*Note: This was written before the "Rebirth" update to the game that makes changes to the main story dialogue. I have not played it since this update, if I do, I will revise my review. For now, it will remain the same. This is a review of the game I paid for, played and that the devs were content with for almost six months.

TL,DR: Chronicles of a Dark Lord is an ineptly written game with somewhat tolerable combat. The story is cliche, the characters have no personality or diversity and the game's flow is extremely repetitive. The description promises a game that's dark, mature and complex, but what you get is juvenile, shallow and as dark as something like Naruto. Furthermore, even though the description promises that you'll get to make decisions that effect the game later that is not the case (aside from choosing whether or not to kill random NPCs).

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First, I want to point out that one positive review on this page was written by someone affiliated with the developers. Looking at some comments on their Desura page, it seems like this is not uncommon for them. Even if I liked this game this would leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Fair warning, there are SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW.

Chronicles of a Dark Lord: Episode 1 Tides of Fate is the kind of game that gives RPG Maker games a bad reputation. It is one of the worst written games I've ever played. If an RPG is poorly written, it fails. This goes double for RPG Maker games, because the graphics are pretty standard across the board (some will have nice character portraits, the portraits in this seem to be generated in RPG Maker) and the gameplay is very rote JRPG fare.

Before I get into why Chronicles of a Dark Lord is so bad, I will talk about the few things I did like. The random battle system is very nice. It's not really random. There's a meter that fills up as you walk and decreases if you stand still. If it fills up, you enter a battle. There's lots of object hidden around in the environment. My love of RPGs has trained me to check literally everything. In this game it pays off and I like that. Finally, about halfway-ish through the game I found a hidden sword and piece of armor that was so over-powered I breezed through a lot of the game. That definitely helped me keep going. Also, the song during the end credits is pretty good. Marielle Thomas did a great job with it.

So, onto the problems. First, and most importantly, the characters have no personality. Well, they kind of do, but everyone is either quiet and serious or kind of goofy. There is hardly any distinction between your party members. Half of them even look the same. If I was forced to describe any of them it would be extremely difficult. That's not good. The characters should be diverse and interesting.

The main character, Magus, is the worst of all. No personality. Towards the end of the game, some characters have a conversation about how he doesn't show emotion. Guess what? That's not interesting. He's just kind of there. Everything interesting about him happened in the prologue and the text crawl between that and the main game. There's supposedly a conflict between the evil path he started down and his decision to not be totally evil. . .WE NEVER SEE THAT.

Magus is supposed to be so dark. The only way the game really shows us that in the main game is that we are given the option to randomly kill some NPCs. That's the problem with the game in general: where's the darkness? This is supposed to be dark and mature, but it's not. The game tries too hard to also be funny and light for it to be dark. For instance, there's one part where you're in a cave and there's a rumble. Magus' wife says something like, "Either Magus is hungry or we better get moving!" The game doesn't have any of the edge it claims to have, but when you throw in lines like that, it's just goofy. Or, the conversation with a female NPC where the Dark Lord Magus says he'll come back later to pick her up so she can come visit his kingdom.

Here's a line that just blew my mind: "She is going to cut my breasts off or something if we do not get out of her garden." That's in the game. Or, how about this line which someone says before fighting one of the final bosses: "I am Sapphire Darkwell. . .and I hate cats. It's because of YOU I have to institute a law against cats in Senefarria!" That is some dramatic and dark writing.

The storyline is really cliche. First, you're traveling around trying to rally people to fight an invading evil. Then, it turns out that (spoiler alert) the bad guys have a hidden agenda. They're trying to summon something to destroy the world. The dumbest trope in the world. Why do they want to destroy the world? What do they gain?

The script is super repetitive. I'm willing to bet 10% of the game is characters introducing themselves or being introduced. Magus seems to know every character he meets, but I don't. We usually don't really learn who they are, but we're supposed to care about them or be invested in what's going on. One character is recruited, then a side quest immediately becomes available where someone is trying to lure them into a confrontation. I don't know who that enemy was and I didn't care about what was going on. The whole game in general is repetitive. The bulk of it is: go to castle, talk to rule, get permission to go to next world map screen, fight boss, go to castle. World map screens come in two varieties: Castle and town and bridge/cave/docks or castle and bridge/cave/docks.

Then, there's just weird stuff that makes me think the game was written by a 13-year-old boy. All your party members are female, except for Magus and someone you get at the end of the game. Why? There's no good reason. Also, three of your party members are women who Magus has had sex with. His ex-wife, his current wife and their lover. That's right, Magus has a wife and together they have a lover. Why? How did this happen? What is the attraction? What is the purpose from a writing perspective? It doesn't add anything. None of the three seem to actually be in love, they just call each other "my love." I guess for them to seem like they actually loved each other they would need personalities. Is it so we know how not gay Magus is? Is it so he seems cooler or more awesome? I'm not a prude. If the characters were more developed, if any of it served any purpose, it would be fine. It doesn't, though. There's also a city entirely populated by lesbians.

There's also just mind-blowingly crazy things. There's a character named Crysta Aier. Later, someone mentions "Krysta Aier." I thought, "Oh, a typo." Then, we recruit Krysta Aier and I thought, "Oh, I just remembered it wrong." Then, you re-recruit Crysta Aier and have both Aiers. Then, I didn't know what was going on. Finally, by chance, while checking a bookshelf, I found out that one of them is FROM ANOTHER DIMENSION. That's right. People's dopplegangers just pop in from other dimensions. Then, Magus remembers about the time that happened to him!

On top of the insanely inept writing, there are other issues. There's no mouse control and muting sounds doesn't completely work. Also, even though the description seems to promise that you'll get to make decisions that effect the game that is not true. The only decisions you get to make are whether or not to kill some random, nameless NPCs.

I know that this review is extremely long, but the game is so flawed in so many ways I had to get it out (if only for my own sanity).

Overall, this game is decent. It's a typical "bad guy wants world domination" thing, and there aren't any big plot twists or surprises in the bland story. The characters are very different than what you'll find in a typical jrpg, but they lack any real depth. Your party members are all important people, monarchs, badasses, with you the greatest of them all, but you're never given any serious backstory on any of them, and the game only takes a shallow dive into their personalities. The game also seems to favor women a lot, with plenty of lesbians and only one male in your party, but that's fine.

So what makes the game worth playing? Well, the combat is solid. Characters' abilities are all useful, items are often essential, boss fights are common and tough, and occassional grinding is a must. If the dev could take this battle system and expand on the story and characters to lend more meaning and emotion to the fights, this game would be fantastic. Hopefully the sequels improve that way.

tl;dr: Usual story, different but shallow character types, solid combat. It stays entertaining enough to play to the end.

I am only 6 hours in, but definitely worth the 5 bucks I paid for it if not more. Not too far in but there are a few things that jumped out at me right away:

1. It's very much like Dragon Warrior 4, and it borrows concepts from Final Fantasy. They don't try to reinvent the wheel, which is a good thing, eg the thing that revives a dead ally is called a "phoenix feather," that which cures poison is an antidote. Simple and good.

2. tl;dr - You can avoid battles when you want to /tl;dr. The battle system is turned based, and each character's time bar fills up at a rate based on the character's agility. Time stops when a bar is full. Encounters are not random on the world map or in encounter zones. Instead, a "battle bar" fills up with each step you take. When the bar is full, there's a battle. If you stand still for a second or two, the bar will begin to empty until it is.

3. The characters and their abilities are good and balanced, and they don't contain fluff or spam.

4. They did a good job of taking the elements of classic rpgs that drive you nuts / are overdone / are unrealistic out, and instead put in refreshing updates to an older genre. I don't want to give out spoilers but the protagonist is a bad ass, not some wet behind the ears kid who just had his mind blown learning that he's the savior of the world or some whiney teenager with "teen angst." Npcs for the most part don't have duplicate dialog, meaning every npc you talk to has something different to say. They've completely removed unnecessary hyper-morality that is common in old school rpgs. The story and dialogue are interesting but not overbearing. There are many, many more examples of times you will find yourself smiling just because they did something better than it's been done in the past.

5. Lesbians


I have only a few criticisms of the game at this point, and none of them are "bad."

1. Character sprites in battle are the same as they are on the map, while enemies' sprites in battle are elaborate. I would have made artfully elaborate battle sprites for each of the characters to give them more depth, personality, and make them more likeable over all.

2. There are two areas in the game so far where it seemed to be "laggy," which doesn't make sense because it's basically a super nintendo game. One area had "fog" which seems like it could almost make sense, but the other was in a castle i beleive.

3. If you turn off all three sound options (listening to music, at work, etc), there are two sounds during battle that are still heard. Issuing battle commands and critical strikes.



As you can tell from these "criticisms," there's nothing not to like about this game. Buy it.

I don't often write reviews, but this game only had two at the time of this writing, so i wanted to endorse a good game. I will update this review once I have more time in.

Having finally completed it (the Final boss is nearly impossible), I can say this is actually a better than average RPG (even more so considdering it's price), At first I was pretty "meh" about it but about 5 hours in, the story really pick's up and builds to a climax rivaling that of old JRPG'S ala Final Fantasy's. (leaning more toward's 3,or 5)

The Music for this game is actually also really good (you will have the battle theme stuck in your head for week's) and so is the art direction and spell effect's

Combat is standard Turn based, with character's able to act once their "battle gauge" has filled up, but feels quick battle's never seem to drag.

Also a REALLY good plus for this game is the lack of Random Encounter's, instead you have a Battle Bar that fills while not in battle with every step you take but stopping cause's it to go down slowly basically allowing you to control wether you want to battle or not (you still need to of cause due to the boss fight's) and you WILL need to level up cause some of the boss fight's are utterly brutal, exploiting your weaknesses and barrageing your party with high damage attack's, basically get used to ressurect and look after your Healer, she WILL save your life many time's.

Character's are a step above generic RPG protagonist's ( Your family and Wife can fight with you) rather than the normal boring cliche's "Silent Main Hero" "Love Interest who get's kidnapped" etc, they feel like they have their own personalities without feeling like cliche.


p.s you can also blow up Teddy Bear's... cause sure why the hell not :)

Update: The Rebirth Update is actually quite a good enhancement to the game, adding better looking battle sprites, spell effect's, Resolution option's and I think although I might be wrong, new music as well, also the performance of the game is now silky smooth when before it was quite choppy if you chose to play fullscreen.

With the Steam summer sale on, and this game at the moment being £1 by all means get it :)

I am playing this game now and am finding it pretty fun. The pacing is a little weird. You kinda go from boss to boss pretty quickly, and just have to level up right before you face them. This is my first RPG Maker game and its really not bad. Good dlalogue overall, cool bosses, and I actually like the characters you get to play as. Worth a try for less than a buck, for sure.

Generic RPGMaker trash.

An RPGMaker game, with many of the rough edges that implies. The creator clearly had big dreams, stuffing a lot of worldbuilding into the intro cutscenes and the prologue and then the post-prologue exposition dump. (And in the process, rushing past what might have been some interesting parts of the story to actually play.) Nothing here is actively bad, but the combination of “not good enough” factors dooms it: The main character is a whiny ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and then a no-nonsense tyrant and neither is compelling. The dialogue is functional; the other characters are flat and repetitive. The battles are too slow and have no auto-battle option; but you definitely need to grind and there aren’t many battle options. Enemies use lots of status effects from the very beginning; Magus has status effect attacks that never seem to work. The dungeon design might improve later, but for the first few hours of play it’s simplistic. The graphics are fine but they’re stock RPGMaker used in typical ways. If I was really interested in the plot OR I didn’t have to grind OR the dungeon design was really neat OR the play experience was just really smooth and comfortable I might have continued. Oh, well.

Got my money's worth out of the game. Didn't beat it, but by the time I got this far into the game, I really stopped enjoying it. Was fun at first, but there were so many flaws to the experience that I just couldn't look past them anymore.

Now that the Rebirth update is released, I have no major compaints about this game! Some might be turned off by the broody, almost gothy mood of the characters and story, or by the perhaps inconsistent graphics and fonts, but really, the gameplay is tight, and the writing (with said update) is delightful. It's fairly linear besides the occasional little sidequest, which is fine. For five dollars (or a buck and a quarter during the Summer sale), it's a great deal for those who love oldschool JRPGs!

I thoroughly enjoy the story. It's not sugar coated like most RPG's , and just has a general feel of something different then the ole final fantasies, in a good way. the music is actually really good, and I enjoy how you have to stay leveled up to stay ahead of the curve, or else get slaughtered.