Final Fantasy... Endless... Nova? [Happy April Fools!]

So, RPG Maker games can be great can’t they?

OFF is a fantastic weird game that I can’t really do justice with a simple description and what’s biggest weakness is actually being an RPG;

LISA is a fascinating tale of the worlds worst dadguy and the human psyche in a fucked up world that uses its mechanics to advance the plot in interesting (and equally fucked up) ways;

A Blurred Line may not have held up well over a decade later but for its time it was a phenomenal product and one of the best made with its system;

Major\Minor is a goddamn trainwreck that decided that making a Furry Visual Novel in RPG Maker was a great idea (and it was… just not for the reasons the developer thought);

Ib is straight-up one of my favourite indie titles period for so many reasons that we’d be here all day talking about it.

Y’know, just to name a select few. If your Favourite RPG Maker Thing isn’t there, then don’t worry; it’s there in spirit.

Final Fantasy Endless Nova is never going on that list.

It was created in RPG Maker 2000 and released in 2002. It’s a hodgepodge of blatant plagiarism, shit MIDIs that are ALSO blatant plagiarism, attempts to pretend to capture the spirit of Final Fantasy (while missing the mark by a mile), some of the most generic and yet simultaneously goddamn awful writing imaginable and, uh… It also tries to be a SaGa game, technically.

Reviews as recent as January this year compare this favourably to all RPG Maker games period, as well as actual Final Fantasy games. And not the bad ones like 3(DS). I don’t even know. Perhaps you do!

I doubt it though; you haven’t played this game and there’s a reason for that. A very good reason.

~

Contents:

Prelude
The SaGa Begins
Sewerside
Sho Me A Way Off This Rock

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Duvet

You’re probably not at all surprised by this, but all the music - all of it - is taken from elsewhere. Usually, it’s from actual Final Fantasy games but sometimes it isn’t.

The title screen music here, for example, is not (I’m also surprised it’s not Prelude!). It is a shitty MIDI version of Duvet by Boa. If you’re reading this, you have definitely heard this before, as the OP music for Serial Experiments Lain.

In every last case, I’m not even going to pretend to play along with this. I’m just going to link the original track instead, because it’s better quality and makes me feel better about this. I’m also not using the names for the MIDIs in the game files because they’re bland and generic. Like how this one is called Narrow Future.

Dark, Calm Night

Meanwhile, in the actual game things… start…?

I did consider making this opening scene a video, but then decided against it because its so slow and not much really happens in it. Its one saving grace is that the text DOES auto-advance here, but that’s all.

No…I just don’t feel safe moving in space like like this thats all.

Oh and I’m not fixing any of the text here or anything. I’m also not going to [sic] any, because if I did it’d be about every other sentence at minimum. Consider it a game to spot all the fuckups. There are a lot!

There’s THREE in these two sentences alone! I wouldn’t be surprised if you couldn’t see them all though, because the text is balls. And this is the fixed readable text. Really.

Also, complete aside? That Earth image in the background there is part of the RPG Maker 2000 RTP. Sometimes, for no reason at all, it doesn’t actually install that image and the game just does not run as a result.

Besides the three of us will make sure you are safe.
"Do you feel better now? It is important that you maintain a clear mind.
I do.I mean you can count on me.

Discounting that one shot of a random Earth image, there’s nothing in the background here. At all. It’s impressive how something as simple as this can be fucked up in several ways already.

and i dont buy at all that this guy is the kind of guy what would exclaim “Splendid!” like that or any of these people at all

Delita Hyral X. Delita. Hyral. X.

Delita! Hyral! X!

Oh and these… “credits” (I’m being generous there, yes) are at least better than fade-to-blacks for scene transitions.

Sadly it’s a trick that only works right now, huh.

Right!

In a bizarre mercy, it is totally possible to differentiate Soldier 1 and 2. Considering the three identical pods before, you’d be forgiven for expecting the same effort here.

I can’t believe we found them! I just know we’re gonna get a huge raise for this!

Well! What did he say?
What do you think! He said to use the snare ray on them post haste! He also said bring them in safe or else!

The writing is bad and generic right now, but it gets worse.

Much, much worse.

also delita hyral x

i cannot get over that i shall absolutely try but

It’s not super obvious, but this screen IS as big as it looks. You can tell because the rocks are wrapping around really blatantly.

Gasp, no! Not a non-magical force! Whatever shall we do about a non-magical thing?!

Also, yeah, you can totally tell that he adds those speech marks in manually because sometimes he forgets to close them.

They found us!
Oh no!
"It’s no use!Ahhhh!!!
We’re being…Pulled in.

I just want to leave this here and stare at it. He had an editor.

He had an editor.

Just… just remember this.

In a few seconds they’ll be under our custody!
What do you think our reward will be!!!

The snare ray is pulling in debris
Noooo!!!

Velv.net still very much exists, believe it or not. You can tell that it’s from mid-2000s at the latest and has not been touched since 2007. Such wonderful gems on it include the editor of this game giving Anime reviews (bizarrely enough, Lain is NOT one of them!).

In which he considers Cowboy Bebop worse than Dragon Ball GT.

fucking hell what have i gotten myself into

No, you’re not missing anything here. The ship getting hit and sent flying just isn’t animated. One frame, there is a Gold pod. Next frame, it is gone.

Ahhieeeee!!!

Delita Hyral X is now out of things to credit after crediting himself 2.5 times and his anime friend 1.5 times. So we just get a lazy jumpcut…

Dungeon: Horror

Asteroid colony Stars Bliss.

Endless Nova. Stars Bliss.

They are in space. Do you… do you maybe get it? Because it’s going to get more blatant.

We gotta go after it! What do we tell the president!?
You tell him that we have three out of the four and were on our way to Stars Bliss to get the other!

President! I had no idea you could hear us!
You said you retrieved three out of four pods! Was one of them Gold!?

Are you ready for the writing to get MORE generic and bad? Because it’s doing it right now. And we’re still in the fucking opening cutscene.

The snare ray! It caused debris to hit. There still hitting us sir. We do have the other three though. And once we fix damages we will find the gold pod in Stars Bliss.

hey guys just a thought but maybe

JUST MAYBE

the nonspecific president is a bad guy???

What! But President we have three of them! And we will find the last one!

You bastard! We are loyal soldiers who dedicated our lives to our Capital!
Then die like the loyal dogs you are! Hahaha!

RIP unnamed guys who I bet were obviously going to be named Biggs and Wedge until Delita Hyral X decided otherwise for whatever reason, or at least got talked out of it by his ““editor””.

…Believe it or not, it’s only going to get worse from here.

Much, much worse.

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Oh man, fangames. I always feel a little mean picking on them, because the creators are enthusiastic and genuinely seem to be doing their best, but the blatant plagiarism kinda tempers that.

And this one positively REEKS of 2000s Deviantart. Sign me up.

Considering what we’ve already seen this is a comparatively minor nitpick but WOW the tiling is really bad.

I kinda have an hobby of breaking open RPG Maker games just to see how they work, so seeing this game in action perked my curiously to take a look at the guts. Turns out they have their own website for this game??
http://velv.net/FFEN.html

I just want to make sure I’ve got something right. Not only did Delita Hyral X plagiarize the song tracks, he gave them different names? Did he think people wouldn’t notice? I’m not even that upset about using existing music, but he’s genuinely trying to pass if off as his own work, isn’t he?

I always wanted to give this a go, having a strange fondness for RPGMaker games (there’s a surprising amount that are actually pretty good – even among fangames), but I’ve never been able to get it to run. That Earth image in the intro would never load no matter what I’d do, and the game would crash.

Probably my computer trying to save me, or at least itself. I’ll follow this for sure, though.

Honestly, the best thing about the website still existing is that the game’s creator made a walkthrough of the game himself. And he never finished it. It’s just… perfect, really.

This is absolutely correct, yeah. I can put the names the game requires them to have in parenthesis or something, but they’re not really interesting other than for existing.

Also for everything being terrible MIDIs. I’ve mentioned that already but it bears repeating because it is one of the most early 2000s things ever.

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Not to say Word have fixed all the problems with the script, but like, why doesn’t anyone ever consider writing in Word before putting it in RPG Maker? A little red line appears underneath the words you misspell and you have 20% of your problems you solved before you send it to the editor who definitely exists and definitely wasn’t the creator’s dog all along. Anyway, nice to see a Star Ocean sequel, but I have no idea why they called it Final Fantasy Endless Nova. Bit of a misnomer there.

I listened to the MIDI files too and they are lovely, lovely works of art of butt trumpet. Alas, I cannot look at the guts because it requires me to have RPG Maker 2000 which I don’t have but I’m sure they are a treasure to one and all.

The real question is are they going to say Stars Bliss as much as I hope they do

Hey now. This game is already more sci-fi than at least two of the Star Ocean games.

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oh I am excited as fuck for this

Gonna assume this isn’t one of those RPG Maker games you can pay money for.

Also, clearly he is Delita Hyral, Tenth of His Line. We can expect great things.

How often do the facial art styles clash horribly?

e: And to be honest, even with all this, it probably does still compare favorably with a lot of RPG Maker games.

What in the world is this pile?

I’m excited to find out.

If we’re gonna be fair, this game looks like it was made by the hands of a teenager (or younger even), so they maybe didn’t understand that ripping things off in the way they were was a big creative NO. That said, we haven’t seen just how much they rip off yet…

Intruders

Deren is the dude on the right. You can tell he’s the protagonist because he’s the more boring looking one.

Also I bet that Delita Hyral X’s name is either Derren or Darren (and leaning towards the former). I just get that impression for some reason.

his name is skeet? as in the clay pigeon thing??

Well… I sure doubt that this is a Doug reference, because c’mon. I bet it’s not even a sports thing, considering this is doing the Generic RPG But In Space schtick.

No problem. Eh?I still need to get paid though.
"Haha. I know.

I know animation can be difficult, but a closed > opened treasure chest is not anything resembling hard. At all.

How’s 200Gil. It’s all I have on me right now.
Hmmm…That’s really low! But since you’re a buddy of mine, I’ll do it.

I also know that after the writing masterclass that was the prologue, this clunky-ass exposition should not come as a surprise.

But somehow it does.

Thanks Deren! I’m in your debt. If you need anything in the future I’ll do my best to help!
That sounds great but you still need to tell me what exactly I have to do?

What’s a Wisdom Orb? It’s basically Magicite But Worse. You’ll see when we find one. That won’t be for a short little while, though.

Their was nothing I could do.

This particular round of clunky exposition ended up being, uh, not GOOD but better. A tiny, tiny bar I realise. Then it declined a bit at the end there and now? Oh now it gets worse.

Yeah. That’s another reason I asked you to do this for me. I knew you had a history dealing with him.

Endless Nova. Stars Bliss. Ally Luna.

Space. Do you get it? It’s space. A fantasy game in space! Do you… Do you maybe get it?

Also yes that is a “Q” and not cutoff. How does THAT ONE happen?!

I’ll get the weapon back for you. All I have to do now is get a ticket for the next space flight.

Motor. I wonder if they might just be a robot or something.

You once told me that Sho has a storage facility in the sewers. Do you think he would keep it there?
I do. Once I meet up with Motor we’ll head to the Space Station. See ya.
Good luck…

Kind of an overworld map, I guess? It’s really not at all useful, though. That one tiny rock is Stars Bliss? How considerate of you to tell me. I can barely see that thing because the arrow is mostly obscuring it.

Also holy shit the galaxy or whatever is called Hell’s Dome that is so generic edgy at least its not a space thing for once

its also not a dome so uh

Also, did you guess that Motor was going to be a blue haired, blue skinned(?) anime android? And also a woman? Because she is.

Because anime.

Hey Motor, you ready to bust into this joint?!

Sho usually relies on everything electronic like cameras and gates. So I highly doubt he would waste

Gates. Gates are electronic. Also generic nonspecific android “computer hacking advantage.” You could make something up here, you know. Technobabble exists for a reason.

Also this just proves 100% that we’re going to meet actual people in there. Derren just said as much by saying that there won’t be any. Welcome to cliche generic writing 101.

I will do my best.
Great. Lets go then.

Hey look, gameplay! It only took about 8 minutes, which is short for a Final Fantasy game nowadays but way too long for a 2d one. Doubly so one made with a shitty engine like RPG Maker 2000.

We can’t go left either, so we gotta enter the only other door we can. I’m surprised he had the foresight to set the event trigger HERE and not past it though. That would be awkward.

Can’t just open the door though. No, you gotta be told by a textbox that this gate that is a door has been opened. And it’s a Gate with a capital G so it’s important.

Except its a fucking door so it isn’t.

Never Look Back

Your theory of no guards seems to be incorrect.
Well I guess we have to move to plan B.
What is plan B?

God, that is so bland. It’s not even funny bad, it’s just… bad.

You wont get pass me!

No music change here, so that one Final Fantasy VIII track plays for the entirety of this area. Enjoy…

Anyway, this ripped static image of a Military Police guy from Final Fantasy VII is our first fight. Just like in Final Fantasy VII for that matter… except that was animated but shush.

Our options are all fairly self-explanatory. Battle lets us input commands, Berseker autobattles for the round (and its not just basic attacks) and Escape flees. But we can’t do that which is fine with me.

Deren has no skills at all, because he’s a shit protagonist.
Motor is Deren with lower Strength but she has Scan. Which is ever so helpful.

FC Soldiers have one trick. They cast Blind. Because fuck you, that’s why. It obliterates your accuracy (reduces it to 20% of what it was!), but at least it doesn’t last after fights; very, VERY few ailments do that, thankfully. It also has a 20% chance to just end after 3 turns.

I’m sure not expecting this to mean much right now, and it shouldn’t. HP and MP are all that matters, really.

12 HP means 3 hits and we’re done; 12 MP means he can cast Blind exactly once and that’s it.

They have a decent chance of dropping Eye Drops, nicely enough. Cure Darkness of course; it’s not guaranteed though, which is kind of bullshit at this point but whatever.

Notably, we didn’t get any EXP from this. Hmm…

And now we have to deal with a scene. Kind of.

I’m finished. All security cameras, locks and alarms are disabled.
Great. Lets get moving!

Moving ever so swiftly on.

And now we fight two of these guys, sure okay.

I’m sure these will prove nice to have later on at some point. We can’t exactly heal without them and all.

Moving swiftly on, because this is just rote simplicity right now.

That must be where the weapon is! Well there are three levels to this storage facility. There has to be a way inside some how. Lets check the third level.

Well at least he didn’t also ripoff the part where you have to go through a tedious sidequest just to get a shit card.

Hungry Cookpot is pretty nice tho’. Devour is never a bad skill.

It must have gotten in by mistake.

Anyway, this thing ripped from Final Fantasy VIII (because space!) is our savepoint. It also gives us really generic lore!

There is a casino here. I am sure that won’t ever come up in any sidequest way in the future or anything. That would be silly.

Those inaccessible options do open up later on, at varying points and are of equally varying degrees of useful.

We could go back to where we just came from, back to this same one room or we could… not.

And wouldn’t you know it, there is A Man here.

He immediately attacks, and mercifully spares us any and all dialogue. I already like this guy better.

Shame about his awful palette, which is due to RPG Maker itself having an awful internal recolour slider thing. I don’t know why you’d ever use it for things that aren’t just placeholders and yet here we are.

Anyway, this guy is marginally LESS annoying than his weaker buddy paradoxically enough.

Like sure, he’ll fully heal if you give him a chance but that’s it. He doesn’t even do an ailment, and he is guaranteed to drop a Potion too. How nice!

So anyway he jobs out and… oh boy, this isn’t at all ominous.

Also vending machine! Let’s see what we can get from it!

…Oh, well fuck you too, Deren.

Another room, another fight. 2 more Soldiers, very ho hum. Moving ever-so-swiftly along!

Can you solve this puzzle? It is a very tricky one, I assure you.

And by “tricky” I mean “tricky if you’re not looking at the screen.”

Spot the difference, push the computer.

Fortunately, the obvious thing to move IS the obvious thing to move and we advance ever onwards. Yay?

And another dude. Sure, whatever.

Just lucky I guess!
Your luck ends here!!!

Somehow, I don’t think it does. But I do a bit of a heal here just to be safe. For reasons. Not because this guy’s dangerous but because I can.

Pictured: my thoughts slogging through this; it doesn’t LOOK so bad right now but its really, really slow. Everything is so tediou–

Oh no. Oh no, no, no. Motor gained Strength following that fight, which is not a good sign. We still haven’t gained any EXP because you don’t level up here. You gain stats based on your combat actions.

It’s Final Fantasy 2’s infamously terrible stat gains with no easy way to game the system! God fucking dammit.

Where do you think you’re going!

Do, like, ANY of these guys have any sense of self-preservation? Like, at all? Why would you do th–

Actually, we disabled literally everything already. HOW can you do that?

I don’t believe for one second that the android lady missed the “self-destruct” protocol during her mercifully offscreen hacking scene. But apparently she did. Remember how FF7 and 8 in particular had a timed sequence in their first dungeons? Yep. I’m fairly sure that’s the entire reason this exists.

Motor we gotta get that weapon and get the hell outta here!

Bio… Yoma? So it’s either a Mystical Demon or a Butterfly.

Or I guess a really bad sprite of… I don’t even know. Whatever this is meant to be.

But it’s kind of a boss fight I guess, but not really, so we’ll se-

It’s the Sealion from Final Fantasy IX. What.

WHAT.

At least it’s called a Demon, which is sort of accurate. I don’t think its name is actually based on Youma though for some reason!

Bio Yoma is not really all that threatening. Sure, he CAN cast Bio more times than you can cure it, but it at least can also wear off on its own. It’s only a 10% chance after 3 turns but hey. It also mercifully does not persist after the fight.

It also drops your HP by 10% of your max every round, though it doesn’t tell you the amount you lose ever-so-helpfully. That’s just an engine limitation rather than spite at least.

Oh and after he loses 22HP, so long as he has at least 4, the fight just ends. If you can kill him here, he has a 100% chance to drop a Phoenix… Tail…

It’s obviously impossible to get that Phoenix Down Tail when actually playing, though. Not even sure why it’s there, other than spite or something, or even renamed. Does Delita Hyral the Tenth, esquire, somehow not expect people to realise what a Phoenix Down is, or maybe even not know what down feathers are?

It’s really obvious where it’s going to be, but it was only really visible in one screenshot. Gonna set up an easy way out first though.

Or not. Because we can’t animate that, even more than usual.

We’re also not allowed to try and disable the self-destruct because shush. We’re just not.

So we’ll grab the non-specific Prototype. Only way out is to obviously jump down through that other new grate.

And then we fight one last FC Captain in an attempt to whittle away what little time we had left. It’s not at all a difficult fight, naturally.

…I genuinely don’t know why Motor’s Magic went up here, but it did. It is semi-random in general but still.

Oh right but we can’t have the thing on-screen when it “explodes” because we can’t animate that AND have it change easily on-screen simultaneously, I guess. That’s sort of fair, because RPG Maker is kind of not great at things.

The Gestahl Empire

Which is part why we unceremoniously cut to a scene in a different area altogether.

i It felt like an explosion.
Of course it was an explosion!!! What I want to know is where it came from!!!
(1) It felt like it came from underground.[/i]

How would you not notice that immediately. It’s not like an explosion is SUBTLE or anything.

You guys told me you would guard it from intruders!!! Remember this is your fault, not mine!!!
(2) Please calm down. It could not possibly be the storage faclity. If someone broke in, the guards would have quickly set the alarms.

“You have a point?” The guy who’s so shittily written he’s perpetually megashouting as per those myriad exclamation marks instantly calms down and becomes a completely different person?

look i know writing is hard but this is the easiest thing in the world to make one guy be consistent within the space of 30 seconds

Anyway, there is that guy peeking through the text box now.

What do you want! Do you have news on the explosion!
Yes. Two intruders entered the storage facility and disabled the security. Afer that they took out

How do you know any of this. If you fled THE INSTANT THE SELF-DESTRUCT was activated, that was before the thing you are saying happened happened.

Things that are difficult:

  • Animating
  • Writing
  • Designing
  • Characterisation
  • The Chronology of Things That Just Happened

…Wait no that’s not right.

I don’t think it was them. I never heard of an android becoming a Su Karu Hunter.

The word android immediately conveys this one specific character, huh? I guess Motor is the only one in the entire universe then. No other sentient humanoid robots anywhere at all…

Yes. They seemed to know the area pretty well.

how do you know this

Remember how I said in the OP that this game got good reviews as recently as this year? One of the things it got praise for was successfully capturing the spirit and feel of actual Final Fantasy games.

Y’know, actual Final Fantasy games and their gendered sexist insults. Those sure are my favourite parts the whole zero times I can recall them happening. …If you can actually recall any, feel free to keep them to yourself 'kay, thanks.

Collect your men, find them and lock them up in my dungeon! I want the pleasure of turning them both to dust! And don’t you dare forget that weapon!!!

Intruders

So that sure was a scene that happened. It was basically just to mask that this map is not the same one as we were on before. Because the storage area or whatever exploded.

All systems seem functional.
Great! We have to get back to the Residential Area as soon as possible, before guards storm these sewers like army ants. Lets go.

…FC is an actual thing that means something? And it apparently means Finel Quartet?

Finel. Is… did Delita Hyral X mispell “final”? Final Four? That… is a really bad name for anything.

Like ever. Fortunately, it may not actually be a mispelling. At least not entirely. It’s dumb. Surprise.

But we can worry about that when we’re back at Arleah.

Oh boy, now that we’ve finished the dumb prologue-y area, we unlocked the ability to recolour windows! But only at save points!

Fortunately, there’s one right here.

Yep, that’s the best option alright. So fucking gauche that you can’t read a thing. It fits perfectly.

Oh right, uh, the reason that the Final Fantasy VIII requisite sewer dungeon music is playing here at least makes sense.

It’s because we’re about to immediately dive into our first real dungeon.

And it’s a sewer level.

for fuck sake

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It reaaaaaally doesn’t. Even among fangames, this is not good so far. It’s “important” in the history of RPGMaker because it was one of the first fully completed games, but that is obviously very different from being good.

I wasn’t calling it good at all, mind.

Just, being finished was one of the things that makes it compare favorably to a lot of RPG maker stuff. Though in fairness, I haven’t kept track of that community, is 90% no longer both dogshit and unfinished?

Well, I mean, Sturgeon’s Law and all that, but quality has definitely greatly improved.