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| Creator | BlazerTheWyvernWriter |
| Engine | SRPG Studio |
| Download | Here |
| Score | 20/80 |
| Rank | 13th |
| FEU Link | Here |
Reviews
Judge 1: Darrman
Gameplay: 1/10
Lambent Tale places the player outside of a big, ominous castle, with four groups of prisoners to save, all while shrouded in the fog of war. Such a setup would normally lead to a difficult, intimidating chapter, but the player units are all so strong that no enemies posed any threat whatsoever. The monster reinforcements were especially weak. Each unit has three skills, but I didn’t have to pay any attention to them. Five save points are scattered across the map, along with the game allowing saves at the start of the turn. While I did use every save point, I never actually had to load my save at any point. Many turns were spent simply walking from A to B, ensuring the army regrouped.
However, there is a critical flaw with this chapter. The objective is to kill the boss and have the prisoners escape, but one particular group of prisoners refuses to escape by the northern exit. Oddly enough, both player and enemy units can escape, but two NPCs refuse to leave the map. I had to allow an enemy to kill them in order to properly trigger the ending scene.
It is clear from this oversight that the chapter was not properly tested, and so I must give this a score of 1. Other major issues include the loading times before each battle, which I have never experienced in any other SRPG Studio game, and enemy positions in fog being given away by effectiveness warnings and by simply not being able to move on top of a hidden enemy.
Presentation: 1/5
The character portraits are created using the “clay soldier” character generator, which never look very appealing wherever they are used. Some of them have visible artefacts not actually part of the mug. Aside from that, there isn’t particularly much to note here.
Story: 2/5
A mad scientist is inventing the Berserk Staff. His sister isn’t very pleased with these experiments, but does nothing to stop him. Meanwhile, a thief was watching all the experiments, escaping before the enemies saw him. Rumours were spreading over people disappearing, and so a party of heroes set out to find out the truth.
As each character exchanges banter with each other, they reach the fort. The sight of a berserked person had made the thief sick, and so the chapter starts. After a decent period of time, the scientist’s sister decided she had enough of following her brother, and decided to switch sides after talking with an imprisoned bishop.
Upon victory, the mad scientist’s library is found, and his sister says to only destroy the Berserk information. She then makes an escape, angering many of the party members. The thief allows her to go, however, and the Berserk Staff is lost to history.
While the storyline itself is decent, the text itself has frequent typos scattered throughout the dialogue, which pulls down the story score.
Total Score: 4/20
Judge 2: Frog
Gameplay: 0/10
The chapter was unwinnable for me due to two prisoners getting stuck forever on escape tiles without fleeing.
That aside: this chapter serves as the prologue for a longer campaign, and opens with an evil wizard performing mind-controlling experiments on a captured soldier. One of our heroes, a thief, sneaks inside to witness the gruesome scene before fleeing and reporting it to his friends. They unanimously decide to pursue the villain, and battle begins.
The map itself is a huge fog-of-war map, with several cells of captured prisoners requiring rescue. While this might seem oppressive on paper, the opposite is actually the case – the enemies here are so weak as to barely pose a threat. Most of the chapter was spent moving forward and spamming end turn for me, with occasionally defeating the rare survivor on player phase. The biggest indicator for the lack of enemy quality is when they end up attacking the helpless NPC prisoners – usually dealing no damage to 5 tops. The boss itself, while having much higher stats, was also a non-issue in my playthrough – the thief stole his Berserk staff and 1-3 range tome, letting my archer kill him using a longbow with no chance for retaliation. All in all, this was a very long and uninspiring trek with no sense of difficulty or danger.
I also encountered many issues in my playthrough – such as the aforementioned softlock, but also opening a door triggering a second one on the other side of the map, and a huge amount of lag whenever a unit was highlighted or entered combat (which made the tedium much worse).
Presentation: 2/5
The map looked nice, and most portraits were good too – although their GBA style stood out in stark contrast to the rest of the game, especially the NPC portraits. The rest was pretty unremarkable though. Lastly, the screen was really tiny on my machine with no way to increase the resolution, necessitating the use of an external zooming tool to be able to see clearly.
Story: 2/5
I’ll admit that I haven’t seen the ending due to my softlock. From what I’ve seen however, I didn’t find the story very engaging. The characters felt very stereotypical and bland to me, without anything really interesting going on. There were also multiple typos in the chapter.
Total Score: 4/20
Judge 3: Struedelmuffin
Gameplay: 0/10
Lambent Tale’s map is massive and covered in fog, which likely would have taken quite awhile to traverse through had I not been spared the journey by two noble green units who decided to softlock the game. For the period that I was able to play, however, I kinda liked annihilating the weak enemy units with my guys. They could barely do any damage to my units or even the prisoners which made things way too easy, but I think some of the skills and mechanics were pretty creative. But, even if I hadn’t been softlocked, it seemed like a significant amount of time spent on this chapter was going to be filled with walking around, fighting super weak enemies, opening some prison doors, and so on. I think that, even if I could have completed this, it would have felt too slow by the end of it.
Presentation: 3/5
I’ve never played an SRPG studio game before, and Lambent Tale is a pretty cool looking game. I can’t really say for sure what is a custom asset or not, but what we’re given is pretty nice looking aside from the portraits which I have to say I am really not a fan of. Since I’m not familiar with the engine and what is custom or not, I don’t have much else to add beyond that.
Story: 3/5
Despite being soured a bit by the whole softlock thing, I think the story here (or at least what I saw) was pretty interesting. The berserk staff being a novel new piece of tech with some terrifying implications for its usage is a cool concept that I enjoyed quite a bit. Seeing the villain’s sister become disillusioned with his actions until she ultimately decides to fight against him was interesting and set up well. That being said, when it comes to the writing itself, while I would not usually deduct any points for minor grammatical errors, I have to admit that I was taken out of the experience a bit by the myriad of typos here unfortunately. I am also deducting an additional point due to the softlock preventing me from seeing the ending altogether.
Total Score: 6/20
Judge 4: BandanaSplitzzz
Gameplay: 0/10
There’s a pretty egregious softlock in this hack, where a handful of green units will refuse to escape the map if given the opportunity. Head judge Darrman figured a workaround where you can simply let some red units gut and flay the uncooperative allies, but I really could not be bothered to do so.
Otherwise, Lambent Tale: To Hell and Back is a very sprawling chapter where you must free allied prisoners in several cells across the map. Your army is actually incredibly strong, relative to your enemies. The frailest unit I had, my thief, was 3 shot by enemies that hit him. He was only the frailest in the army of some very, very tanky units. He was practically my only HP concern, and I almost always had a healer on standby. The prisoners scattered across the map are staffed by a meagre number of enemies, but it takes so many turns to actually get back to your core army. It’s… not that fun?
There are many mechanics, and I think they’re genuinely cool, but this map takes so long to complete and is so easy that I got tired of it midway through. There’s effectives and 3 skills per unit, and items to pick up, and all these super involved main objectives… It’s so much, but you don’t really get to chew on it because passes with so little resistance.
This chapter would kill for just a little more time in the oven to playtest it, or to take place in an actual full-length game. If it wasn’t for the softlock, I would have rated this a 4/10.
Presentation: 3/5
There’s a lot of SRPG studio assets here. I’m not sure what’s fully custom aside from the character portraits. But most of it is a sight for FEGBA’s sore eyes. The softlocking bug is arguably a presentation error.
I also had to manually change the games tiny ass resolution for 20 minutes.
Story: 3/5
You are a group of mercenaries investigating a few far-out prisons. A lot of the dialogue is centered around the recruited unit in this chapter, and it’s fairly compelling. I appreciate the newfound focus on the Berserk staff in particular, which lends itself very well to these types of short-form stories. As stated before, I wasn’t able to finish the chapter, and I didn’t see the ending.
Total Score: 6/20
Results
| Category | Darrman | Frog | Struedel | Bandana | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gameplay | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Presentation | 1 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 9 |
| Story | 2 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 10 |
| Total | 4 | 4 | 6 | 6 | 20 |