Destiny Fantasia (Android) review "Maybe the Khallenge was temporarily (and mercifully) forgotten, but, sadly, nothing lasts forever."

Just when I thought I was done with the Kemco Khallenge, something dragged me back in for at least a game or three. That “something” goes by the name of Famicom RPG Double Moon Densetsu. To explain in brief: That ancient game that never got ported to American soil was such a frustrating and annoying experience that upon finishing it, I legitimately felt that it’d be a major upgrade to return to Kemco and that company’s never-ceasing deluge of perfectly adequate games that are perfectly content to be perfectly adequate as opposed to doing something crazy like actually being great or innovative or worth spending more than the bare minimum to experience.

And so I played Destiny Fantasia, one of the older games in the Kemco library, but one that I’ve had on my assorted mobile devices for many years and needed to do something about eventually. Published by World Wide Software, it both is and isn’t what I’ve grown to expect from that team.

In the “IS” category, there is a simple plot that doesn’t take long to get rolling. If there’s one thing I remember respecting about WWS, it’s that they don’t waste time. You’ll start up Destiny Fantasia and immediately watch protagonist Lidim leave his small village to seek employment in the nearby city that also hosts the castle belonging to the local ruler. After a short period of time has elapsed, Lidim pays a visit to that castle only to find emissaries of a rival kingdom seeking to force an alliance and showing just how much they mean business by eradicating Lidim’s village as a way of showing their offer shouldn’t be taken lightly.

In a “didn’t think this through” moment, the enraged Lidim immediately assaults one of the emissaries and finds out what happens when random idiots try to assault the damn imperial general. Fortunately, he’s saved by a pair of young women, Pure and Elis, who convince him that he possesses some mystical power that will be necessary to save the world. From there, the trio sets out across the world to find more people with similar powers to both confront the requisite evil empire and prevent a deadly disaster threatened by a comet on a collision course with their planet.

Now, while I appreciate World Wide Software’s dedication to creating games with simple plots that waste little time in getting underway and progressing, there are problems with that sort of thing. Mainly that a lot of stuff winds up just sort of happening, instead of becoming big moments. It’s kind of weird to say that finding out a teammate is actually an android who needs to sacrifice herself because the mechanism serving as her heart will be needed by you in order to complete your quest isn’t some huge game-changing moment, but it sure doesn’t feel like one. You learn this information when you find out you need four specific items, collect three of them in dungeons and then she sacrifices herself to provide you with the fourth and that’s that. I guess there is a way to bring her back to life to truly make all of this meaningless, but by that point, I was starting to lose interest. This is a Kemco game, after all — I’m only going to feel compelled to put a certain amount of effort into things!

The “ISN’T” category was mostly a pleasant surprise. When it comes to WWS, I tend to expect lots of short and simple dungeons. While some definitely do fit that description, several are pretty large and complex. They often possess various gimmicks, such as mine carts that carry you from one place to the next and require you to flip switches to change their routes or icy floors that send you careening from one side of a chamber to another or dark locations where you have very limited visibility while exploring. The only real downfall of this complexity is that you can’t do things like access menus while on a mine cart or sliding across ice, but random encounters can happen during those times, meaning that an unfortunate encounter could leave one or more characters depleted with you having no way to heal them before getting into another fight.

But overall, I’d call this a pretty decent RPG where the main failing is simply that it’s a Kemco game with many of the various little setbacks that are part of the Kemco experience. For example, you have a character-building system where, much like a SaGa game, you don’t get experience for defeating monsters, but instead gain small stat increases after fights. Except the way you fight has no impact on anything. If a character is supposed to be a fighter, they’ll get more health and power; while mages get more intellect. It’s basically a standard “gain XP to earn levels” system except for how the bonuses are constantly allocated to your characters.

You also gain skills much like in Final Fantasy IX, as all weapons and some armor and accessories have an ability attached to them that you’ll learn permanently if you keep that piece of equipment on a party member long enough. As an added bonus, there is a fair amount of equipment in this game, so every party member will wind up with a lot of skills and/or spells at their disposal. However, every character has his or her own specific weapons and armor, so there’s barely any customization to this. Much like with the stat boosts, everyone is on their own pre-determined path to power and all you can do is watch it happen with scarcely any input as to how they grow.

And, if you’re like me, most of those skills and spells you get will be ignored as you find a couple that work well for you and simply spam them on a turn-by-turn basis against boss encounters. Sure, Lidim obtained a large number of special attacks, but after I got one that both caused a fair amount of damage and also greatly weakened its victim’s defense for the remainder of the turn, all the rest became obsolete. With Lidim being one of my faster characters, I was both directly causing a lot of damage, as well as ensuring that at least three of his four teammates would deliver far more damaging attacks than they naturally would. With that sort of attack, why would I want to experiment with others?

But that’s the life one lives with Kemco. If you’re looking for a competent JRPG, you can definitely do worse than these guys. Believe me, I know. You just have to resign yourself to the fact that there does seem to be a ceiling to their efforts and there will be all sorts of little flaws that prevent them from breaking through that ceiling to come up with a legitimately good game. Destiny Fantasia is the latest one of their releases I’ve experienced and I can sum up my feelings about it in much the same way I could do so with any number of other Kemco titles: It was a reasonably fun experience that provided me with a “junk food fix” for 10-15 hours, but wasn’t anything memorable. It wasn’t Double Moon Densetsu, though, and that was good enough for me!

Staff review by Rob Hamilton (October 04, 2024) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.