RPG Maker Dungeon #15: Master of the Wind
Link: https://archive.org/details/mot-w-complete
Cade is an idealistic armor merchant with a talent for acrobatics and wind magic. Bones is a strong and stubborn thousand year old skeleton. Together, under the names Shroud and Stoic, they fight crime! Unfortunately, there's a force even more dangerous than crime, and that's big business. When the corporation Equipment King muscles its way into their hometown of Port Arianna, aided by a mysterious organization with ties to a past fascist empire, can Shroud and Stoic save the day?
Master of the Wind, developed in RPG Maker XP by Volrath and ArtBane, has two great strengths, dungeons and story. From the very first of its seven chapters, the game's environments throw countless puzzles and gimmicks at you. At first these are RPG stalwarts like pit traps and sokoban (box pushing) segments. But then the game starts pulling out some unusual tricks, like a section in the fourth chapter where you program and upgrade a golem. Even the dungeons that don't quite work, like a mansion in the second chapter packed with hair-pullingly opaque adventure game-style puzzles, are admirable in just how detailed they are.
Unfortunately, many of these dungeons are made less tolerable by the game's battles. Enemies in Master of the Wind have a lot of HP; you're encouraged to use skills in order to defeat them quickly rather than just mashing the attack button. But since you just have a small party of characters that plays similarly from start to finish, you're left repeating the same actions in nearly every encounter. Plus you'll be fighting a lot, because the encounter rate is high. There's a consumable that lowers the rate but it expires quickly.
Boss battles are much more enjoyable, thanks to better encounter design and a flair for theatrical presentation. There are even a few fights choreographed to vocals! I wish that the developers went all in on these and reduced the difficulty of random encounters. Perhaps they realized this, because some later dungeons are selective in just when and where you'll be getting into fights.
That leaves the story, which I would describe as having real webcomic energy. The premise is a joke: what if two generic fantasy characters living in a RPG Maker RTP world were superheroes? Despite this, Master of the Wind takes itself seriously. The first episode has Shroud and Stoic visit a graveyard haunted by the ghosts of human soldiers who slaughtered elf civilians years before. That would be the end point for most Japanese-style RPGs, but it's just a set-piece here en route to bigger things.
When I first played this game back in the early 2000s, what stood out most to me was its treatment of Equipment King. Shroud is convinced from the moment they appear that they mean nothing good. And fair enough; WalMart and its brethren are the product of cold, capitalist calculation. Yet I was frustrated by how every "good" character in the game confirmed Shroud's opinion, while every "bad" character on the side of Equipment King was later revealed as weak or corrupt. Couldn't there be more complexity?
Returning to this game in 2025, though, taught me that I was wrong. From the second chapter, Master of the Wind immediately starts introducing characters who complicate this dynamic. Auburn is Shroud's cool girlfriend, but she also works as a mercenary for Equipment King's wealthy boss. Dican is a principled, religious man who is kind to his brother; he also kidnaps children and attempts to indoctrinate them into his faith. Not to mention Gabriella, a friendly student Shroud meets at university (it's complicated!) who has a deep prejudice against undead. Master of the Wind lets that character grow (and regress) in ways I never could have expected after her introduction.
The rest of the story too just plays differently these days. Equipment King works just as well as a fantasy metaphor for Amazon as it does for WalMart. Its secret connection with the Hand cult (and its ties to the Gallian empire) matches up cleanly with Silicon Valley's alliance with the Trump administration. Stoic's presence is vital throughout the game not just because he's a cool and cranky skeleton, but because he's old enough to have fought the fascists the last time around.
The game questions some of the basic assumptions around superheroes, too. Early in the series Shroud and Stoic face off against the Touten Corps, a criminal organization run by fantasy creatures like elves, orcs and shape-changers. At first they appear to be standard reoccurring villains. But then we learn that the Touten Corps are really a group of principled anarchists, and that Shroud even used to run with them before teaming up with Stoic.
Their distrust of the law turns out to be justified; the police gladly serve capital, Gallia and Equipment King. So where does that leave Shroud and Stoic, who once believed that the law was on their side? You see this kind of thing in superhero comics all the time these days, whether that be Marvel or DC. But it's surprising to find in a mid-2000s RPG Maker game.
There's an extensive Let's Play in the Something Awful forums in which Volrath, one of the game's developers, posted about his influences. "My grandmother's family left Poland just before things started to get really bad there," he said. "The town where my family came from, somewhere in eastern Poland, no longer exists. The Nazis wiped it off the map. If my grandmother hadn't left, there would be no Master of the Wind. My grandfather wasn't Polish but he fought in World War II. Even though I miss them, I find myself grateful they didn't live to see what's happening now." This was written in September 2020; I can't even imagine what Volrath (or ArtBane for that matter) think about the current situation in the United States.
Master of the Wind won several Misaos (community awards for RPG Maker games) in its day. As far as I knew, it was considered to be one of the top titles ever developed for RPG Maker XP in the English community. Which is why I was so surprised to discover this year that the game has vanished from the internet. Its homepage solest.org is defunct. Even the copy available on Archive.org that I could find was an incomplete version of the game.
So I uploaded my own copy to Archive.org, which you can find a link to above. I wasn't able to obtain the consent of the creators despite my best efforts to reach them. But considering just how timely this game is, I thought they'd appreciate sharing it around. Perhaps it's not to everybody's taste these days; it's long, slow-paced, and uneven in its visuals even if its cutscenes are immaculately executed. The kind of game packed with technical accomplishments that might not mean much outside its small community. Still, its heart is in the right place, and that means so much these days.