Twenty years in the making...

Recommended Videos

Myria

Sanity Challenged
Nov 15, 2009
124
0
0
I like to throw a twitch stream on my second screen whilst getting ready in the morning just to have some noise in the place. This morning one of the streamers I watch was playing a game called "Grimoire : Heralds of the Winged Exemplar". The more he talked about it, the more bizarre it seemed. Twenty years in the making, a dev who refers to everyone as "sapes" -- apparently because he believes he's descended from neanderthals -- and an ungodly number of other weirdnesses.

This article [http://www.pcgamer.com/grimoire-heralds-of-the-winged-exemplar-is-now-live-on-steam-after-20-years-of-development/] kinda gives the TLDR version.

The game itself looked to me to be a mess. The UI would have been considered an abomination even back in the '90s, the game crashed a half dozen times on the streamer, audio levels were all over the place, there were dozens of stats with none of them explained (a manual is supposedly coming out soon -- given the game's development span, 'soon' is not very helpful), many of the classes apparently couldn't be used no matter what the streamer tried, and the gameplay made some of the dungeon crawls of the day look like ARPGs by comparison.

Digging a little into some of the mentions about the dev, Cleveland "Cleve" Blakemore, was more entertaining to me. His blog [https://vault-co.blogspot.com/] is particularly amusing (did you know that Stephen Hawkings [https://vault-co.blogspot.com/2017/07/rofl-fake-hawkings-gibberish.html] has been replaced with a double? Probably more than once!).

The whole thing is just such an absurd crater of weirdness, I was kind of surprised I hadn't heard of it before. I was curious if I was just out of the loop and this whole gobstopper of concentrated crazy was well known, or is this a sideshow that has been missed by most?
 

Dreiko_v1legacy

New member
Aug 28, 2008
4,696
0
0
I was aware of this game from a while back, it seemed like one of those games from the time before I was into rpgs so I was mildly interested but I have too much on my plate right now.


If nothing else, I support this game on a conceptual level and on the degree of devotion it takes for a small team to stay with a project for 2 decades so I want to at least try it at some point. I wouldn't really go in expecting professional standards or any semblance of modernity to reside within the game, it's a doujin game.
 

Tanis

The Last Albino
Aug 30, 2010
5,264
0
0
From what I can tell, it basically feels like a 'better than average' RPG maker...that got a Steam release.

So...good on him/them for releasing a broken piece of shit that would have bombed even if was released 30 years ago?