The Amber Throne

A genuine hidden gem of a JRPG. Made in RPGmaker but defined by its gorgeous hand-drawn art, making up the entire world. Then there's the beautiful ambient music which elevates the whole experience to an ethereal and evocative adventure. It has your typical overworld exploration, and somewhat basic turn based combat. It's functional, and fast-paced. Think something like Fear and Hunger in the sense that it's not so stat-focused, but more about neat little gimmicks. I think it's neat and helps the experience.

Then there's the story. The main reason I have this at 4 stars. Imagine a dark fairy tale. Something like the original myths written by the Grimms. It's less about explaining every detail and introducing each individual character and more about allowing you to experience a strange, inventive and cryptic, yet still meaningful world.

All aspects combined, you get a thoroughly fresh experience that I loved all the way until the end. My only complaints are that the game does have bugs and obvious playtesting errors, and that there's unsolicited nudity which is worth mentioning considering the game is obscure and unrated.

I've had this game in my library for years and I just got around to play it. I am very saddened that I haven't experienced this gem of a game any sooner. I really adored this passion project and I hope you would get to experience it too.

Also artwork shows main character holding a rifle but she only uses a sword so that was a fucking lie

It's an RPG in the loosest sense.

Positives:
Art is great
Music is good
Pacing is a through line. No grinding..also*
Overarching story and concepts are really great.

Negatives:
*No grinding. Not challenging at all for experienced gamers.
No content
Explorations is not rewarding
Side quests result in nothing of benefit
Story writing is not fleshed out and often confusing or missing key content.
Characters help with nothing in narration or moving the story along in any meaningful way

Ovarall this is just not a very rewarding RPG. Skills feel like a burden.
-> Strategies are basic AF ... that you can run through this from beginning to end doing nothing but fight what they throw in front of you...and still feel you wasted however many hours you played.

Maybe focusing on the art and story would have been a route to go, because all the RPG elements are just that, elements.

I felt more annoyed playing this game than any sense of satisfactory outcome or story payoff. I ended with zero emotional connection to any of the characters or sense of accomplishment ... and that sums it up.

Great game, but really grindy

This game is very beautiful and atmospheric. The hand drawn animation definitely shines through. I played it in a few days and it was easy to get lost in it. It can be a bit glitchy, so make sure to save often (which you can at any time). I also enjoyed the side quests and exploring portion of the game. However if you get lost or want to find a specific thing for a quest, I haven't been able to find a decent written guide for it. So keep that in mind when completing.

Basically a JRPG, “The Amber Throne” is most distinguishable by its artistic graphics and beautiful music that you will rarely see and hear in games of this type. You start the game as a warrior-princess just woken up from hibernation into a world in turmoil, and you need to muster your skills, gather resources and assemble your companions to ascend to the Amber Throne and deny your rivals to gain access to its power. The plot is quite intriguing, although the story isn’t exactly descriptive and you’ll need to piece it together from various indices, dialogues and journal entries. Gameplay-wise, it’s what you’d expect from a JRPG: party of heroes exploring the world, finding treasures and fighting enemies. Combat system is also typical JRPG, with your characters having their own set of abilities, and about medium difficulty. The game can last couple dozen of hours, sometimes you’ll have to figure out how to continue as the path is not always obvious. The game is sold at a reasonable price that entirely corresponds to its exquisite style and engaging story, so be sure to try it if you like JRPG in general and are looking for something unusual.

This one is definitely a 'Maybe', but I would not recommend for most people. A quick summary: The story is pretty good, the characters are ok, the mechanics are trash. If you really want to play a JRPG and don't mind a lot of jank then this is an decent option.

Some major pain points:
-New characters start at awkward levels and with just 2 skills. You get basically half a skill point every level, so the characters you get later on are basically useless unless you want to grind for no real reason.
-A lot of skills are completely useless, and it's hard to determine which are bad until you've already invested points in them. This is made awful as you cannot respec so you are stuck with any bad choices, some which are not immediately apparent to savescum through.
-SP(magic) based skills are extremely under powered. There is no way to effectively get your SP stat high enough to be useful. This means you should only spec into skills with ATK based scaling and use ATK boosting gear
-AGI is OP. You get way more turns when you have more AGI. AGI+ATK based characters are inherently stronger. Other characters are only good for buffs and status effects.
-The only method to effectively heal is by a character that has the passive to double item effectiveness, and use items during combat. Some skills heal % based HP on hit which is 'ok' for sustain.
-Items are horribly balanced, many being useless and some being extremely OP.
-There are a good amount of bugs. Was able to get past the ones I ran into, one by googling one by reloading.
-Some areas of the game it's unclear or misdirects where you need to go next. Especially annoying since it's hard to find guides.

There's a lot of other jank in the game as well, but overall I moderately enjoyed it, since the setting is cool, the story was interesting and there was some mildly challenging combat. It would be a very good game if there was some re-balancing and QOL changes, like re-speccing and having new characters start with the correct amount of skill points.
I'd say if you're on the fence about buying it, don't bother.

Great RPG! Beautiful artwork, interesting world and lore. Decent challenge, hard enough to actually have to use items.

Finally played it after it sat ion my backlog for the last 7 years and all I can say is "Hell yeah!". Great game for those who love older turn based RPGs but don't want to sink 60 hours into a Final Fantasy. There were a few loose threads story-wise by the end, but may that was just me missing some Easter eggs.