The Tale of Relm Review

Two reluctant heroes, one corrupting darkness

The Tale of Relm opens with a familiar JRPG premise -- a corrupting Black Essence spreading across the land, two unrelated heroes forced together by fate to stop it -- and builds around it a combat system that reviewers describe, almost unanimously, as the game's clearest strength. Developed and published solo by EG Games, it released on Steam on 9 October 2025 at NZ$17.49, and the developer's own public news history leaves the date in no real doubt: a March 2025 announcement post, a July "first look at the box and manual" update, and a late-August "New Target Date -- September 30" post that slipped just over a week to the actual launch date, a genuine, traceable original release rather than a relabelled one.

Mechanically, battles unfold as classic turn-based combat with a specific tactical hook: enemies carry hidden weaknesses that, once discovered and exploited, break their defensive "shield" and open them up to significantly increased damage, while a boost-point system lets players bank resources to supercharge an attack at a critical moment. Crucially, enemies are visible wandering the map rather than triggering random encounters, letting players choose their fights. Reviewer after reviewer calls this system out specifically: one writes that "the shield breaking mechanic against the 200 plus enemies makes every fight a unique tactical decision," while another describes it as turning "every battle... into a satisfying tactical puzzle," and a third, more measured review still calls the combat "the real highlight," praising how it goes "well beyond the usual 'press attack to win' JRPG routine."

That praise comes with an unusually direct and specific caveat that this review's sample raises repeatedly: The Tale of Relm's combat system bears a close, openly acknowledged resemblance to Octopath Traveler. A detailed neutral review states the comparison bluntly -- "the combat is Octopath Traveler. Not just the system but the characters 'classes' right down to their combat skills and names" -- while a separate Simplified Chinese-language review frames the same resemblance more approvingly, describing the game as pairing a "Final Fantasy-style" story with an "Octopath Traveler-style" battle system. That's a meaningfully specific critique rather than a vague "feels familiar" complaint, and it's worth reporting factually rather than dismissing, even though most of the sample treats the borrowed foundation as well-executed rather than as a mark against the game.

A second, more consequential shared concern involves difficulty and pacing in the opening hours. One negative review describes boss fights that demand specific weakness-exploiting equipment the game doesn't clearly signal in advance, writing that the resulting one-shot kills against two-thirds of the party "seems just like punishment not strategic difficulty" rather than fair challenge. A separate reviewer, in an update appended to their own review, describes an even more pointed journey: an initially critical assessment of "back to back boss fights without saves between" and an unskippable slow-paced opening, later revised to a soft recommendation after the developer responded directly to the feedback with balance changes -- a genuine example of a reviewer changing their public verdict in response to real developer action, which this review treats as meaningfully more credible than either static opinion alone.

That developer responsiveness is corroborated independently by Steam's own news history. A "Balance and Beginnings" update landed roughly a month after launch, a fast-travel system was added later in response to complaints about slow early pacing, and the game has since been overhauled into a "Definitive Edition" adding new difficulty options and further visual polish -- a substantial, ongoing commitment for a solo developer's debut release that directly targets several of the specific complaints raised in this review's sample.

Language accessibility is a smaller but concrete complaint worth noting: two separate Simplified Chinese-language reviewers, both otherwise positive about the combat and story, specifically flag the lack of official Chinese localisation as a real barrier given how dialogue-heavy the game is, with one noting the game's obscurity outside its core audience makes that gap more costly than it would be for a bigger release. Steam's own news feed shows this was later addressed, with a Japanese and Simplified Chinese localisation update following roughly a year after launch.

On scale and value, the sample is unusually consistent: multiple reviewers describe a 10-hero roster, over 200 unique enemies, and a campaign running somewhere between 28 and 31 hours by the account of one detailed long-playtime review -- a substantially larger scope than most small October 2025 releases this coverage has examined. That same reviewer notes the story deliberately ends on a cliffhanger with a sequel already planned, a detail echoed by another reviewer who frames the open ending as evidence of a developer already thinking beyond this single release. No Steam achievements are tracked for this title, removing one of the independent, quantitative signals this coverage typically uses to corroborate how broadly players actually progress through a game's content, leaving the review sample itself as the primary evidence base here.

Set against the wider field of small-scope, RPG Maker-built JRPGs this coverage occasionally covers, The Tale of Relm's clearest strength is a genuinely well-executed tactical combat system that earns its comparisons to far bigger-budget games, even as several reviewers note plainly how closely it borrows from them. Its clearest weakness is a rough, sometimes unfairly punishing opening stretch that the developer's own active patch history suggests they were already aware of and working to fix.

Verdict

The Tale of Relm delivers genuinely tactical, shield-breaking turn-based combat wrapped around a substantial 28-to-31-hour story, and a large, consistently positive review sample backs up both halves of that pitch -- while sharing real, specific concerns about a punishing early-game difficulty curve and an unusually direct resemblance to Octopath Traveler's combat design. An active, responsive developer who has already shipped balance patches, fast travel, and a full Definitive Edition overhaul makes this a considerably safer pickup now than it may have been at launch, for JRPG fans willing to look past its influences.