My fascination with games that have progressively longer and longer titles will be the death of my writing career. Every time I discover something new that needs to use a linebreak to deliver the full title, I want to see what the heck is going on, and it wreaks havoc on my wrists as I tirelessly pound out these elongated monikers over and over. While The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time doesn’t break records, it still puts a lot of pressure on the player to need to speak the whole mouthful to get the name across. However, The Remake (and yes, that’s how I’ll shorten it) does have a couple of great things going for it right off the bat. First and foremost, this doesn’t come out of Japan, in spite of the implication. And secondly, it’s not an RPG, in spite of advertising otherwise.

Yes, this is definitely not the inventory screen of a JRPG. Nope.

The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time is a meta-as-all-hell satirical take on game development, QA and the director’s commentary options that crop up more and more as titles gain notoriety. The player will go through a series of three different save files that were made during the creation of the aforementioned game, working out how to get past different bosses, puzzles and glitchy patches of “finished mostly” game areas as you piece together the lore and history of what is a passion project between two friends. As the title states, this is supposedly a remake of a long-lost but deeply beloved SNES title that no one outside of the developers know of, and they chronicle their journey to bringing the game back to life on modern machines. There are trials, tribulations, tempers, and all of it is captured in incredible, campy detail.

As stated above, you will not be RPGing in the classic sense of the word. Instead, The Remake functions more as a careful puzzle interaction where you’ll be figuring out what you need to do to advance within the confines of the game. Each section is blocked by one or more monster and boss fights, and you’ll need to discover the proper way to get past them. The keys to success are hidden within the area you’re currently occupying. For example, one enemy’s weakness is tucked away in the partially damaged pages of the game’s manual, which you’ll collect, page by page, throughout the stage. Another is casually mentioned during some of the audio commentary that you’ll find scattered here and there. Need to open a particular door? I hope you remember a clue dropped in a flashback that one NPC mentioned!

Plus some deliberate quizzes where you can totally just keep guessing till you pass.

If you’ve never played a JRPG before, this might actually be a better approach to coming into the game. The way that things unfold makes the most amount of sense if you’re coming at it from the perspective of a very puzzle-focused point and click adventure, like an oldschool Monkey Island title. You’re able to access inventory at certain points, though you never have to buy anything or visit shops. Instead, you need to listen, read and use contextual clues to decipher what comes next in terms of progressing the game forward. Or, backwards, as it sometimes is, as you are doing playtesting, debugging and getting the game squared from a nonlinear POV. But being in the mindset of “I’m trying to reason this situation out” versus “I need to level up and get stronger” makes the game flow more consistently.

This approach also makes the player tend towards more “out of the box” thinking, which you should really keep in mind before engaging with literally anything. One of the earliest fights the player will see that the perspective is upside down, and you need to reason out that you need to do your combat inputs in a similar manner in order to succeed. In others, you might need to consider that what you’re expected to do next isn’t what you should do, and that you’ll have to “break” the format to actually move on. I’m being vague so that you can discover these interesting advancements yourself, but also giving you a general heads up that not all is what you might think it to be.

As you can see, things are going swimmingly.

The visuals for The Remake are both a selling point and a bit of a hang-up when it comes to the overall experience. On the one hand, being able to use this roughly hewn pixel art with a 2.5D aesthetic lets you nod towards the “source material” that inspired this remake while also exploring and engaging on better footing. There are a lot of areas to see and discoveries to be made, and it feels more satisfying to do so as a 16-bit adjacent sprite rather than a flushed out, 3D model. But with that freedom comes the caveat of this game also being purposely “buggy and unfinished.” You can’t always tell if moments of becoming stuck, turned around or otherwise displaced are on purpose or are a result from this being a Steam release and PC gaming being a Wild West of discovery.

Moreover, the glitchy nature of a game you’re debugging can wear on you, due to the perception of the game’s format. You’ll end up in locations where audio clips, especially spoken audio clips, will loop over and over to give you a feeling of being between finished realms, and that just can be really annoying if you end up in one spot for too long. Thankfully, if you’ve been able to make notes based on the clues dropped along the way, you should be able to move through these spots without wasting too much time. The music is really good and tonally spot on for the evoked era, but it is tempered by hearing, for the millionth time, the joke about there being no Circlesoft lawyers around.

I GET IT, IT’S THE PATH OF JUSTICE, STOP TELLING ME.

If you actually want to play and enjoy The Remake, you need to get onboard immediately because the entire journey, even with some missteps, is shockingly short, and the gameplay aspect is even shorter. About 30% of the game itself is the video “documentary” pieces that you discover, where live action of the struggling creators both gives you insight and clues into the puzzles as well as just a lot of camp to enjoy and witness. When a game is less than three hours from start to finish with the video scenes included, you don’t have a lot of runway to try and adjust and decide if this is the game for you or not. By the time you get a feel for things and figure out if you like it, you might already be rolling credits.

Having said that, the length of The Remake isn’t a problem, and actually contributes to the overall charm. Since it’s just the ending of this game, you don’t need a lot of backstory or justification, and the hilarity of how off-the-walls some statements are then really juxtaposed with the sincere feeling of trying to make a game and documenting it. It’s a passion project that seems to have become an actual passion project, and I can respect the hell out of that. After reading books like Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, it was wonderful to find a game that felt like it captured the essence of creation with the tumult and disconnect and even heartache that comes out of it. The tone of the game and what you discover is such a gradual but accelerating slide you don’t know you’ve hit the bottom until the impact is bone-shattering.

It’s a weird one, to be sure, but The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time is an artistic treasure, and one well worth exploring for fans of game creation, storytelling and challenges to your perception. Go in as blind as possible, put aside an afternoon and enjoy the tale. Just be patient and ready to try something different, and you’ll always be pleasantly surprised.

The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time is available now on Steam.

Reviewed on PC.

A copy of The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time was provided by the publisher.