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Machine Knight (3DS) artwork

Machine Knight (3DS) review


"Pretty standard stuff, done pretty well."

So, I play RPGs. Of all different kinds. My very first JRPG was a little gem called Golden Sun, on the GBA. My first Western RPG was Morrowind, on the XBOX. My first RPG on the PC was Neverwinter Nights. I take it as a matter of faith that no game that follows will be as good as those that I lucked into in my first forays into the genre.

Machine Knight is a JRPG that follows that Golden Sun tradition. It’s been around for a while as an iOS and Android game; it was ported to the 3DS in February of 2018. I’m an old-fashioned guy, I guess; I’d rather buy a game outright and be done with it than mess around with microtransactions (though reports are that this game can be played and won without spending any money). I’d also rather have buttons for input, rather than my stupid fat fingers on the screen in front of me.

It’s a game published by Kemco. Now, some folks see the name Kemco and get all excited, because it’s their favorite developer. Others see it and get all excited, because it’s their least favorite developer. I fall into neither category. I’ve played Kemco games that don’t hold my attention, and I’ve played a couple of games that I think are pretty good. This is one of the latter. (The other, for those who are interested, is called Chronus Arc. These two games share a developer called Hit-Point. I guess Kemco works with several developers; Hit-Point definitely seems like one of the better ones).

Kemco games, for the uninitiated, are similar to games developed for the SNES. That’s what everyone says, anyway. So, if you played RPGs of the SNES era, you know what you’re getting into. There are sprites, there are random encounters, there is turn-based combat. But Machine Knight features all sorts of improvements, frankly, over the average SNES game. Have you booted up Breath of Fire II* lately? Goodness. The graphics are better. There is a journal system that keeps track of quests, large and small. You can use fast travel, once you’ve first arrived at a place the hard way. The menus are easy to use, and utilize actual words, where back in the day terms were abbreviated sometimes to the point of incomprehensibility. There is a crafting system. There is an elemental system that can be used to change the stats of your weapons or spells. The leveling system is more complex, and gives the player a couple of modest choices.

Machine Knight, according to the Nintendo website, is a “science fiction” adventure. That is not strictly true. Our protagonist is a scientist who teleports to the game world in the opening cutscene. He’s followed by a robotic invasion. So that SOUNDS like science fiction, but the gameworld really is a European Middle Ages sort of setting, with some magic thrown in. Our hero quickly learns that he’s pretty handy with a sword. Early on, he forms a typical adventuring party with a young woman who uses elemental magic and another who is a healer. Pretty standard stuff.

That party of three is all you get in the game; there aren’t others you can swap in or out of the party. Those three, though, are diverse and interesting, have their own histories and agendas, and engage in the occasional squabble. They’re likeable, and fun to hang out with.

Machine Knight has a pretty good premise, story-wise. Our hero is teleported to another world, tasked with the mission of contacting the citizens and forming an alliance with them. The ultimate goal is to get access to the energy that they have, and that the protagonist’s world now lacks, due to its overdevelopment. What we quickly learn, however, is that this is a ruse...that indeed all kinds of robotic soldiers are teleporting to the same world immediately following him, to take by force that energy (and also to kill the protagonist). At least, I think that’s what the story’s premise is. Unfortunately, some of the main ideas and most of the subtleties are lost in some rather dense text. I was early in my second playthrough when I finally had a couple of “Aha!” moments regarding character and story development. That’s not entirely the fault of localization; truthfully more efforts at providing early cutscenes or somesuch might have been judiciously applied for storytelling clarity. Once the evil scientist shows up in the world, toward the end-game, we only vaguely remember that he was the one who sent our hero to create an alliance with the locals (it turns out cynically) at the beginning of the game.

My major complaint, though, regards difficulty. The early game is WAY too easy. When you begin the game, you’re offered a choice of difficulties. I never choose hard mode, but sometimes wished I had with this game. There are lots of cool mechanics in the game whereby one gathers materials, amasses skill points, and gains tomes to bolster one’s crafting ability, but mostly those seem like wasted opportunities. As a gamer, I tend to ignore those things until the game’s difficulty forces me to explore them. When you can auto-battle your way through almost everything, including bosses, what motivation do you have to explore the elemental system of soul pebbles? The end-game, though, is suddenly QUITE difficult, and then it’s time to attend to these mechanics if one hopes to survive even the next random encounter.

Having played this sort of game before, I started off doing a fair amount of grinding. Pretty quickly, though, this seemed unnecessary. I had convinced myself that the decision had been made, gameplay wise, to create quests that would be sufficient to the grinding enterprise: go kill five of this creature, five of that creature, and we’ll call it good. (In other words, I wondered if the game was too easy because I was over-levelled). But, again, maybe 15 or 17 hours into my adventure, grinding suddenly became very necessary. That’s cool...that’s what we sign up for when we play an SNES-style game...but it’s not quite fair that the game filled you with complacency so regularly along the way. There was no challenge to early fights, which felt a little cheap, and there was high difficulty in later fights, which also felt a little cheap.

Toward the end of the game, I sort of became fatigued with the random encounter thing. That’s expected, I suppose. Even Golden Sun wore me out with random encounters, and this is no Golden Sun. But the characters, the character interaction, the varieties of villages and towns, as well as this quest to SAVE THE WORLD pushed me forward. We often have a hero who comes from some insignificant background SAVE THE WORLD in these games; it’s interesting, this time, to have that character’s motivation be guilt. The only reason this world needs saving is because he and his people arrived there. Arrived there with an open hand, but also with their military at the ready, eager to plunder their resources. Goodness. Maybe there’s a lesson in there somewhere.

Back in the day, video games were created by perhaps a single person. I remember playing text-based games that were definitely developed by one guy...in my case, Steve Meretzky over at Infocom. (My favorite was “Leather Goddesses of Phobos.” If you come up with a better title for a video game than that, you’ll have to let me know). And I played some platformers from the folks at Apogee. (My favorite there was “Crystal Caves,” developed by Frank Maddin). There’s something really cool about a game created by a single mind, with a single vision. That doesn’t happen much in this world (maybe “Fez” is an example?). Skyrim must have had dozens and dozens of people working on it. And, while I love Skyrim, I also love this little RPG from Kemco, put together by a handful of folks who obviously cared about what they were doing. If you’re one of the niche gamers who likes these little RPGs, I think you’ll like this one too.

If you look below, you’ll see that I’ve rated the game with three stars. That’s just a limitation of the system. If you look more intuitively, you’ll see that there are actually 3 ½ stars..


*That Breath of Fire II comment will no doubt get me in trouble. And, I guess that’s fair. We’re still playing that game more than 20 years after its release; we’re unlikely to be talking about Machine Knight in the 2030s.



dirtsheep's avatar
Community review by dirtsheep (June 02, 2018)

jeff white is an old guy who came to gaming late. He plays mostly RPGs. He'll play on any of a number of devices or consoles, but is particularly fond of the Nintendo 3DS.

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