#9 - Baelberith
This will contain full spoilers for Baelberith. It's a short game, so please use caution if you'd rather play it yourself.
Baelberith. Where do I even begin with this one...? A few weeks ago, I was checking out various games over on Freem and just grabbing random interesting things to try. If you're unfamiliar with Freem, it's a site frequently used by Japanese indie creators to host their games. There are some English games there, but they're the minority--some of them are even tagged with 'English learning game'. Baelberith is one such game, created by a group known as DarkAtelier. Their site is gone, and what's available on the Wayback Machine indicates that there may not have been much there in the first place, but as far as I can see it's their only game.
It also has a pretty funny FAQ section in an included manual. There's no Japanese version of the game as far as I can find--it's English or nothing, if you're curious about the last question there.
Baelberith focuses on a short but tragic love story. Felte, an earnest and upright young man employed as a soldier by an unnamed country in an unnamed city, and Amina, a sorceress of some considerable skill that's in love with Felte--though she's yet to make her feelings clear--and works alongside him. They were born together in a poor village in the frozen wastes, and fled together, at which point they managed to establish a new life for themselves. A particular bit in the intro shows Felte and Amina uncovering a scroll in some ruins that would allow one to summon "spirits".
And that's where things go sour. One fateful day, Felte, Amina, and another girl by the name of Soshana were attacked by monsters. Amina insisted to Felte that he should go save Soshana and he did, only for Amina to be wounded in the process. Soshana accepts the blame for this--it's her weakness that caused Felte to prioritize her safety, and in turn got Amina injured.
In the present, the demon Baelberith makes contact with Amina, seeing her wracked with grief over the ugly wounds she suffered, and urging Amina to make a pact with her. Amina acquiesces, seeming to believe that she'll never be able to truly be loved by Felte the way she is, and her body is taken over by the demon Baelberith. Felte rushes in just as the now-possessed Amina flies off, lamenting that he, too, is to blame for what happened to her. And so, Felte is tasked by the city to find the demon Baelberith, now using Amina's body, and slay her.
It's a fairly exciting plot hook, and this kicks off the meat of the game. Baelberith has a single digit hour run time and only has about 4 real "dungeons", one of which is re-used. The battles are a little bit unique, though.
All fights start as 3-on-3 engagements. You can see enemy intentions (the two enemies with red swords by them will attack, the one with a shield will cover for one of their allies). There's a couple of interesting gimmicks, mainly owing to your party's formation. Whoever is placed in front can no longer use magic, but can instead use the Defend command, reducing damage received and allowing them to cover for one ally--albeit, it's based on who the enemy decides to hit first, so if Soshana is defending and one enemy targets Eugenie and another targets Felte afterwards, only Eugenie will get covered.
The party members in back get to use magic instead, which is unique to each character. Soshana gets some slightly quirky buffs and MP drains, Felte gets a spell that indicates who enemies will choose to attack as well as bog-standard attack and defense buffs(!), and Eugenie has access to all the healing spells, including a revive. Despite Felte being the one who seems most suited to taking hits, his buffs combined with Soshana's not-always-useful magic means it's far better for her to take the hits. And of course, Eugenie's the actual healer, so having her be in front is inconceivable. Note that regardless of position, everyone gets physical skills throughout the game that are all variations of 'basic attack + some extra hits afterwards'. They're quite damaging!
All in all, it's interesting, but nothing super complex or nuanced since your party never deviates from these 3 members. This is because I'm leaving out one major detail about how battles work. Click right here for an example. I hope you enjoy timed hits!!! Baelberith's are a bit extra mean in that if you're using a skill and you miss a single hit due to being too fast or too slow, the rest of the attack is instantly canceled. Your hit count per turn also contributes to a damage bonus for the remainder of that turn, so one character missing means the next person to attack does less damage too. This can lead to some absolutely ridiculous damage by the end of the game, since as your characters level, their basic attack string goes from 1 hit to 3 hits, and later skills have extra hits, so just look how hard Eugenie is hitting here. ... Don't pay any attention to the misses, and please appreciate Soshana's rhythm game style trap on her skill's input timing.
The last thing I'll say about Baelberith's mechanics is regarding the level-up system. Leveling up from experience gives 0 stats, but gives you a point. There's objects you can examine in dungeons which also give points, but only one and only to one character. Points can be spent on the screen above at any time out of combat. As you can see, spending more at once is way more beneficial, and it encourages some degree of specialization. Since your front character can cover for others and if they're covering they can't attack, stacking defense on them is good, whereas your back row wants plenty of attack since enemies in Baelberith are really durable as the game goes on. Yeah, your back row will get hit sometimes so they may want a bit of defense, but the best defensive measure is generally quickly thinning out enemies since the odds of your back row getting hit go down dramatically that way. The game's so short you'll likely end it at level 8, and there's probably 3-4 bonus points per dungeon, so you don't have a lot to work with.
I found the game pretty hard at first after the intro area before you start actually investing in stats since enemies simply hit too hard and are too durable, but it gets pretty easy later on once your tank can actually tank, and once Eugenie's damage explodes out of control. (Felte will be too busy spending his first few turns casting buffs, so... he can do damage too, but it'll take some time.)
The entirety of the rest of the game is about the hunt for Baelberith, and the consequences of that one fateful day where Felte opted to save Soshana and leave Amina to fend for herself. All the dungeons are pretty short and empty--four or five screens to walk through, some "!" marks to interact with for points, a cutscene and maybe boss at the end, one or two more short scenes to tell you where to go next, repeat.
It starts off with Felte and the party pursuing Amina/Baelberith back to the snowy shrine from the intro where Felte and Amina initially found the spirit summoning scroll, whereupon with Baelberith's power she quickly hurls the party into a metaphorical dumpster and leaves. Then the party finds out about a temple close to the village being attacked by monsters, goes there, defeats the demons, and runs into Baelberith once more, who chides Felte for never noticing Amina's pain. She doesn't attack this time, though. The next day, the city the party is staying at is attacked by monsters which you fend off, only for Baelberith to show up and deliver a quick ultimatum of where she'll be waiting for the final showdown. That same night, Soshana leaves the city by herself.
She confesses that the incident at the flower garden was spurred by her, and she wanted to know Felte's feelings--would he save her, or Amina? Baelberith appears once more to inform Soshana that she'll have a chance to make amends for this in the near future. The penultimate dungeon has the party go through a mine where Felte goes more into his origins with Amina, but never explicitly stating if they were lovers or not. Soshana knows he's not saying something but never accuses Felte of anything. After going through the mines, you end up in the final dungeon... which is just the snowy area from the beginning of the game but with a way cooler BGM and much stronger enemies, and you reunite with Amina/Baelberith once more in the shrine from the intro. That's the entire game in a nutshell, since she's the last boss.
The last boss fight is sort of a pain because Baelberith herself has a mountain of HP and the two demons with her can heal as well as buff attack and defense, and on top of that, Baelberith is the only enemy in the game with an AOE attack she can occasionally bust out. But, fundamentally, it's just a long fight and not a particularly hard one.
All of this takes us to the ending, which given how sparse the game was on writing genuinely surprised me. I recorded it and uploaded it here if you want to see it for yourself, but the summary is that Soshana sacrifices herself as atonement to separate Baelberith from Amina, and Felte, now having truly lost everything, quickly gives in to a deal with Baelberith--all he wants is Amina by his side.
Baelberith takes over Felte's body, and as Amina recovers, she reacts with horror at the thing that once used to be Felte standing over her. That same thing advances upon Amina, incensed at being rejected, and seemingly strangles and possibly kills her--it cuts away and isn't explicitly shown. When Eugenie finally comes back in, having seemingly fled the room briefly while Felte was being possessed, Amina's prone body is laying there behind him. Eugenie just asks Felte if they're truly fine with this, to which they respond--sure. It's a happy ending after all, right? Everyone got their wish in the end.
I'll admit that I'm not sure Baelberith is particularly fun to play. The constant timed hits are grating, and if you're behind the curve due to holding onto points to dump 4 into a stat, fights turn into drawn out slogs, not helped by some monsters being able to cover for others or knowing healing magic and defense buffs. But! It's nice to look at, and has a good selection of music from composers like YouFulca and H/MIX, and the run-time is absolutely short. If I hadn't been playing in exceedingly small chunks due to the combat grating on me, it could have easily been finished in a couple of quiet afternoons. While I'd assume that it wasn't written by a native English speaker and there's not that much dialogue, it's written perfectly fine enough outside of a couple lines here and there.
The gameplay itself never really changes too much besides your numbers getting bigger and later skills requiring more timed hits to complete. Nobody learns new magic, though skills/magic do get slight improvements over time via a Proficiency system that strengthens them (up to a cap of 50 uses). While characters start off with their basic attacks only requiring 1 hit/1 timed hit input, this expands to two and then three hits and inputs by the end of the game. The later physical skills are also prohibitively expensive--75% MP in a game where you start fights out around 40% and the MP Replenishment command only restores 15, so you'll probably only ever use them a couple of times, made somewhat more annoying by the fact that timed hit inputs vary between skills so you very well may flub the skills the first few times you do try them. As a reminder, missing any input in an attack ends the entire attack on the spot.
An exceedingly brief narrative that doesn't even name a single location or region, sometimes repetitive combat with way too many timed hits, and a level up system that just incentivizes making one character into a 0 damage wall while the other two do all the real fighting, an ending that some might find unfulfilling if they had perhaps hoped for a happy ending to Felte and Amina's story... it sounds bad, but despite all of that, I actually really enjoyed Baelberith. It certainly feels a little experimental at times, like a staging ground for a bigger thing that never came to fruition, and I'll admit that part of the appeal to me specifically is the complete lack of information or commentary on the game anywhere. I won't be so vain as to suggest it's some kind of super special buried treasure or anything like that--there's just something fun about uncharted territory sometimes.