A couple of weeks ago we reported that Myanmar’s first RPG had been published. Well, that game, DarkEnd, has now been put through its paces at Games in Asia. Here’s what we think.
DarkEnd is marketed as an indie RPG, but in truth, it’s actually an action RPG. It’s centred around four individuals, who, although living cliches of fantasy game stereotypes, have been developed with great attention to detail.
DarkEnd’s start menu.
These four individuals (you get to pick two) are tasked with saving the world from its dark end, which came about when a good king turned greedy and tried to control more power than he could. Scattered across the Dark End zone are various crystals containing an evil power, which must be destroyed. These crystals are located at the end of each combat zone, which contains an inordinate number of levels, enemies, and keys that you need to get to the next level. There are a lot of battles to be fought in DarkEnd, though these are easily avoided since fights only trigger when you walk into a roaming enemy.
Roaming enemies in DarkEnd are easy to avoid.
Obviously, there’s more fighting than chit-chat in DarkEnd, which wasn’t what I had expected. Still, the little there is of the dialogue and character development in the game have both received a good amount of attention and it’s easy to empathize with the characters as the game progresses. DarkEnd is pretty much what you’d get if you made an action RPG with the RPG Maker engine, but the roleplaying and world-building part of it doesn’t disappoint.
Of course, the game is not without its flaws. Myanmar only opened up to the world in 2011 and while one could argue that the internet is exposure enough, a country’s infrastructure and education – or a lack of – also contribute to its level of game development. DarkEnd was developed by a hobbyist group, called Kodots, working in its spare time, with none of the group’s members professionally trained in game development or design.
See: 4 up-and-coming game studios in Myanmar that you might not have heard of
As a result, DarkEnd’s artwork is amateur and the visuals in the game don’t sync. The rough, hand drawn characters are juxtaposed with more polished RPG Maker assets. The tough battles also get repetitive in spite of the different levels of difficulty you can select at the start of the game, and dungeon-crawling for keys gets old quickly.
Battles in DarkEnd are visually incongruent.
Still, DarkEnd is not without its merits. It was created by a small group of hobbyists in a country with next-to-no game development background. It was picked up by a publisher. It has a rocking musical score I really enjoy. It might not be the greatest endeavor in game development ever, but it’s a good start for Kodots, and will hopefully provide the grounding for the studio to do better with its next game.
DarkEnd for PC is distributed by UK-based publisher Kiss.
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