aRPG Frane: Dragons' Odyssey out now for iOS and Android
Kemco have been consistently releasing a game every month for the last six months, the latest is Frane: Dragons' Odyssey, an action RPG from veteran RPG team Execreate Inc.
Frane: Dragons' Odyssey follows the story of two children from different dragon tribes (hence the strangely placed apostrophe) who set off to rescue a missing girl and, as a result, end up exploring a world below. There's some crafting/cooking elements and also a natty little slot-machine mini-game.
Its an aRPG, with lots of dashing and blasting when it comes to facing off against your enemies. From the trailer alone we can see that the enemy liste includes massive sandworms, bandits and slimes. Also featured: a man with a locket.
As with previous Kemco published titles, Frane: Dragon's Odyssey feels adjacent to older titles, there's a lot of stuff which looks very similar to the SNES era RPGs like Seiken Densetsu 2 and the Chrono games. Never a bad thing, both had exceptional art styles for the time. From what has been said though, it plays much more like earlier entries in the Ys series.
The JRPG and Retro RPG subgenres are in a strange place these days. There are plenty of companies out there, like Execreate, who have been making games of this genre for over a decade, and want to continue making games using a similar format. They stand shoulder-to-shoulder with a deluge of new companies brought into existence as a result of Degica's RPG Maker engine. This gives the Kemco published RPGs (from Execreate, Hit-Point Co, et al) a strange uncanny valley effect as they each stand somewhere between classic jRPGs and RPG Maker ones.
Frane: Dragons' Odyssey is available now on the App Store and Google Play. For the latest news why not head to our news section?
