents, he tells you that Oderell is to the west. So, you go to the town's west exit and...

...oh, whoops, that's not an exit, is just a dead end, haha. Okay, let's go out the way we came in. Except...

...that's a dead end now, too. So is the town's only other exit-looking path. It's at this point that you notice that every shop in this town is eerily empty. I-Is this some sort of psychological horror game?

Other than the guy who gives you directions, the only other residents in the town are a little girl who tells you she owns the forest and a woman who claims that "even though our town is small, we are happy." They are both exactly as convincing.

"And now you'll be happy too. Forever."

The only way to exit the exit-less town is to abort this cursed timeline and go back to an earlier save state (good thing you've probably saved like twenty times in these 5 minutes of gameplay because this game tends to crash a lot during enemy encounters). Doing so lets you reach a town to the west that's probably Oderell, but we don't know for sure due to the shocking lack of signage in this kingdom.

Oderell has 66.6% as many residents as Ojarel, meaning two people: a guy who tells you about "five magi" who defeated the "evil horde" that once attacked this town (unrelated to the evil horde promised at the start of the game, which hasn't shown up yet) and another guy who promises to sail you anywhere if you defeat "the monster in the sea." That monster turns out to be a dragon called "Serpent," who has insta-kill attacks and seems unbeatable unless you're cheating by using dev mode to deal 9999 damage each time. Good thing you're doing that, then.

After defeating the dragon/serpent, a text box tells you that "Ochal and Karal faint in the crashing sea" and everything goes black. Apparently the excitement of defeating their first boss was too much for them and they died on the spot anyway. There's no "END OF DEMO" or implied threats of legal action in this one, just an empty void at the end of it all, so in that sense this is the most realistic game so far. At least the next game couldn't possibly be lazier than this one.

"Alamar" by Tim Maj (05-22-1998)

Original description: A boy sets out on a mysterious quest to destroy evil and avenge his parents with a magical sword.

This one drops you in the middle of a castle, with no preambles or explanation, and trusts that you'll find your way to talk to the king without any hand-holding. It's always nice when a game respects your intelligence like that. So you walk up to the king and... oh.

No king. No gods either, presumably. No nothing, in fact, because this whole castle's empty and there are no exits, again. There's nothing to do in this game... unless you reset it and load the mysterious save file that comes included with it, which spawns you outside the castle with no doors. Can you guess what's out there?

If you guessed "more nothing," you are correct. Just empty fields with no towns or even a single dog person to beat up. Peeking under the hood reveals that the dev spent some time making attacks and spells, but no time whatsoever placing enemies to use them on. Does this qualify as an early example of one of those artsy "walking simulator" games where nothing happens? You were ahead of your time, Tim Maj.

"The Dragoner" by Wing (05-24-1998)

Original description: A knight embarks on a quest to reclaim the world for humans.

You start next to two guards who call you "captain" and wish you a good day. At this point in the game it's fun to go back and forth between the two, imagining they're getting louder and louder each time to try to out-"good day" the other.

That door up there leads to the interior of the castle, most of which seems to be off-limits to you. If you try to go through any more doors, you're emphatically informed that there's "no enterance" because they lead to the king and princess' rooms and they are "pravate." How are you supposed to go talk to the king if you can't even see him?!

What you can do is go down some stairs, which leads to a hall where you meet... the king? Wasn't he just yelling at you from his room? Does he have a slide pole in there leading directly to the throne?

The king tells you that "this city was built on an island in the center of the world," which suggests that he had his door locked because he was getting baked. There used to be a portal connecting the city to the rest of the world, the king claims, but it was sealed off when said world was destroyed by "an evil sprite." Now that portal has become un-sealed, for some reason, but fear not: the king already sent Jenny the Sorceress to find the cause of this "anomany."

(Obviously that's a misspelling of "anomancy," meaning the art of reading one's future via the wrinkles in your butthole.)

The king sends you off to find Jenny and help her in her mission. Before that, you can stop by the shop outside the castle and buy weapons from a guy named Raymond, who assures you that he only sells "good weapons, unlike Tony." You could technically buy weapons from Tony, too, if for some reason you like owning dogshit weapons.

Since you can't afford Raymond's weapons at this point, you elect to go fight monsters with your bare hands rather than bear the social stigma of using Tony weapons. Oh, you can also stop by the "discount store," but before you can even browse, the attendant tells you "Umm... you can't afford to buy anything." Some discount store.

Having stocked up (on nothing), you can go to that portal the king mentioned, where you meet the good sprite Cathine, who seems to be a sort of door lady or bouncer for this mystical pathway. Before letting you go through the portal, Cathine tells you, unprompted, that "only the dragon and its rider can save the world" and that "you are the dragoner." Based on your reaction, this is all news to you.

Cathine gives you a key and tells you to "go search for the dragon" so that "one day, the earth will be alive again!" If you have no clue WTF any of that means, don't worry, neither does your character.

Cathine vanishes without really explaining much. With nothing else to do, you go through the damn portal, at last, and reach... another empty field with no enemies and nothing to do. Wait, is this a crossover with the previous game?

Alternatively, you can take this to mean that Jenny the Sorceress destroyed all the monsters and brought peace to the land while you were busy not buying weapons and talking to possibly high people. Mission accomplished!

That's it for Part 2 of this series. Coming in Part 3: games that actually take more than 5 minutes to play through! (In fact, we had to stop here because the next one requires more screenshots than Tumblr will allow in this post.)