I am only going to warn the readers of this review once. This review will have tons of spoilers and should not be read by those who have a passing interest in playing this game and have not done so yet. This is truly a review for the creators and fans of the game to read.

Master of the Wind is a game that I have been meaning to review for a long time, but never got around to. Playing it back in the day up to the end of arc 4, I found the game quite charming. After some prompting in the #rpgmaker.net IRC channel, I began a replay of all the old arcs and the two newer ones.

A cast of about eighty:

Where do I begin?

Well, Master of the Wind has one of the largest casts in any RPGmaker game. In fact, the only game I can think of that exceeds it in number would be Exit Fate, a self-admitted Suikoden clone. That said, only a small fraction of these are actual player characters - the rest are NPCs of varying levels of benevolence, malevolence and relevance.

:Insert character chart here:

Let's start with the game's heroes. At the beginning we are quickly introduced to Shroud (a.k.a. Cade) and Stoic (a.k.a. Bones), the game's primary heroes and the only permanent members of your party for quite awhile. Raging idealists, they take up masks and costumes for the sake of their home, Port Arianna, and seek to protect it from such common from hazards like emo vampires and big business (more on that later). Later on they are joined by the Baron (a.k.a. Finley), an obnoxious guy who lives off his family's money who has a love for guns, and Laurel, who's main function is being a gigantic deus ex machina.

I'll be starting with the likeable ones:

Stoic is pretty damn cool as a character. At his best he's a 1000-year old skeleton that produces witty catchphrases. At his worst he's a 1000-year old skeleton that goes on rampant soliliquys about his past for most of a game arc (I will get to this, too). Up until that point, though, he is a throughly enjoyable character who does not suffer (as much) from his companion's righteousness complex, and who sports an actual sense of humor.

Baron is an interesting case. Normally, this type of character is just as annoying as one would expect, but he is actually the best (I would argue) character in the party. As resident comic relief, he is often played for laughs, usually successfully, and he has an interesting dynamic with Shroud and Stoic in that he is the most realistic and grounded member of the group, not so quickly jumping to conclusions or buying into things as them (the game plays this off as him being 'slow', but I would argue that it is Shroud/Stoic being ridiculous more than not). There is no doubt in my mind that this contributes to him being likeable, quite possibly at Shroud's expense.

And the others:

Shroud is the game's leading man, and the 'Master of the Wind' the title refers to. This character starts off serviceable but quickly falls into a very predictable and painful character model. He is extremely antagonistic and self-centered despite 'doing things for others', and quickly forms prejudices against anything and everybody, and comes up with absurd theories about events even though he obviously does not know everything about the situation. And the worst part? He is always right. I mean, ALWAYS right. If he thinks/wants someone is/to be evil, even if they haven't done anything yet, they're evil. If he comes up with some screwball conspiracy theory about something (which he does - a lot), it is always spot on. He might just be as reliable a psychic as Laurel is, for all it's worth to the plot. 

Speaking of Laurel...

Well, she's a psychic, as previously mentioned. In the game world this is explained by her skill in holy magic, which grants the ability. This is all fine.
The problem begins when she starts sending psychic messages across town. What exactly is preventing her from finding out everything about the villain's plans and how they plan to do it? Nothing, really - she's a walking deus ex machina on command. This power is outrageously strong, with few if any limitations on use (and makes her one of the strongest characters in the game world by default) and the only thing that really gets in the way is her own self-confidence issues (boohoo). Top onto that gut-wrenching scenes like the graveyard one in the elven capital where the very first challenge of her faith leaves her an emotional trainwreck, and you have a really annoying character. 

As a side note, I really wonder why the creators did not use the Gabrielle character for the fourth slot instead. She appears earlier, has far more story context and would've provided better character interplay with Shroud and Stoic. Oh well.

There are two other characters that will join the party over the course of the game. One is a drunk kobold named Bubba (yes) with an awkward alcoholism recovery subplot that I will not get into here, and the other is Auburn, the athletic redhead bodyguard of one of the baddies that Shroud immediately falls head over heels with upon her introduction very early in the game, and who occasionally gets shoved into the party over the course of the arcs.

Auburn is a decent enough character on her own. She is one of the very few characters that is played as ambigious (i.e. Shroud and the plot shove that down the player's throat) and she provides a nice alternative to the usual love interest even though she has iffy compatibility with the insufferable Shroud. When it is found out she also has a secret identity as Shroud's rival, the cloaked Sparrow, however (how does she hide her massive chest under those clothes exactly?) we are given a number of plot contrivances that ensures she somehow ends up on the good guy's side in the end - in the party, in fact - even though she killed a whole lot of people, some of them innocent, in the name of big business. Double standard with the damaged goods, Shroud? It's simply more proof that he's a selfish bastard.

As for NPCs, if I went into detail about every one of them this review would be the length of the healthcare bill, so I'll just give an idea of what's there.

Gino: The classic 'helpful normal'. He is the only one (at first) who knows Shroud and Stoic's secret identities. Cheerful, helpful.

Andau and Gabrielle: Andau is a vampire with a big complex, and is the subject of much emo. He lives in an old fort near port Arianna and spends most of his time trying to drink the blood of young women. He ends up biting Gabrielle, who hates the undead, and turning her into a vampire, which makes her realize undead aren't too bad after all. In true anti-hero fashion, he makes a heroic sacrifice and dies late in the game - very slowly. Gabrielle is one of the game's better characters, however.

The Toutens: These are the 'bad good guys' of the game. That is, they are basically a group of mercenaries and thieves with a semi-Darwinist perspective on life, much of which is revealed in a Shroud flashback, who clash with the good guys a few times, but end up helping them in the end. They start appearing early, and some of them are actually quite likeable, specifically Morias, a greedy elf, Douglas, his tiger, Tyranda, a haughty female elf and Pilc, a hyper-intelligent shapeshifter that is off in his own world. The rest are alright, save the dumb ogre, who will be best remembered (by me, anyway) for being in the game's worst sequence, during arc 6.

Equipment King (a.k.a. 'Big Business'): The goal of big business is to help people and globalize the economy. No wait, actually they are the backers of an evil racist cult bent on the recreation of some evil racist empire that got destroyed a few decades back. Don Kovak is the traditional 'bad' business man; he isn't afraid of killing a few people and backdoor dealings to get what he wants, and is willing to work with scum in order to secure his success. A serviceable villain. His trusty ally Vec is a common sight as well, and fairly likeable - even if I do not get the thing between him and Shroud's pseudo ex, Emma.

Solik and Rana: Rogue necromancers. Solik is a pretty neat villain until he transforms into a lich - which is when he becomes a villain out of a Saturday morning cartoon. Rana is his apprentice and could have been an interesting character, though the only thing she really ends up doing is burning bridges with people and making Solik come back from the dead.

The Hand: These are the 'real' villains - a bunch of extremists that want to bring back the age of Gallia, which ruled over the world for some centuries with genocidal tendencies. Ketsu is their leader, and is a fairly typical power at any cost type. The most interesting characters in this group are Cari, Ketsu's lil sis, and the cool-headed Voyd.

 Now before this (section) review turns out being the length of a college thesis, let me explain my problem with all these characters. It isn't that there is a lot of characters. It isn't (always) an issue of character quality. There is just so damn many! And largely irrelevant characters keep on getting introduced and reintroduced!

For example, Enkur, a giant ancient skeleton with a vendetta against Stoic, appears in arc 5. He then does what a buddy on IRC called 'walking off into the sunset' at the end of the arc. That is, he has removed himself from the plot by his own volition, and it is assumed that he would not appear for the remainder of the game. But wait, he appears again at the end of arc 6, awkwardly placing him back into the plot again! Other examples exist (Emma, Violet, dumb ogre I forgot the name of, the lava mage guy, etc.) but the point is this - the author really needs to learn to kill off his characters. They just keep on appearing and reappearing when they really, whether they are good characters or not, should be removed. The end of arc 6, considering how far it is into the story, has a huge number of characters and subplots to account for and wrap up. It just seems...unreasonable.

Summary: The dialogue is good. Character direction, however, could be better. There's some very likeable characters but many suffer from late-game storyline developments.

Story:

The quality of the story is best represented in sin wave form.

:image:

The story starts passable, gets better and better until it's quite good, and then steeply drops off in arcs 5 and 6.

Let me go arc by arc.

Arc I: The first dungeon/story sequence can be something of a turnoff and the characters don't really hit a stride until later in the arc. That said, the writing is good and the dungeon design is decent. The battles become a chore rather quickly, and this remains a problem throughout the game.

Arc II: The characters really hit it off here, though it does feature the horrifying and obnoxious mine dungeon that can take multiple hours to beat depending on how much you grind/run. There's the great sequence with the summoner musician, among other things.

Arc III:

Arc IV: This is probably the best arc. It features a nice dose of character development, has an awesome sidequest and features some good dungeons. Nothing happens too slowly or quickly and it makes some good ground with only one caveat: the out-of-the-blue drunk kobold subplot. I could've done without it.

Arc V: I have serious issues with this arc. It pretty much abandons all conventions of gameplay and focuses much of its time 

Arc VI: