RPG Rusted Emeth Review

RPG Rusted Emeth is a role playing game that seems to pander directly to those that have grown up playing games like Chrono Trigger and Earthbound for the Super Nintendo. It has a nice looking 16-bit aesthetic, Japanese-inspired character design, robots, questing, and more. Despite all of this though, Rusted Emeth has some significant issues that keep it from feeling anything like a polished experience.

Like a console style role playing game, players of Rusted Emeth take direct control of the main character, Jink, with the purpose of moving him along in his quest to become a successful bounty hunter. In order to accomplish this, players go on quests to gain more insight into the world and earn upgrades for their golem: giant robots that most bounty hunters use. On a basic level this entails using an on-screen d-pad or tapping the screen to direct Jink around the overworld, and tapping through menu items upon entering any random battle encounters.

The first of Rusted Emeth's issues arises in the control scheme. Although it does allow players to make use of the touch screen, neither set of controls feels well tuned for iOS devices due to bad button placement and poor pathfinding. Although poor controls aren't necessarily the end of the world for an RPG, especially considering Rusted Emeth does not rely on any action sequences.

Even if the controls for Rusted Emeth were perfect, it would still be far from stellar. The primary problem is in its structure. As a bounty hunter, Jink goes to a specific building in town to pick up quests. Upon completing these quests, there is occasionally some added insight into the game world but sometimes there isn't. Either way though, almost every quest is entirely repeatable; and if a quest is repeated, the exact same long sets of dialogue play out again and are entirely un-skippable. This may sound like a small complaint, but when the writing is dubious at best, and more and more missions become available on the bounty board, much of the gameplay begins to feel like a pointless slog.

Rusted Emeth does an okay job of emulating a 16-bit role playing game in the aesthetic sense, but otherwise drops the ball on almost every front that makes those types games interesting and fun in the first place. For a quick nostalgia trip, there's no problem with popping open Rusted Emeth for a battle or two every so often, but there's just too much jank in it to feel truly fulfilling.