Knights of Grayfang (Android) review "Vampires as amazingly milquetoast do-gooders? Kemco, you never cease to amaze me!"

After all these years, I think it’s finally time I gave Kemco RPG-creator Exe-Create some praise for their creativity. Over the duration of their existence, this team has been able to come up with a huge variety of different premises for their games and have shown an amazing amount of competence in transforming these diverse settings and characters into what is essentially the exact same template. I don’t know about you, but I think it takes a special sort of talent to put players in control of deities, futuristic police or vampires and have each of those wildly different beings wind up behaving in the exact same manner!

Vampires are the subject of 2023’s Knights of Grayfang — a game I was initially intrigued with because, I mean, they’re vampires. You know, those undead, blood-drinking creatures of the night with ferocious appetites and questionable, if any, morality? I should have known.

In this game’s world, vampires are essentially a higher class of human raised to protect others from monsters due to the powers that consuming blood gives them. And that blood is given willingly, as there are human aides that follow vampires into battle in order to provide them with the red stuff. Which seems to be magically transfused from one to the other — none of that neck-biting in this game! And those humans are treated with consideration, regularly being sent away from the front lines in order to recuperate after “donating” their services. A far cry from the vampires in Skyrim’s Dawnguard expansion, who kept their humans penned up like cattle and took what they wanted whenever they desired. You know, like one expects from vampires.

Now that we have determined that Grayfang’s vampires are kindly rulers using their powers to protect normal humans, it probably shouldn’t be surprising they’re also the same sort of noble, all-loving heroes one typically finds in an Exe-Create game. Regularly engaging in conflicts against the human-hating monsters and devoting their efforts to creating a world where the people under them can live in peace and harmony. Sure, the person in charge of writing the dialogue for generic townspeople might not have gotten that memo — as many of them are given lines indicating they’re about as comfortable around blood-drinkers as, I don’t know, any non-Renfield would be around a more traditional vampire — but there’s no indication that the average vampire in this world is anything other than a wonderful human being who happens to have special powers.

The main focus of the conflict between vampires and monsters revolves around gaining the control of nine temples strewn throughout the world. At the onset of the game, it’d be a fair assumption to say this conflict might not be going in favor of the good guys, since you’ll be visiting all nine of those temples to gain control of them, including starting your quest out by regaining the one that’s only a short walk from the vampire/human capital city.

Making that trip are vampire knight Lise, kingdom princess Leticia — who is serving as the land’s interim ruler due to the mysterious disappearance of her parents — and Leticia’s attendant Mylene. Upon completing the short dungeon constituting that temple, they’ll encounter a very powerful monster general who is way too tough for them. However, saving their quest from a premature conclusion is a dimensional rift that spews out a young man, Thoma, wielding a special sword that drives off that general. Even better for the vampire girl trio, Thoma is a special human capable of constantly donating his blood without needing a rest period.

This turns into a game mechanic. While each of the three vampires gains experience in four elements, leading to them picking up spells and skills in each of them, they also can find and equip bats of each element. Each bat boosts the experience you get in its element, while providing three high-power skills. To use those abilities, you drain some of Thoma’s health to temporarily get access to them. For his part, Thoma has far less health than his cohorts to ensure you can’t abuse that power, but also is far superior defensively so that pittance of health can last longer than one might assume. And if he does fall, it’s only for three turns before he revives with full health.

After he joins the party, you’ll go from one temple to the next, either battling key characters on Team Monster or random foes summoned by them, as the game settles into a “town-dungeon-town-dungeon” routine that lasts for the majority of the game. It’ll be a long cycle of going to a town, buying the new equipment available and then going to the nearby temple — with the main topic of interest being a handful of cutscenes showing that some of those key monster figures might not be as evil as they’re made out to be.

There’s nothing openly bad about any of this. It’s a perfectly fine, if generic, quest that contains a number of elements I’ve seen in other Exe-Create games, such as the ability to combine weapons and armor to improve that equipment’s stats. The main saving grace is that most of the dungeons at least have their own hooks, with nearly all of them having its own type of puzzle or obstacle that must be overcome to progress further. Sadly, that stuff winds up having diminishing returns as you near the game’s conclusion. A couple late-game dungeons simply recycle earlier challenges and the final dungeon is nothing more than a tedious walk with nothing to do other than get tossed into battles from time to time — almost like the designers figured out they probably threw in one too many late-game “no, THIS is the actual villain!” plot twists and decided to just wrap things up as quickly as possible.

But that’s the Kemco experience. A game that connects all the dots, but winds up just being there. Exe-Create’s habit of recycling anything and everything from game to game turns any premise or cast of characters into the same ol’, same ol’, as this group of vampires and their human ally wind up feeling just like any group of protagonists from any other game by the team, while their quest winds up hitting the same notes as those in other games. Knights of Grayfang isn’t a bad game, but it is a pretty generic one, which isn’t something I thought I’d be saying about a game revolving around vampires.

Staff review by Rob Hamilton (December 19, 2025) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.