The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time Review – A Puzzle Hidden Within a JRPG

The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time Review

A game like The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time is so difficult to review because it’s almost entirely made of secrets. I’m going to try and be vague to not give away too much info past the beginning of the game. The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time is heavily inspired by Inscryption, which has become one of my favorite video games of all time. It had a groundbreaking narrative format that players are still trying to uncover all the layers of. The simplest way to describe The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time is if Inscryption traded its card game mechanics for JRPG mechanics. If you need more information than that, read on, and I’ll set you up…

When the player starts The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time, they aren’t able to start a new game. The player can only continue from a save file that’s at 99.54% completion. The game immediately throws the player into a battle against the fake RPG’s Chronobeast end boss, Because the JRPG battle system has atypical mechanics, the player isn’t able to figure out how to do any damage to the Chronobeast, and they die. After dying, the player can load a save file at the final save point of the game, right before the final boss.

JRPG Love Letter

Right away, The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time has tons of little details that make it a treat for JRPG fans. The save file has close to 100 hours of play time. When the player selects it, they are immediately given a ton of Steam trophies, as if they’ve put in tons of work to gain all the achievements. The main character is named Jacob, but after gathering some info, the player realizes that the character’s canon name is Rose. The company that made The Greatest RPG of All Time is called Circlesoft (instead of real-life JRPG dev Squaresoft). The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time is a treasure trove of homage and humor about JRPGs, and it’s a real treat for fans of the genre.

The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time has a turn-based JRPG combat system. The way it works is that the player has four characters. Each character has three abilities and an item to use to choose from. The player has tons of items as if they’ve been hoarding potions for the entire game. They have six actions per turn. Character abilities, like melee attacks or elemental magic attacks, can be used. Chaining specific combinations of abilities yields new attacks.

A Puzzle With Many Layers

But, The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time, isn’t really a fourth-wall-breaking JRPG. The JRPG sections are window dressing for what’s really a puzzle game. The player has to walk around the game environment collecting hints. These hints come in the forms of developer audio commentary, pages of the game’s instruction manual, and clips from an FMV making-of documentary. Some of the info is a story about a narrative going on outside of The Greatest RPG of All Time’s plot. Without giving away spoilers, the FMV making-of reminds the player that they’re playing a remake, and not the original game. That same video also hints at the location of an in-game dev room.

Manual pages explain the core battle mechanics. For example, one page tells the player the elemental weaknesses of some enemies. The player does no damage to any enemies in combat. When they apply this knowledge, they realize that enemies are immune to all damage, except their weakness. But the player only has an elemental attack that deals fire damage, and they meet an enemy early-on that’s only weak to lightning. Another page tells the player that a swirl attack followed by two melee attacks, will do a special lightning attack.

Cryptic Hints

The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time’s mechanics are explained through these hints. One audio hint straight up tells the player that they should be taking notes as they play. Some pages of the game manual even have hand-written notes on them, such as “All carpets lead somewhere”. The player is constantly getting new information, having to take notes, and applying this information. It’s an incredibly fun gameplay model. And without giving too much away, the player does step away from the screen of the JRPG, and enters an Inscryption-like first-person 3D puzzle room.

My only complaint about The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time is that it can be a little rough around the edges. It’s obviously a very low budget indie title by a small dev team. The remake JRPG graphics have an HD-2D style that I’m a sucker for. But the pixel spites lack detail, and their animation is sparse. Some of the environments and UI feel unlovingly constructed. The JRPG combat system serves the game’s puzzle mechanics well, but it’s not a great battle system on its own. My last complaint is that I wish The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time made me want to play the RPG itself more. The game presented is fun genre homage, but a truly great game would have left me begging to play it.

Inspired by the Greats

The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time is a wonderfully clever puzzle game. It masquerades as a JRPG, before becoming something much stranger. Anyone who’s a fan of Inscryption, or other fourth wall-breaking classics like Undertale, and Doki Doki Literature Club, really needs to play The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time. It’s not as great as those classics, but it’s still a valiant effort. JRPG fans should also take note, because The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time is full of Easter eggs and homage to genre classics.

***PC code provided by the publisher***