Video Game / KSB's RPG Parodies

A series of Japanese Freeware Games made with RPG Maker by indie developer KSB Games, with the games being Parodies of RPGs that add a certain aspect that's often antithetical to the RPG genre, all Played for Laughs. The plot of the games is generally the following: the King assigns the hero to slay the Demon King, with a gimmick tied to each game's respective title.

List of games in the series include:

• Too Fast RPG
• An RPG That's Been Stripped Down To the Bare Essentials
  • New RPG That's Been Stripped Down To the Bare Essentials, a sequel to the former that's even more barebones.
• Too Weak RPG
• Crappy Game Where the Hero is a Massive Scumbag
• Too Excessive RPG
• Eterna Magi
• An RPG That Spoils Its Plot Twists

These game can be found on KSB's freem! account. Most of them are Japanese only, though Too Fast RPG has an English translation.

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Tropes:

In General

• Negative Continuity: None of the games are connected in any fashion whatsoever, with the characters often being dramatically different in each setting. The closest the games have to a continuity is with God in Too Weak RPG (implicitly an Author Avator) indicating in the Golden Ending to be creating all these different scenarios with the cast of characters, rebooting the universe each and every time.
• Stylistic Suck: Each of games uses the default assets of RPG Maker, complete with the main heroes using their default names. Specific games also lean into this trope with its respective themes.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Lucius in most of the games is prone to being killed off just as quickly as he's introduced, whether right after being recruited in Bare Essentials or accidentally using a Suicide Attack spell in Too Weak RPG. The RPG That Spoils Its Plot Twists'', courtesy of its theme of Punny Names, lampshades this with his last name being "Diesquickly".

Too Fast RPG

• 11th-Hour Superpower: After the Demon King curb-stomps them and curses them with slowness, the heroes gain the blessing of ultimate speed from the "God of Speed" to turn the tide.
• Brutal Bonus Level: Completing the game unlocks a few additional obstacle courses based on the Collision Damage segments at the beginning of the game.
• Collision Damage: The walking NPCs. They run at such absurd speeds that getting in the way results in the protagonist becoming roadkill.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Most of the dialogue can only be properly read by frame-perfect pausing a recording of the game... assuming the game doesn't load the next dialogue faster than it can display the first. In particular, one dialogue from a party member against the Demon King reads "Glasses are the best!"
• Motor Mouth: With dialogue boxes zooming by 90% of the time, almost everyone qualifies. The Demon King practically can't hear what the protagonists are trying to say.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: After the king and the heroes die by colliding with each other at such high speed, the queen, having learnt the value of slowing down from the demon lord's curse, declares an edict that undoes everything the heroes fought for. A grave is made in memorial for the demon lord while the king and heroes are quickly forgotten.
• Super-Speed: Practically most of the cast has this. Taken even further with the heroes upon getting blessed with the "ultimate speed" from the God of Speed — they are constantly moving, and any attack made on them automatically misses.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Running at such speeds is naturally dangerous, as touching any speeding NPC results in a gruesome death. This also happens by the end with the Super-Speed-induced heroes and the King when the latter attempts to hand them their quadrillion prize money.
• Talk to the Fist: The impatient heroes attack the demon lord before he's done with his monologue. After he wipes the floor with them, he even scolds them for not letting him finish.
• Unreadably Fast Text: Exaggerated. The entirety of the game, with the exception of the Queen and the Demon King, has their dialogue sped up to far past unreadable.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Exaggerated. Opening the menu at first opportunity shows that your party is all level 80, but barely know any skills. Even the cleric only knows a basic lightning spell. However, the party is so fast and so strong that you don't need to worry about anything in combat.
• Zero-Effort Boss: Any enemy in the game, from the lowly mooks to the Final Boss, gets slain with zero input.

An RPG That's Been Stripped Down To the Bare Essentials

• Hoist by His Own Petard: Both times for the Demon Lord.
  • The final battle is set up to look like the player first has to fight the Demon Lord's Elite Four, but they all end up killing themselves by not following the rules of the Demon Lord's curse. Both him and the heroes react in Stunned Silence.
  • Shortly after going One-Winged Angel for a second phase, he proclaims his first attack with "Ultimate Attack", speaking enough syllables to trigger his own curse to kill him, ending the fight prematurely.
• Irony: The title of the game being lengthier than the games before and after it, which flies in the face of the thematic terse sentences within.
• Never My Fault: The Demon King calls out the heroes for killing his Elite Four, even though they were killed by the curse he's responsible for.
• Phrase Catcher: If anyone breaks the rules of the curse, everyone, including the speaker, can only react with a shocked "Ah—" before the speaker explodes.
• Stylistic Suck:
  • Practically everything is barebones like the title says. Every area including the overworld is rather small (with "towns" being no bigger than a dozen tiles), the battle system is cheap enough that killing one tough enemy maxes out the character levels, and everyone, including the UI, speaks in incredibly short dialogue. The characters' terse Hulk Speak dialogue is at least Justified: the Demon King cast a Curse on the land that causes anyone that utters more than five moji (Japanese syllables) in a single sentence to die in a fiery explosion, so everyone is trying to avoid death by being as terse as possible.
  • The sequel to this game condenses things even more, and the whole game takes place on a single map!
• Schmuck Bait: In a mandatory encounter with Lucius, on the path to the Demon King, he asks to join the party. As it's already established that speaking more than five syllables in a sentence results in death due to the Demon King's curse, immediately picking the "join our party" option results in the inevitable.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story:
  • Upon finally getting through the Schmuck Bait choices to get Lucius to join without dying to the curse, he ends up getting killed upon uttering "I will show you my power," with a fiery death following suit.
  • The game ends in this fashion: With the Demon King killed, the King and the heroes briefly ponder if the curse has lifted — assuming so, the King requests for everybody to congratulate Harold for his heroics, with everybody suddenly exploding from the still very active curse.
• Stupid Evil: The Demon King, as he claims to be too stupid to understand sentences that are longer than five Japanese syllables, thus cursing the land with the "no more than five moji rule". Not helping matters is that he dies to his own curse anyways.

Too Weak RPG

• Adaptational Villainy: In the prior games, the King simply served as the Quest Giver to start the story, no matter how comical. Here, not only is he a bigger jerk than usual, he sent Harold on a suicide mission to retrieve the Yikes Stones to have three to grant any wish - his being a selfish one of ruling over the whole world.
• Adaptational Wimp: The hero of this game, Harold, is as weak as the game advertises him as: a paltry 10 HP and 3 MP, practically nothing across his other stats, and his attack deals exactly 1 damage. The first half of the game consists of being strategic to survive the mandatory encounters while avoiding all the other overworld mooks that'll one-shot him. Upon "beating" the game, you get the option to play Too Strong RPG, showcasing the complete inversion and the grave consequences.
• Armor-Piercing Question: The Demon King gives several of these to Harold, the first two in response to the latter's usual boasting in response to the former calling out the "Survival of the Fittest" mentality, with the simple questions making Harold go quiet.
  Harold: The strong shall win! That's how this world works!
  Demon King: Then, why are you still alive?
  Harold: ...
  Demon King: Because you're strong? ...That's not true. It's because you are protected by the strong.
• Always a Bigger Fish: Inverted Trope. Harold is advertised, and proven by his interaction with a dog entering his house, to be the weakest character of them all, with him being the subject of mercy at various dangers until he gets some insurance with Hyper Guard. But after the Demon King's defeat and the death of his companions, Harold finds Weakerling, the Demon King's son, and proves that they're even weaker and more of a victim than Harold once the latter kills them in a murderous rage.
• Cerebus Syndrome: The game starts off as a typical RPG parody like the others in terms of premise - the protagonist Harold being too weak to fight against even the lowliest of enemies despite their boasts of strength. As the game develops partway through, it takes a more serious tone with its characters and themes, including: a moral of the weak having their place as a valuable asset for others, Harold demonstrating his ego is a case of Inferiority Superiority Complex, and everything about the King's deceit and the fight with the Demon Lord that results in Harold's companions dying to the Demon Lord's One-Winged Angel form. And that's not getting into the entire Too Strong RPG Wham Episode, followed by The Reveal that Harold, with the power of three Yikes Stones at the end of each timeline, has been trapped wishing for the two timelines for who knows how long.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Starting the game features a disembodied voice asking what you wish for, with the following options being "The Weakest RPG" and Back to the Main Menu. After Harold gathers three Yikes Stones to earn a wish of his desire at the end, it cuts to the same setup, this time with "The Strongest RPG" at the top. Clearing that "game" then results in a blank option, the result of Harold picking neither Weak nor Strong as his wish.
  • An old woman in one of the castle town's shops ponders Harold's predicament as the weakest hero in the land, wondering out loud if he's the way he is due to being too strong in a past life. Talk to this woman again during Too Strong RPG and she'll deliver a perspective-flipped version of the same dialogue.
  • The memory Harold has involving Marshal and Terese after having lost his companions and defeated the True Final Boss of Too Weak RPG — Harold claims it was just a made-up memory, noting how they didn't get along all that well. When taking the resets into account, that likely was a legitimate memory in one timeline. Taken further when a variation of that memory serves as the final cutscene for the Golden Ending.
• Joke Character: As he's the "greatest hero" in a game called Too Weak RPG, Harold is appropriately pathetic, having a paltry 10 HP and practically nothing in all stats, to the point that a dog that shares the same HP does ludicrous amounts of damage to him in return. Partway through the game, he finds his niche in becoming the Support Party Member with the help of the support orbs, including patching up his lacking HP with Hyper Guard. He completely averts this in the Too Strong RPG retread, and Golden Ending sequence that follows after the retread's Final Boss.
• No Title: After beating Too Strong RPG, the player is once again asked what they think Harold's true desires are, this time with a blank choice above Too Strong RPG for the game's Golden Ending.
• Puzzle Boss: Several of the fights Harold gets into at the beginning requires using items to end the fight without relying on his "strength", from throwing a stick to get the dog to chase after it, to using bug spray on the wasp.
• Shout-Out: Lucius' Suicide Attack spell is named, in all of its Gratuitous English glory, "Super Lucius DanceDanceRevolution Presented By Konami Featuring Oda Nobunaga".
• Suicide Attack: Accidentally invoked by Lucius trying to use one of his "esoteric" spells on one of the Elite Four. On the plus side for the heroes, the opposing side is down a member for the following fight.
• Support Party Member: Upon being gifted several magic stones from Marsha partway through, Harold goes from a Joke Character to this, being able to cover for his lack of HP with Hyper Guard from the stone of protection, heal with the red stone, recover MP with the blue stone, and remove debuffs with the green stone.
• True Final Boss: After revealing himself as the true villain of the story once Harold gets the Yikes Stone from the Demon King and Weakerling, the King, alongside the Queen, is the last fought boss of Too Weak RPG... up until the retreads, of course, which exchanges the role to Weakerling in Too Strong RPG, then God in the Golden Ending sequence.
• Victory by Endurance: How the second phase against the Demon Lord is beaten. With both Marsha and Terese killed following the Demon King's One-Winged Angel power boost from the Yikes Stone, the only option for the lacking-in-offense Harold is to tank the hits with the use of Hyper Guard and periodically heal while letting the Demon Lord sacrifice their own health from the aforementioned power boost.
• Weapon for Intimidation: The Ruffian just outside of town can be scared off with Harold using a toy gun as a bluff. While an effective way to avoid combat for Harold, he ends up dropping the weapon shortly after using it.
• Wham Episode: The entire latter half of the game where it turns into Too Strong RPG. Harold is now the complete opposite of his weak self in Too Weak RPG: becoming equipped with the Dark Sword and Armor as the Majin class, with his stats being maxed out across the board. His two companions Marshal and Terese are completely absent, his personality becomes cold and distant, and most if not all NPCs he comes across get instantly slain. All those previous times enemies Harold had to be careful engaging with? A mere effortless obstacle. Furthermore, the Weakerling disposed of in the Too Weak timeline now fights back in the same manner as Harold with the King, gaining strength from the spirits of the previous antagonists, and proving a much bigger challenge.
• Would Hurt a Child: Harold in Too Strong RPG, as one of his first few victims include children roaming around the village. Weakerling is implied to also be a child, making him another victim of Harold, even in the Too Weak timeline.

Crappy Game Where the Hero is a Massive Scumbag

• Combat Pragmatism: All of the Hero's battle skills consists of melee attacks that target either the knees, head, or groin.
• Establishing Character Moment: Upon listening to the King's plea to go slay the Demon King, the Hero immediately bargains to get paid for the job, going as far as having the King repossess their own castle to give 1,000,000 gold as down payment.
• Groin Attack: One of the Hero's melee skills is a straightforward "Go for the Groin".
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: Unique to this game is the ability to name the protagonist, his default being "Kuzu".
• It's All About Me: If Kuzu's Establishing Character Moment of repossessing the King's castle isn't a clear act of selfishness, his menu description makes it clear...
  "A despicable sadist, psychopath, and narcissist, who has no second thoughts about using others for his own gains."
• Jerkass: The very premise of the game is that the Hero embodies every aspect of this trope.

Eterna Magi

• Stylistic Suck: The subtitle of this game is "An RPG desperately rushed out by a creator who makes stupid games". The game is listed as a "demo" and intentionally has some sprites that aesthetically clash with the stock RPG Maker assets.

An RPG That Spoils Its Plot Twists

• 11th-Hour Superpower: When his treasured companion is threatened, Harold Sageblood awakens to the sage's bloodline that empowers him right before the final showdown.
• Absurdly High Level Cap: The level cap is 70, but with the limited number of battles available and the general difficulty of most battles, you don't need to grind to beat the game.
• But Thou Must!: The Demon Lord offers a hero an opportunity to join him and oppose the Man Behind the Man, but you have no choice but to refuse.
• Disappeared Dad: Harold makes it clear that his father disappeared with his fate unknown, and it turns out Fren Less's father is also the same.
• Does Not Know His Own Strength: Dark Beast Toostrong underestimates its own abilities and cowers every other turn despite being able to one-shot a party member with a basic attack.
• Failure Is the Only Option: The first village puts the player in a werewolf suspicion minigame and they have to deduce the identity of the werewolf from among the residents. Even if the player correctly figures out who's the werewolf, there's no saving Thenex Victim because Yuu Too is also a werewolf.
• Fake Ultimate Mook: The first enemy in the game, Dark Demon Smallfry, has an intimidating 9999 HP and MP, but his deadly attack that uses all his MP does only single-digit damage, and he goes down in a couple of hits.
• Friendless Background: Despite what he claims, Fren Less has no friends. He eventually comes clean with Harold and Marsha.
• Forced Transformation: There is a curse upon the kingdom that turns those who fall into despair into slimes, making them easier to kill and maintaining the illusion of a hopeful populace. This is then demonstrated when Hee Ro learns of his father's true identity.
• I Should Have Been Better: The hero, Harold, angsts over his failure to save people from their deaths.
• Improbably High I.Q.: Theresa I.Q.Three brags about her IQ being "100 million", though her name implies it's quite the opposite — her "analyses" merely regurgitate what's already apparent.
• Killer Rabbit: Dark Beast Toostrong looks like a meek bat that can't introduce itself properly. Despite its mere 25 HP, it only takes single digits' worth of damage and its basic attack one-shots your party members.
• Look Behind You: Fren Less, with the help of Martha, gains a skill named "Look! A UFO!" It's used to distract Theresa to keep her from threatening the party.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Even the subtitle of the game can't help but give away that the final enemy of the game is the Hero's father. To further reinforce this setup, the Demon Lord is named Hee Rosfather. Harold's not his son, though!
• Meaningful Name: Nearly every named character has a name that describes their role and immediately gives away their associated plot twist.
• Meta Twist: Despite the game's premise, it can still pull a fast one on the player from time to time.
  • Yuu Too sounds like she would be the second victim of the werewolf attack after Thenex Victim, but the "you too?!" refers to her being the second werewolf.
  • The Demon Lord reveals that the hero's been traveling with a mole all this time. It's not Marsha Traytor, it's Theresa I.Q.Three, who's the last of the Demon Lord's generals.
  • Hee Rosfather isn't Harold's father. He's actually the father of Hee Ro, who's been going by the alias of Fren Less.
  • It turns out there's another force that's been manipulating both Hee Rosfather and King Mastermaind.
  • Marsha's betrayal isn't to the Demon Lord or King Mastermaind, but by manipulating the hero according to Queen Adultery's plan. However, her final betrayal is against the Queen instead.
  • Who's Harold's father? Was it the Demon Lord? King Mastermaind? The final slime you slay before the credits roll? In the end, the game never reveals the truth, turning the subtitle into a red herring.
• Money for Nothing: After the werewolf event, a shop in the village sells an Ultra Pricey Necklace for 60,000 G. You can take a loan to afford it and then immediately sell it back for 100,000 G, and the game lets you do this as many times as you want to get as much money as you want.
• Oh, and X Dies: Right after the spoiler warning, the game gives away that someone dies within its first five minutes. As the name would indicate, it's Lucius Diesquickly, who dies right outside the palace.
• Suddenly Voiced: This is the first game in the series that features voice acting.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: All over the place, even from the very beginning. King Mastermaind assures the hero he has nothing to do with the incidents troubling the kingdom, Marsha Traytor assures that she'll never betray the hero, Lucius Diesquickly aspires to live to the age of 100...
• Well-Intentioned Extremist:
  • The Demon Lord sent out his strongest generals as trials for the hero to overcome so that he becomes strong enough to join him and overthrow King Mastermaind and truly save the world. His generals have caused some deaths among the populace, but those are sacrifices the Demon Lord is willing to make in his grand plan. He even left a kill-switch as a bomb in the hero's bracelet that would kill him if he refuses to join up.
  • As a twisted form of love for her kingdom, Queen Adultery cast the curse that transforms those in despair into slimes, so that they can be eliminated without causing remorse. This leaves the populace with only people who have hope, no matter how small it is.

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