Isekai Villain by developer Exe-Create and publisher KEMCO—Sony PlayStation 5 review written by Richard with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes.
Hello
everyone and welcome to the next instalment of KEMCO RPG: Isekai Villain! This
time we get to witness the tale of a regular dude who gets transported into his
favourite webnovel, but as a villain mob character!
Isekai
Villain starts out with a guy walking home while reading a webnovel on his
phone, falling in an open manhole, breaking his leg, passing out, and then
waking up to find himself a part of the Crown Eaters, a gang of villains in the
webnovel he was reading. The catch? He’s a low level grunt named Gray. The
other catch? The Crown Eaters aren’t part of the story past the early-ish
chapters. Gray now has to balance his old world sensibilities, new world
budding villainy, as well as trying to survive as a villain grunt.
While
Isekai Villain is pretty similar to the other same stylized KEMCO RPGs, there
are a few notable differences in how it’s handled. For those who haven’t played
a KEMCO RPG, well, it’s a pretty generic retro style RPG for the most part.
You’ve got your random turn-based battles, dungeons to explore and find
treasure in, bosses to beat, sidequests to complete, and characters to interact
with. What is somewhat interesting here is that unlike in most RPGs of this
nature, there isn’t a world map, just a location directory. This makes going
between different areas a lot easier for sure. While you’re in a location, be
it town or dungeon, you get a 2D area to explore, chests to open , and characters in town to talk to and shops to visit. Dungeons will also
have those random battles.
As is
tradition with most KEMCO title with the same art style, there are plenty of
quality of lifestyle options for players. Getting in too many battles and need
to tone them down? You can reduce encounter rate. Need to farm some enemies?
You can increase the encounter rate to every step. Enemies too hard? Well,
there are five difficulties to choose from. Also back for your pleasure is the
“store” and all that comes with it. Essentially the store is the place where
you can buy “cheats” with earned in-game currency. Every three battles in-game
you get a number of evil gems depending on difficulty setting. You can use
these gems to exchange for permanent passive effects, such as increased exp or
money, items such as keys that let you into special areas, or you can exchange
for lottery pulls, where you might win the best weapons or armour. The Evil
gems are fairly easy to earn on the easiest difficulty, so if you really need
the boost and aren’t playing for the challenge you can grind some out to help
you out.
In terms of
combat, things are mostly traditional RPG style. Combat is turn based and you
have a character gauge at the top of the screen indicating turn order based on
a character’s speed, with different moves available such as normal
attacks, skills, items, or you can stand by to recover some MP. You also have
summons you can use as well, although only once per summon and character per
battle. Some stronger enemies will have a guard you can break by using skills
matching the symbols under their sprite. For example, a down arrow indicates a
skill that hits a full column, whereas a star symbol is a single target. When
you go to use a skill it will also show you the associated symbols. Guard
breaking an enemy allows other characters to chain in and use follow up moves,
potentially resulting in massive damage to a strong enemy or boss.
Acquiring
new skills is a bit of an interesting departure. Unlike how it’s usually
handled, in Isekai Villain skills are unlocked through a skill tree. You can
earn skill points primarily through reaching certain milestones such as levels,
or increasing your notoriety within the villain community. Once you’ve acquired
some skill points, you can unlock and upgrade skills in each character’s skill
trees. Needless to say the further down the tree you go, the better the skill
usually is, but the more costly it is to use and get to.
Another
cool introduction is passive skills. These are earned by performing certain
actions or milestones, either in or out of battle. For example, using different
types of skills will increase or earn some passives, while switching your party
formation to a certain layout may unlock others. These can usually be upgraded
by performing the same actions repeatedly a set number of times if the skill
can be upgraded.
Among the
neat aspects this time around we actually have a sort of LITE base building.
When you return to the Crown Eaters base, once you unlock it you can go talk to
a certain NPC and get them to build stuff in your backyard. These buildings can
have a variety of purposes, some unlocking stores or game mechanics, and some
just giving a general stat increase to your characters. Most buildings that
feature some sort of shop or gameplay mechanic can be strengthened to increase
the effects, making it worthwhile to check in occasionally if you have some
extra building materials.
Now, I do
have to talk about the storyline a little bit here. It isn’t exactly bad, but
it does have some ups and downs. For the most part, characters in Isekai
Villain tend to be rather un-idealist. They're all for going for what they want,
but are more than willing to recognize that things aren’t always going to work
out if you don’t make changes or compromise on things, both in the heroes party
(not you) and for the villains. Also props to the devs for having good and bad
people on both sides of the conflict and not stacking it one way or the other.
Unfortunately the translation is…pretty rough to be honest. There are a ton of
awkward sounding sentences or words I didn’t feel were particularly well
translated. A bit of a departure since most of the KEMCO titles I’ve played
have tended to have a decent translation. While it isn’t the worst, it
definitely makes getting involved in the plot a little tougher.
In case you
are a returning KEMCO JRPG enjoyer, the style is in the more anime-esque style
instead of the more RPG-maker more realistic style. The music, backgrounds, and
a bunch of enemy sprites are certainly reused from other games, but I feel like
if you’re playing these KEMCO titles you probably don’t mind too much. While
the music direction is similar in that regard as well, at least all the music
and animations are well fitting.
Overall
Isekai Villain is a decent addition to the KEMCO RPG line-up. While a poor
translation makes it a little harder to enjoy the storyline, there are a good
number of features to allow you to customize your experience to create the
difficulty level you want in your RPG. The colourful cast of party members are
all extremely unique as well, and not very often you find their type of
personalities. If you are looking for another retro JRPG to pass some spare
time, check out Isekai Villain. Just remember, don’t be too evil now.
Score: 7 / 10
