Elminage Original

Elminage Original is a game that is hard to play but easy to review. It has little to no reputation, even online, to the extent that there aren’t even many guides to speak of, as if it has no following at all. After a week of playing it I can tell you with confidence exactly why that is.

This game is awful.

It has a standard RPG six character party system, with the twist being that you can create new characters of any race or class at any point in the game. The down-side is that as such there is no character development. Not only that, but when a character dies you must pay to revive them at a town, and if your entire party dies you must form an entirely new one just to revive the first. It pays to have a backup crew, but when a third of the time the revive attempts fail anyway this just feels mean spirited. As per RPG tradition, you might think that this could be solved with good old fashioned grinding. Well, I hope you really, REALLY like grinding. Not only are there no combat or character creation tutorials, but you can believe me when I say that the difficulty curb is ludicrously steep, particularly with randomly occurring mini-bosses.

The monsters and level design are nice to look at, but lack any substance or consistency

The monsters and level design are nice to look at, but lack any substance or consistency – much like the plot, in which you seek six magical rings in order to save the world. Sadly, there is no route to each ring. Instead, you must complete quests to gather ‘fame’, a substance that will eventually allow you to encounter a ring randomly, often in a world of your choosing.

This sounds interesting on paper, but with no tutorials to speak of, getting into the game is a chore, and anything unique is hard to appreciate. I spent a long time online searching forums after finding half my characters weren’t allowed to attack, only to find out that the last three characters were the ‘back row’ and couldn’t apply melee damage. You’d think this would be made clearer in a modern RPG, with a wealth of great role playing games out there to take heed of, but no. 

You can pretty much button mash in battles early on. Of course, your characters will inevitably die, altering the plot not one iota. You, your characters, and almost everyone you meet is entirely detached from the story. One way to sum it up is this: you can choose the class and alignment of your characters, and so you can set off to defeat the evil sorcerers with a party consisting exclusively of evil sorcerers, and nobody will bat an eyelid.

With an ephemeral story and frustrating gameplay, there is very little to motivate the player here. Anything worth of praise in this game is quickly overshadowed by the need for excessive grinding. With no guidance but plenty of enemies, the only conclusion I can come to is that the developers assumed that the gameplay was enough to want to keep the player going and going. This is always a risky, and in this case wrong, assumption to make.

You’ll find little fun here. Avoid Elminage Original like the plague.