TE: Absolution - A 2025 Retrospective

[Manibrandr System]

Introduction

The world of TerraEarth had been something that had captured our imagination ever since we've started telling stories about each other going on adventures and having a great time overall. It started with Adventures, and spun off into side stories written by various members. One thing lead to another, and eventually the RPG Maker games became a thing. With the release of TE: Absolution, Ashlynn was given something to anchor to during the time when xey were an exile from our system. And so despite it being primitive in construction, it gave us a lot of meaning.

---
What We Have (Re)played

So far, we have played through the first main arc as the Soul Cross team, going from the beginning, all the way up to after the fight with Malizzo. That includes all of the side quests. We also played up to the First Gig of the Brewmaster's Guild, North Cape Shipments of the Secret Service, the first part of the Book Club, and the Frostspire Battle Royale.

---
What We Liked so Far

• The fact that it is basically a world that took elements from the Soul Blazer games, and that "remixed" the world in a new interesting way.
  
• The amount of side quests that opened up fairly quickly early on.
  
• The TP system that allowed for agency in building up a set of skills.
  
• The writing. A lot of the NPCs are given their own quirks and personalities that makes them feel pretty relatable.
  
• Lore. The idea that the world is a virtual one, that can interact with beings from other planets and worlds is a compelling one, one that raises questions about what makes one particular subjectivity more real than another.

---
Our Involvement

For those who may not know, we had a lot of involvement in the creative process, what with having a self-insert presence in some form in the world, the games and the stories. We also were responsible for a good portion of the original music being made for the games. We were also responsible for pushing so hard for the TP system and the ATB system being a part of the game.

Looking back, I would say that I regret pushing to hard for the ATB system to be included, as given how it was implemented, I realized how much of a mess it could be when straight up converting a standard Turn-Based System to an ATB system, as there are often situations where turn-lapping happens in either direction. This made the AGI stat the single most important stat in the game.

In our defense, at the time, we have been getting into Playstation 1 emulation and, as far as standard RPG systems go, we were really obsessed with how FF6 crafts a weaving narrative with a wide cast, and how FF9's AP system allowed for character customization and player expression, and both games use the ATB system. Looking back from what we have since learned about game design, we realized that FF9 and FF6 managed to balance the ATB system by keeping the numbers low and clustered close to each other.

---
What Could Have Been Better

• Mapping. It is clear that Jason's strengths are very much focused on writing and not map design. The construction of the locations and the buildings are very much square and orthogonal in nature, and with a lot of empty spaces. To be fair to him. Environmental design is a very involved and difficult process and not everyone can make the kind of beautiful maps that some in the RPG Maker community could achieve.
  
• Dungeon design. Yeah, this one is inexcusable. Making use of the random dungeon generator and leaving it mostly as is is just low-effort. Not only that, a lot of the puzzles don't really make sense in the respective conceit of the respective dungeons. And really, the community deserved better.
  
• Tilesets. Now don't get me wrong, the RTP is a fine set of assets. However, given how it's been used in almost every RPG Maker projects, and how they're designed to fit as many situations as possible, the RTP lends itself to looking somewhat generic, and doesn't really bring out the character of a world such as TerraEarth.
  
• Sound design. It seemed that Jason could not decide how the soundtrack would be handled, and so he decided to throw everything and the kitchen sink at it. This includes, his own music, music from this community, Soul Blazer music, and popular RPG music. The issue with this is that by refusing to commit to a soundtrack style, he's limited his own ability to express himself onto the project via music.
  
• Gameplay styles. Same issue as Sound design. UX is an integral part of playing a game, and by refusing to commit, he's denying himself the opportunity to really make a chosen gameplay style shine, instead being forced to spend resources to balance the numbers across each gameplay style.
  
• Methods of learning skills. Making AP the only way to learn new skills creates a new issue where the learnset of any given class is tied almost exclusively to weapon type access. This flattens the possibility space of class expression.
  
• Quest structure. we feel that some of the quests are overly simplistic, and that they did not really gel well together to form a unified narrative terroir. Moreover, we feel that the quests that we took on did not have a lasting or consequential impact on the world and how it operates.
  
• Cut features. The original character system was one that we greatly enjoyed during the development of the game. The idea of "creating an account" and choosing to build a party of your own creation, or recruiting residents or veterans, and going through an original story line, is quite compelling. I am quite disappointed to learn that that feature was cut for the final version.
  
• Tolkienesque fantasy tropes. Overplayed, boring, generic. 'Nuff said.
  
• Navigation. It is too easy to get marooned in a part of the world that is too high-level for you when you go off the beaten track to do quests that were in the Tower of Babel.
  
• The game engine. Let's be frank here. Even back when the game was being produced, RPG Maker VX is primitive, with an inferior new tileset and tile-mapping system that is several steps backward from XP and 2k3, with the Ruby scripting engine that is barely an iterative upgrade from XP. It gets worse when VXAce got released soon after, as a straight up upgrade to VX. This made sure that RPG Maker VX as an engine would be largely forgotten, and abandoned by the community before it had a chance to mature.
  

---
How We Would Revisit It?

So, given that this game, despite its flaws have buried itself in our mind and imbued us with an obsession of iterating on the premise, we have a few ideas as to how we would handle this when we get to doing this for keeps.

• We will be using Clockwork Raven's tilesets and icons. With its 16x16 aesthetic, it will be sure to give that retro aesthetic that keeps it looking fresh and colourful. While we could come up with our own original tilesets, we feel that having a library of assets ready would work as a good starting point. And as needed, we could easily extend the tileset with our own original work.
  
• We will be using these assets to great effect in making memorable environments that players would feel good traversing, exploring and revisiting. We'd also be leveraging Aerosys' Random Map Generation system to add some replayability.
  
• We will spend time to make sure that each quest will be as impactful and consequential as could be.
  
• We will be making use of our compositional skill to write original music for it, making use of the Roland SC-8850 for sound generation.
  
• We will be adding a twist of the original character creation back, by bringing in the possibility of starting the game with Loki (Formerly Enigma) and Cierra in the party, older and wiser, and defaulting to residential recruits.
  
• We will be making all encounters on-map encounters that only respawn when the player exits the dungeon.
  
• We will be implementing multiple ways of learning skills, be it through equipment, class proficiency, story conditions or in-battle conditions. We will also make sure each character/class will have something different to add to the gameplay.
  
• We will implement different travel styles that are unique to each party. Raini and Psychokind's party will be able to make use of portals outside of The Tower of Babel, Deathpit's party will travel via Red Riotz, and Jason's party will travel by train. These methods will always be available to the party.
  
• We will be building an original fantasy world lore around non-humanity, the realness of various subjectivities, and paracausalities.
  
• We will be making use of RPG Maker MV, making use of plugins by Yanfly, Irina and Olivia, as well as Moghunter.
  

[Jason Tandro]

Oh my word, what a read this was on my lunch break! Really dragging me back to the good old days... lemme give some feedback.

Manibrandr System wrote:

It started with Adventures,

Ah yes, my first foray into TE: Fanfiction. The entire story was written in chunks (I was writing this thing DIRECTLY into the web browser and often during school so I had to be judicious with my time.)

It all began with a goal to hit the word count limit on TE, and this was back in the early early days (circa 2005), so it was like... 75,000 words? I don't even remember but I do know that I gave up before hitting the cap about a third of the way to it because I felt the story had reached a satisfying conclusion... or more likely because I grew tired of writing it....

Foreshadowing is a literary device...

Quote:

and spun off into side stories written by various members.

I myself wrote a few other mediocre to bad pieces including TE: Mysteries, TE: Soap Opera, TE: Haunted House, TE: Christmas Carol, and the obnoxiously bad and aggressively poorly edited "Kingdom Smarts". A two-part story, and I never finished the second part.

Others, however, were writing wonderful pieces. Our girl inferiare wrote a direct sequel to TE: Adventures, and of course SoulBlazerFan had their wonderful (and tbh, much better constructed) Crisis of Infinite TerraEarths. It was a glorious time to be a young creative who's friends were mostly online and represented by avatars.

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One thing lead to another, and eventually the RPG Maker games became a thing.

A PSOne RPG Maker nothing-burger, an RPG Maker XP game simply called TerraEarth which was ambitious, bad and ambitiously bad, two separate attempts at a sequel, and finally TE: Absolute, the ground-zero of this post. Also there were three additional games, only one of which was completed: TerraEarth: Awakening (a prequel set in Rainichan's home country of Kineti). The other two was TE: Dark Gaia Crisis, meant to be another prequel and focusing more on the story of TE: Adventures, and the infamously unfinished (hell, barely started) TerraEarth: Beyond.

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With the release of TE: Absolution, Ashlynn was given something to anchor to during the time when xey were an exile from our system. And so despite it being primitive in construction, it gave us a lot of meaning.

I'm glad it helped with a difficult time. I poured a lot of love for this place into that buggy half-finished mess, lol.

Quote:

--- What We Have (Re)played So far, we have played through the first main arc as the Soul Cross team, going from the beginning, all the way up to after the fight with Malizzo. That includes all of the side quests. We also played up to the First Gig of the Brewmaster's Guild, North Cape Shipments of the Secret Service, the first part of the Book Club, and the Frostspire Battle Royale.

Malizzo and the elemental fiends are stolen straight from Final Fantasy, and were also carried over from the very first TerraEarth Game. Why did the Fire Elemental live on a previously non-existant island north of the OC Town "North Cape" and in a haunted manor? No reason. Though... I think that manor is the one from TE: Haunted House? I need to go back through all this old stuff....

Quote:

--- What We Liked so Far The fact that it is basically a world that took elements from the Soul Blazer games, and that "remixed" the world in a new interesting way.

Map taken directly from IoG with a few oddities of my own, and some stolen from Soul Blazer and Terranigma. I remember Glecliff being one of my favorite Terranigma Dungeons, and the concept of an underworld - another wholly cut map, by the way. Soul Blazer I didn't play enough of so honestly I just slapped some names on some places and hoped for the best. Southerta Island as a gold-saucer-esque minigame hub? Jeez, lol.

Quote:

The amount of side quests that opened up fairly quickly early on.

I wanted the world to be as open as I could reasonably make it, but I lacked the skill to fulfill this particular vision. So I'll take the plus points, but tbh, the game probably could have used with some reining in here lol.

Quote:

The TP system that allowed for agency in building up a set of skills.

One of several scripts I managed to stitch into the game. I only wish I had done it justice! (Same as the ATB and other noteworthy additions to the core VX system).

Quote:

The writing. A lot of the NPCs are given their own quirks and personalities that makes them feel pretty relatable.

You're too kind. Character interactions were my favorite bits for sure, and I did love a good dialogue scene, even if it was primarily static sprites face-blabbing at each other. I do like a lot of my original NPCs though, particularly from the guilds. I wanted them to be just serious enough to feel like people but primarily comedic elements. Even though the story as a whole can probably be chucked in a bin, there are a few little bits that shine here from my late teens / early 20s style of writing.

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Lore. The idea that the world is a virtual one, that can interact with beings from other planets and worlds is a compelling one, one that raises questions about what makes one particular subjectivity more real than another.

And if you think I fully understood the implications of that when I was writing it, I have a bridge to sell you in Euro.

The general idea was I wanted it to be a place that actually existed that people from our world (Earth) visited like a game, but also that most of the people within it lived in. So the closest comparison is - and tbh, another concept probably stolen - Star Ocean: Til the End of Time and it's Fourth Dimension nonsense. And this from a main story premise that openly aped the .hack games... I was a simple boy.

Quote:

--- Our Involvement For those who may not know, we had a lot of involvement in the creative process, what with having a self-insert presence in some form in the world, the games and the stories. We also were responsible for a good portion of the original music being made for the games. We were also responsible for pushing so hard for the TP system and the ATB system being a part of the game.

Your contributions were essential, it's true. Truthfully, the story was a team effort from everybody who brought a bit of themselves to the table, because without their personal wishes I had very little to go on. That's how we got Psychokind and EverPhoenix heading an "evil" adventure, and how chicken wound up joining the traditional trio of Jason, Val (frm. Joan) and Axe from TE:Adventures.

Your music is absolutely breathtaking, and I still listen to it regularly to this day. It cheers me up and reminds me of better times. The battle theme "Clash of Wills" is what I consider the true "Theme of TerraEarth" considering my own meager contributions such as "Where All Is Revealed" are really just loop-happy messes stitched together in MAGIX. I am not the renaissance man I thought myself in my youth lol.

All of your music was and continues to be a wonderful expression of some genuine spirit and life and I only wish my game had been worthy of the tracks. "Grecliff" and "Final Destination" are also favorites, as well as the somber "Suffering Dryad". But picking out a favorite is an impossibility. Each does what they do so wonderfully and fit their scenes beautifully.

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Looking back, I would say that I regret pushing to hard for the ATB system to be included, as given how it was implemented, I realized how much of a mess it could be when straight up converting a standard Turn-Based System to an ATB system, as there are often situations where turn-lapping happens in either direction. This made the AGI stat the single most important stat in the game.

This is the part where I tell you that I... basically edited monsters on the fly during play testing to make them suitable for MY party at THAT moment, and was generally just winging it. The game is broken in so many ways that a competent designer would have spotted immediately lol.

Quote:

In our defense, at the time, we have been getting into Playstation 1 emulation and, as far as standard RPG systems go, we were really obsessed with how FF6 crafts a weaving narrative with a wide cast, and how FF9's AP system allowed for character customization and player expression, and both games use the ATB system. Looking back from what we have since learned about game design, we realized that FF9 and FF6 managed to balance the ATB system by keeping the numbers low and clustered close to each other.

Don't hit yourself up too hard, it would have been my preference too had you not suggested it. Your pushing just made me look into scripting, which also got us the TP option, which I think could have been great if we used it better. The FF9 AP system is also one of my favorite skill learning systems as well. Some of my favorite skills were linked to the Boomerang weapon type (did I mention I was also playing Lunar 2 around this time?)

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--- What Could Have Been Better

The whole game.

Quote:

Mapping. It is clear that Jason's strengths are very much focused on writing and not map design. The construction of the locations and the buildings are very much square and orthogonal in nature, and with a lot of empty spaces. To be fair to him. Environmental design is a very involved and difficult process and not everyone can make the kind of beautiful maps that some in the RPG Maker community could achieve.

A common criticism. My map making was... function over form? I guess that's the best way to put it. I knew that I needed X thing in Y Place and ways to get from X to Y. In many of the maps I was just copying an existing map from IoG, but in others I was just truly phoning it in. This was my design sensibility right up until... uh... pretty recently when I learned much better map designing skills from my buddy Jacob, whom lists level design as his core strength. I wish I could show you in this forum, but believe me when I say the man is a master craftsman. There is clutter and beautiful chaos but never in an unbelievable way. Each aspect is carefully considered and adds such a life to the region he is working on that I consider my attempts to ape his style in my latest (and to date, final) RPG Maker project - an FF Fan Game, I started as I meant to go on apparently lol - the highest compliment I can pay myself.

As far as areas that I generally like the design of...? It's been so long since I played, but I remember enjoying the design of Tower of Babel as a world hub. Patted myself heartily on the back for that silly elevator.

Quote:

Dungeon design. Yeah, this one is inexcusable. Making use of the random dungeon generator and leaving it mostly as is is just low-effort. Not only that, a lot of the puzzles don't really make sense in the respective conceit of the respective dungeons. And really, the community deserved better.

No lies detected.

Quote:

Tilesets. Now don't get me wrong, the RTP is a fine set of assets. However, given how it's been used in almost every RPG Maker projects, and how they're designed to fit as many situations as possible, the RTP lends itself to looking somewhat generic, and doesn't really bring out the character of a world such as TerraEarth.

I remember having trouble importing in VX. RPG Maker XP tilesets were far more prevalent when I was working on this game. Still, the resources were totally there.

Quote:

Sound design. It seemed that Jason could not decide how the soundtrack would be handled, and so he decided to throw everything and the kitchen sink at it. This includes, his own music, music from this community, Soul Blazer music, and popular RPG music. The issue with this is that by refusing to commit to a soundtrack style, he's limited his own ability to express himself onto the project via music.

Hah, yeah this one came down to coding laziness, not gonna lie. The way I had to - for every map - have a parallel process to determine music and then to do the same for every scene, eventually got to be too much for me to keep track of and I never went back and gave the thing the proper scrubbing it deserved. As such, iPod Nano Shuffle of a Soundtrack, another disservice to your music tbh.

Quote:

Gameplay styles. Same issue as Sound design. UX is an integral part of playing a game, and by refusing to commit, he's denying himself the opportunity to really make a chosen gameplay style shine, instead being forced to spend resources to balance the numbers across each gameplay style. Methods of learning skills. Making AP the only way to learn new skills creates a new issue where the learnset of any given class is tied almost exclusively to weapon type access. This flattens the possibility space of class expression. Quest structure. we feel that some of the quests are overly simplistic, and that they did not really gel well together to form a unified narrative terroir. Moreover, we feel that the quests that we took on did not have a lasting or consequential impact on the world and how it operates.

Today's lesson, kids, is hubris. I wanted an open world, I overpromised and I under-delivered. Which is a segue right to...

Quote:

Cut features. The original character system was one that we greatly enjoyed during the development of the game. The idea of "creating an account" and choosing to build a party of your own creation, or recruiting residents or veterans, and going through an original story line, is quite compelling. I am quite disappointed to learn that that feature was cut for the final version.

Yeah I put like... dozens of hours into an entire original character creator and story arc and even recruitable characters (something that would later come back in TE: Awakening) and I just... gave up? Scrapped it? It got too hard to balance with everything else going on and considering how poorly balanced it ended up being anyways, that's a real shame. Now for this one, I feel like there were also a bunch of bugs that frustrated me, but it seems a poor excuse to chop 1/5th of my game.

Quote:

Tolkienesque fantasy tropes. Overplayed, boring, generic. 'Nuff said.

Aye.

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Navigation. It is too easy to get marooned in a part of the world that is too high-level for you when you go off the beaten track to do quests that were in the Tower of Babel.

Each town has a teleporter back to the central hub, but I know there were a lot of places you could wind up and just be SOL. Several navigational glitches include my favorite "missing transport tile". I invented the Company's "Sky Hook" item mostly as a debugging tool, lol.

Quote:

The game engine. Let's be frank here. Even back when the game was being produced, RPG Maker VX is primitive, with an inferior new tileset and tile-mapping system that is several steps backward from XP and 2k3, with the Ruby scripting engine that is barely an iterative upgrade from XP. It gets worse when VXAce got released soon after, as a straight up upgrade to VX. This made sure that RPG Maker VX as an engine would be largely forgotten, and abandoned by the community before it had a chance to mature.

Oh it gets worse. VX Ace I'm pretty sure it came out during my production (2008 to 2010) so I probably had to option to move it over and just... didn't? I mean would have been a lot of work tbf.

Quote:

--- How We Would Revisit It? So, given that this game, despite its flaws have buried itself in our mind and imbued us with an obsession of iterating on the premise, we have a few ideas as to how we would handle this when we get to doing this for keeps. We will be using Clockwork Raven's tilesets and icons. With its 16x16 aesthetic, it will be sure to give that retro aesthetic that keeps it looking fresh and colourful. While we could come up with our own original tilesets, we feel that having a library of assets ready would work as a good starting point. And as needed, we could easily extend the tileset with our own original work. We will be using these assets to great effect in making memorable environments that players would feel good traversing, exploring and revisiting. We'd also be leveraging Aerosys' Random Map Generation system to add some replayability. We will spend time to make sure that each quest will be as impactful and consequential as could be. We will be making use of our compositional skill to write original music for it, making use of the Roland SC-8850 for sound generation. We will be adding a twist of the original character creation back, by bringing in the possibility of starting the game with Loki (Formerly Enigma) and Cierra in the party, older and wiser, and defaulting to residential recruits. We will be making all encounters on-map encounters that only respawn when the player exits the dungeon. We will be implementing multiple ways of learning skills, be it through equipment, class proficiency, story conditions or in-battle conditions. We will also make sure each character/class will have something different to add to the gameplay. We will implement different travel styles that are unique to each party. Raini and Psychokind's party will be able to make use of portals outside of The Tower of Babel, Deathpit's party will travel via Red Riotz, and Jason's party will travel by train. These methods will always be available to the party. We will be building an original fantasy world lore around non-humanity, the realness of various subjectivities, and paracausalities. We will be making use of RPG Maker MV, making use of plugins by Yanfly, Irina and Olivia, as well as Moghunter.

Nothing to say here except all of this sounds magnificent. You have inspired me to revisit and post lengthy comments on my old projects if for nothing else than to explain myself XD.

Basically, I made this game - the coding side of it at least - single-handedly between the age of 19 and 21 and it really shows in the final product. I enjoy what parts of this game serve as a time capsule for the era it was created in and the community it - albeit poorly - reflects. I have a theatre in Euro where standups that I enjoyed can be heard. I have a Foamy the Squirrel fanclub which has aged poorly. I have a slew of references, in-jokes and entire side content all based around stuff that only members of this community could find remotely entertaining.

It was a fun project. It still makes me smile. And it definitely didn't work. I'm looking forward to seeing what you do with the basic premise, and am confident you can turn out something of substantially higher quality that that which I released in April 2010.