I am super confused by this. I read the article and then went looking to see if I could buy a rom or something… The gba cart is 60 dollars (oof) and I don’t have anything to play it on. The publisher doesn’t appear to sell roms. The article didn’t seem to mention anything but… there’s a bunch of gameplay videos of this game that have, apparently, been around for years. The gameplay looks pretty much identical to the latest trailer. There is also a rom available from the standard rom sites… that seems to have been there for awhile.
Was this game released ages ago or was it leaked years ago or what?
(I played the rom and it’s…. not great. Mostly just spamming A)
The rom I’m seeing is tagged “proto” and is presumably a leak.
I wonder how the final release compares.
I’d like to know as well.
The leak or whatever it is, appears to be fully featured though. There’s at least one gameplay video of someone beating all bosses (without getting hit) and reaching the ending. Presumably they smoothed out a few rough edges. In the rom I played, it would constantly drop weapons or spells that you can’t “use yet”. Implying that you will be able to after you level up.
So after a fellow lemming pointed me to the digital version. I threw 10 dollars away to find out… that it appears to be identical to the proto rom (and the gameplay footage).
Plausible more content was added or something, but the early gameplay is identical complete with the “you can’t use this yet”
So, the article appears to be a bit wrong in that… the game was finished ages ago… just no one wanted to invest the money to release it.
Here’s the ROM: https://incube8games.com/products/kien-gba-digital-edition
Oof I went to buy this and they’re charging a 10 percent fee for ShipAid Delivery Guarantee… I mean it’s a digital copy. What gives? There doesn’t appear to be any way to remove it from my cart.
(3rd times the charm… I was able to get it into my cart without the delivery guarantee. I have no explanation of how it was getting automatically added.)
I saw the same but had a remove option after reloading my cart a few times. Gotta love the fees these services try to sneak in…
Nice! I went to that site and somehow didn’t find it! Thanks for the link
Yeah, pick any random video and you can already tell the gameplay won’t be great. For the warrior, it’s mostly spamming, the priestess has some AoE magic that basically is all identical but dressed up differently.
Good on the guy to wrap his project up, but other than that… meh.
Then this isn’t retro it’s new
Their game is now finally out – on the long-discontinued Game Boy Advance
Well, that certainly beats Duke Nukem’s record!