Silfade Gensoutan: Half-Month Hero

Silfade Gensoutan / シルフェイド幻想譚, SmokingWOLF

2005-2022, RPG Maker 2000 

Silfade is a 2005 freeware RPG by SmokingWOLF of One Way Heroics fame. It's the second game in his Silfade series after the episodic, forever unfinished Silfade Kenbunroku (official English subtitle: Records of Silfade), which I just finished playing. I downloaded the 2022 version (the first update since 2007!), which apparently improves some of the portraits.

It opens with a character creation sequence in which a disembodied voice calling itself Riqureil asks for your name, gender, and finally choice of Totem. Totems, a setting element that originated in Kenbunroku, are immortal animal spirits who take up residence within certain individuals and grant them superhuman powers. Here you have your choice of three:

From left to right: the wolf Crow, who promises to make you excel at combat; the bird Feather, a generalist who aids in travel; and the serpent Scale, if you want to be this game's equivalent of a mage. Amusingly, SmokingWOLF's usual term for magic is 理力, which would normally be read as riryoku but is instead pronounced フォース: Force. What's riryoku, you ask?

If you've ever wondered why One Way Heroics's magic is called "Force,"
now you know!

That's right: this isn't copyright infringement, it's DOUBLE copyright infringement. Petrified that this shocking expose could lead to SmokingWOLF's arrest, I selected Crow, who sucks at magic.

The player is then bodily summoned to the floating Ether Continent, where Riqureil, taking the form of a unicorn woman, explains the situation. Some kind of great disaster will occur in fifteen days; the hero's job is to (a) find out what it is and (b) stop it from happening. To aid them, she grants them a Totem (already covered), fifteen lives, and the ability to understand the language of the people of her world. She then peaces out.

Here's the big gimmick: the fifteen days are an actual ingame timer. Each step you take on the world map passes one minute, and each step in a dungeon maybe a quarter of that (towns are free). It's sort of like a turn-based Half-Minute Hero.

Free to roam the world, I beat up a wolf in the woods before walking southwest to the town of Sasho. I was greeted by a guard who explained the town and offered me a bunch of free medical herbs, followed by a second guard who dashed into town screaming about BIG NEWS. Talking to him began a long flashback sequence in which his commander, aged general Aegis, complained about kids these days all being wimps, bade farewell to his daughter Mary, and set off to defeat the Dark Lord before he was fully resurrected.

After that I explored the town, which has the usual JRPG facilities: an item shop selling herbs (the guard will only give you so many) and chest keys; a F*rce teacher who sells spells; an old fortune-teller who I assume tells you where to go if you get stuck; and an inn. Rather than instantly healing you, the inn gradually restores your LIFE and FORCE as time passes; if you're in a hurry, you can get out before you're fully healed. Normally you have to pay a fee to access the bed, but Sasho's innkeeper lets you sleep for free if you can answer her special one-question quiz: what's the name of this town?! 

You do have to punch it in yourself.
Skimmers beware!

Trying to enter a certain house triggers a short cutscene where a woman inside tends to her sick brother, talks about going to the northwest forest to gather medicinal herbs, and dashes out. Crow, ever the gentleman, expresses concern about her going there without a weapon. Indeed, forests, and only forests, trigger random encounters with monsters.

Consequently, paths like this one essentially let you choose whether you want encounters. I always take the woods because I'm not a coward.

I followed her there; after a couple of fights with wolves, I got a special "random encounter" where I happened upon her being attacked by a lizardman. Interestingly, there was an option not to intervene; in any other game it would probably be a but-thou-must, but here I didn't test it. Winning the battle has her thank the player and return to town, where you can enter her house again and receive a spiel about her brother's situation: he has a dreadful illness that can be kept at bay by herbs but not cured except with medicine they don't have the money to buy.

The castle from the flashback (Castle Ban, or in Japanese Baan-jou; probably not intentional?) wouldn't let me in so I went further south, hitting a cave with a bunch of locked doors followed by the city of Ruuril. It's the City of Force, with a bazaar housing several different Force teachers. I was too poor and stupid to learn any powers; Crow told me to go back to Sasho and buy weapons instead, but I wanted to make the trip worthwhile; luckily, stats level individually from use and can be manually leveled with bonus experience, so I was able to pump my Intellect to a marginally capable 3, then beat up a lizardman in the woods outside for the Silvers to afford a basic healing spell. Unfortunately it only heals me for 10 LIFE (of more than a hundred) and I can only cast it twice, but hey, it's free.

North of Sasho was a small cave. I immediately found a secret passage which led to... a locked chest I hadn't bought a key to open. Luckily, there was a skeleton in a corner with exactly enough Silvers in his purse for a key, so I was able to come back on my next trip and claim the prize: even more Silvers.

Messed up, man.

At the bottom of the cave is an orb of light that triggers an apparently prerecorded vision from Riqureil, who acknowledges the player as a Totem user, begs them to use their gift to protect the powerless, and gives them "a bit" of power. The scare quotes are because said power increases all your stats and grants you a second action each round, which is a pretty big deal in a game where you control one character against multiple enemies!

Back to Ruuril again, where I attend a class on Force (I was hoping it would improve my stats but no, it's this game's equivalent of Trainer School), talk to a guy who wants me to pay him 10,000 (!) Silvers for a bracer that'll let me talk to animals, hear someone lament the decline of Totem users (interestingly, one of the two surviving ones is Captain Aegis; the other is a sage), and cry at picking the dedicated meathead Totem over the cool wizard snake.

After that I visited a lizardman fortress where the captain of the guard sicced his lizard goons on me before running away, leaving me to wander the fortress peeping into rooms and eavesdropping on little lizard psychodramas. Tl;dr: some of the lizards don't particularly want to fight, but they see this as a defensive war whose loss would lead to their extinction. Many such cases! A sleeping lizardman stood in front of the door to a tantalizing treasure room; I reluctantly turned down the chance to murder him (there was no option to wake him up and engage in honorable combat). Crow vigorously concurred, which makes me wonder if the game is tracking our relationship; probably not.

At the end of the fortress the captain himself came at me alongside like six guys (mercifully, only three enemies can fight the player at once; reinforcements, if any, replace felled enemies at the end of the turn). I killed them all, but his daughter, who had a portrait, came and killed me, so I reloaded—less because I wanted to keep the life than because I was curious if there might be an option besides RAMPANT LIZARD MURDER. I'm leaning against—the choice is likely whether to kill the lizards chilling in side rooms, not whether to fight the boss at all. 

Before your resurrection, you get to see your opponent's reaction to winning the battle:

Good luck, I'm behind fifteen proxies

Stopping there for now.

NAMES REDACTED TO PROTECT THE INNOCENT