Trope Tales

About the Game

Set Out On an Epic Adventure

Harken back to the days of your youth when you sat slack-jawed and starry-eyed in front of a CRT display for hours with an NES controller in hand. Recall the vainglorious days of yore when you triumphed over the first boss in epic fashion then never actually finished the game. Learn a lot of fun words along the way, too!

The dark goddess Vespera has reared her head and is threatening to undo the world.

Take on the role of Hero, a Silent Protagonist who is Conveniently an Orphan. One day Hero is summoned by Quest Giver to find the Orbs of Ineffable Power. You must leave your home of Arcadia and travel via Global Airship on a World Tour. Acquire Villain-Beating Artifacts and optionally (begrudgingly) team up with party members such as: The Chick, The Smart Guy, and The Ditz. Acquire Plot Armor along the way and learn to use Applied Phlebotinum. Gather up Plot Devices and save the world!

Or stop and play a rousing game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. Whatever works for you.

Trope Tales is a riff on classic JRPGs, pulling in common themes and elements from all your 1980's favorites. Grind turn-based combat to over-level, amass a treasury of Mega Elixirs you'll never use, and solve puzzles consisting of walking back and forth while angrily complaining about the random encounter rate!

We've taken great care to both recreate the nostalgia of our youth while also simplifying the game for a modern audience (or adults with jobs and children). We hope you'll have as much fun playing as you remember having the first time you cracked open Earthbound!

About Trope Tales

When I set out to make a game with RPG Maker, I was quick to realize that it was optimized for making a particular type of game: a classic 2-dimensional JRPG, the likes of Golden Sun, Breath of Fire, Final Fantasy, and Chrono Trigger. So I thought -- why not lean in? Let's make the most JRPG game EVER.

From a hand-picked collection of hundreds of tropes and a legally distinct version of the Hero’s Journey, Trope Tales was born.

Enjoy a somewhat comical take on classic JRPGs in this blast-from-the-past adventure.

Features

Multiple Distinct Skillsets

Party members will have different skills available based on the weapon they equip. Try out various strategies based on what fits your play style. Focus on buffing the party and healing to stay alive, or go full blast and nuke down the enemy in a race to 0 HP!

Various Build Options

Different armors and equipment come with trade-offs that create meaningful changes to how you approach encounters. Will you favor boosted resources and regeneration for long-term sustain, choose the swingy and RNG dependence of high-critical and high-evasion builds, or opt for something in between? Kit out each character however you see fit, creating hundreds of ways to approach every boss!

Side Quests

Need a break from saving the world? NPCs around town are happy to waste your time finding their missing garden shears or returning their lost chicken to its coop! Why be the hero of the world when you can be the hero of that little girl who lost her favorite doll?

3700+ Distinct Dialogue Lines

Our lovingly-written dialogue lines and descriptions will cause you to laugh, groan, chortle, and make other noises that we hope are enjoyment. If they're not, you should get that checked out.

(The story is half-finished, and we're still adding side quests, so expect this number to reach 10k by release date!)

Default assets. Original systems. Excessive effort.

We couldn’t find artists willing to work for free, so we used the excellent default art provided by RPG Maker and Kadokawa - work by talented, often underappreciated artists that deserves far more credit than it gets.

From there, we poured over a thousand hours into hand-written custom plugins, rewriting dialogue for original cutscenes and story beats, balancing and rebalancing combat across hundreds of items, skills, and builds, and playtesting everything until the game was fun on purpose.

A City of Catgirls

Sometimes you build features for the players.

Sometimes you build features as a blatant self-insert fantasy.

Who knows which one a City of Catgirls happens to be.

I mean, it's for the fans. The trailer said so.