#14 - Enchant Farm
Enchant Farm! Don't mind the barren title screen.
Enchant Farm is a JRPG heavily focused on exploration created by Kiito. If you're unfamiliar with Kiito... well, that's probably not super surprising unless you're already familiar with the VIPRPG scene. If you don't know what that means, I'd suggest skimming the intro to my earlier post about Helen's Mysterious Castle for a very quick primer and some further reading material.
Enchant Farm is itself a sort of... sequel, I guess? to Wind I Creator, which is another Kiito title about... er. Well, you know, maybe I'll just leave another picture here and let you work out the rest.
Anyway, thanks to Goburinbro both Enchant Farm and Wind I Creator as well as a host of other fascinating titles are all playable in English. You can find their translations here if you're interested. I've only played through a couple myself, but Enchant Farm is easily one of my favorite RPGMaker titles for raw gameplay. Let's talk about why that is!
Enchant Farm starts with a simple enough premise. After potentially carrying over some complete data from past Kiito titles, you get to pick from a bunch of potential starting characters. As is customary for many VIPRPG offerings, these are personifications of low level spells--Water I, Wind I, and so on. They all have their own base stats, skills, and of course very charming portraits and artwork. The character you choose gets the main speaking role in cutscenes as well.
They're all quite distinct--Wind I, as pictured there, is made of wet tissue but is absurdly fast and has incredible magic. Despite what it looks like, she's also comically good at surviving despite having 1 HP. Other characters are occasionally more straightforward--Stone I, the furthest right in the picture, is a tank. Water I, to Wind I's left, is a curious hybrid who can actually shift into more physically oriented or bulky mage centered forms letting her fulfill multiple roles. Darkness I has a combination of skills about fighting dirty but also functions as an incredibly bulky tank. You get the idea--not every character's kit is a totally unique gimmick, but they all have things they're good at.
After a short tutorial that also presents the premise of the game--I'll skip the details, but the long and short of it is the main character of your choice is stuck on an island that has run afoul of some seriously bad things leading to lots of monsters, people being possessed and turning evil, et cetera (but fortunately, your main character and the teleportation-capable fairy you find have rings to resist this) and you're just exploring the island trying to recruit new allies and hope to find a way off of it. At this point, you're thrust out into the world and left to fend for yourself.
Enchant Farm has no real interest in holding your hand or telling you where to go. Yes, it's possible to venture into higher level places or get into fights you literally have no way to win. The game lets you save at any point, and frankly even if you die all you do is lose some souls--the currency of Enchant Farm, used both for shopping and leveling. (.. And while the exploration takes a lot of cues from things like King's Field and even has some extremely explicit references to it, to be clear, this is not 'souls' as in the sense of a modern Souls game where you touch an object and reclaim them. No, you die and they're just gone.)
Speaking of King's Field! Yes, there's a Kraken you can run afoul of in the first 60 seconds of gameplay after the tutorial. It's worth dying to just to hear the ridiculously good boss BGM--Enchant Farm has a pretty great music selection, including numerous battle themes for normal fights and bosses and unique music for basically every area in the game.
But how does it actually play? Enchant Farm has an extremely heavy emphasis on party building and gearing. In a normal run there's 19 other party members besides your chosen protagonist. They're leveled via souls which you can do at any point out of combat, they all learn skills at certain levels, they all can equip up to two weapons, two shields, and one accessory, and will learn multiple active and passive skills as well as learning more generic EX skills (think more basic things like large stat bonuses, bonuses to damage types, etc).
Weapons are all differentiated by different attack stats, hit%, effective ranges (a sword on the back row person isn't very effective!), and can have both active and passive skills. You can find equipment, you can buy it, and you can also forge it via various elemental shards, gems, and sources (which are basically 'tier one, tier two, and tier three' materials). Weapons all have bespoke forging paths--not every weapon can have Frost Shards shoved into it, but a lot do have multiple forging paths you can view at any time since the game helpfully will highlight any potential forging options and you can preview what they'll turn into and even disassemble them afterwards if you don't like what they turned into. Shields work on the same principle, whereas accessories are more unique--you can't ever forge new ones, you just find or buy them and equip them. Some may have drawbacks, like the Evil Ring that gives a whopping +20% magic power at the cost of -30 Max HP, a steep cost in a game where early game party members won't even have 60-70 HP for a while.
Hey, incidentally, did you know Wind I always has 1 Max HP? I just thought that was an interesting fun fact that I felt like bringing up for no particular reason.
Perhaps the most important thing is that every damn weapon and shield has its own elements. Why is that important? Well.. ... the above picture might tell you why. Elements matter, a lot. Every enemy has up to 2 elements, and walking into a boss fight with bad weapons can ensure some party members are dealing minuscule or possibly 0 damage. Being able to save and forge equipment anywhere helps a lot with this, but I won't lie, it does feel bad when you walk into a boss and realize one of your damage dealers has no way to actually fight a boss and you just gotta slap the F12 key to restart.
Either way, expect to get familiar with looking at the chart as you occasionally run into a curious pair of elements on a boss and have to go 'wait what the hell is the best way to damage this thing'. Maybe it's better if you're an avid Pokemon player or something, I don't know--when I replayed this game for the second time earlier this year I was streaming it and had more than a couple moments of pulling the chart up to sit down and plan out gear. This isn't always necessary, but it can give you a huge advantage. Plus, earlier on when you're still scrounging for any actual equipment options at all in the first place... well, the answer is you might just have to get by with what you have, or try to sneak into more dangerous areas to loot chests and leave if you like being cheeky.
To be clear about one thing, outside of a specific edge case (read: Burst I, who has some gimmicks pertaining to elements and her damage display for certain skills is just plain wrong), the game always shows you completely accurate % multipliers for any attack on a given enemy. It's never a surprise if you do 0 damage to them or if an attack is extra strong--you can always just check all of a character's spells/weapons against an enemy to see what the best choice is when you're already in a fight. This isn't true on the defense, but... well, if someone's getting hit really hard, you can just check the type chart and maybe give them a better shield. Or just swap another character in entirely if the situation is that dire, given you have enough souls to level up the newcomer.
A lot of potential party members who all fill particular niches, a world map structure that lets you access places fairly early even if it can be hazardous (yet profitable!), hidden bosses everywhere that sometimes just casually pop up in areas you've cleared.. Enchant Farm has just the right pace of exploration and satisfying boss fights to keep things engaging, in my opinion.
One of the big ways the game tries to temporarily bar you from certain places or chests is with locks. Many chests are locked, and there are locked doors that may lead to some new areas. There may be special keys that are reusable and unlock them, others may use one-off keys that vanish upon use. Some can be bought; others can be found. Again, you can save anywhere, so if you don't mind you can even savescum to see "well, okay, is using a key here actually worth it" and just reload if you're not satisfied. You could just stick with the result, of course, but, well... you know, it's kinda tempting when saving is so easy, right? I won't tell anyone if you don't tell anyone.
The sense of exploration--potential key savescumming aside, forgive me for my minor transgressions--is what keeps the game so entertaining to me, personally. Enchant Farm is a game where you can ask 5 different people how they got through the game and receive 5 different answers. Some of them may have fought bosses the other people in this hypothetical questionnaire never even saw. One person may have used the idol Spirit Curse, while others used more niche characters like Electro Barrier. Some people will use a key early on to get access to an area sooner and might get some strong items out of it and maybe a few unexpected trips back to a checkpoint when they die while rushing past stronger enemies to look for more loot. Some of it comes back to why SaGa games are so cool to me, just in the sense of having a game to talk about with friends where we're all discussing things we saw and having those 'wait, where did you find THAT' moments. When I streamed it earlier this year, I even found some bosses I never even saw on my first run!
There's plenty of pretty funny bits, too. Not every joke is a banger--there's a couple bits I just plain don't like (we're all adults here, it's nothing serious, just a quick 'ehhh, we didn't need that' and that's all), but Wind I especially has some incredible bits of dialogue with some characters. That said, it's not a plot-focused game so if you're looking for that specifically... well, this may not be your preferred title. Expect long, quiet stretches of just clearing through areas, exploring, finding new equipment, and occasional moments of 'hey wait maybe I'm strong enough to investigate that area/fight that boss I found a couple hours ago'.
Best of all, there are both fountains (where you can refill empty bottles with potions that either restore all HP, restore all SP, or restore both [but have a higher cooldown when used in combat]) and statues that act as teleport points, so backtracking around the island is pretty easy.
That said, the game isn't perfect. The aforementioned type chart I can see driving some people bonkers--what do you mean the game let me go into a fight blindly and one of my best damage dealers can't even damage the boss without changing her weapons?! There's a soul multiplier mechanic where the more fights you string together without healing at a fountain--instead of bottling potions at them you can also drink from them to heal--give a higher % of souls gained per fight. Except, if you have access to fountains which the game lets you freely teleport to, nothing is stopping you from maintaining your multiplier by just bottling up potions and drinking them which won't reset your soul multiplier. Boss fights also instantly max out the multiplier, anyway, making it feel like an odd leftover mechanic from some other iteration of the game.
There's various awkward UI bits, too. Consider the above screenshot and how the party is laid out there, and then how they appear in an actual fight. Does that seem intuitive to you...? You can rotate your formation in fights, although it's still awkward since odds are you probably intended to have a very specific person in front and back and it's possible they could be misaligned and they end up in the "off-spots" (i.e. one one of those two end up in the front or back, and the other character ends up in one of the middle slots, so being able to rotate mid-fight doesn't help you much there). Some skills aren't always very intuitive either. Wind I has her iconic Shrug It Off skill that lets her ignore 2 hits entirely--a crucial skill given she has 1 HP--but sometimes those register as normal misses rather than clearly using up charges of Shrug It Off, so combined with there being no easy way to see active buffs/debuffs it's easy to never know if it actually has any charges left. These aren't game-ruining flaws, but more just... well, hey, the game's not perfect, you know?
The one other thing that can be somewhat grating is that while the game offers a Hardcore mode from the start that changes some of the rules slightly to make the game a bit more punishing in theory, some of the real interesting game modifiers (like a level cap that starts low and goes up as you beat bosses, alongside other changes to the game) are only unlocked after completing the game. I get that it's probably done that way to avoid overwhelming new players and ensure most people--besides the perverts who picked Hardcore from the start--are playing under the same rule set to begin with. I don't mind this too much personally, but I can see why it'd be off-putting to some.
Ultimately, I really, really like Enchant Farm! It has a good sense of exploration where at any given point there's a variety of areas you can go without managing to be too overwhelming, backtracking is pretty reasonable between copious checkpoints to teleport between and also the fact that weaker symbol encounters can be instantly killed by dashing into them. Boss battles reward good planning, and there's a sufficient spread of optional content--both hidden bosses and also alternate game modes after completing the game--that'll let you spend more time with the game if you're so inclined. I'd highly recommend giving it a shot!
And also Wind I is really, really good.