March 2-8, 2025
It’s finally done! I started Final Profit way back in November and I’ve finally finished it. Review is below but spoiler alert, I loved it. No Tales of Phantasia again this week, my friend and I didn’t get a chance to hang out. I did finally start my next game though. And I beat it in two sittings! Not only that, but my recording equipment is setup, so you get to hear my lovely commentary 😊 I’m still tweaking settings and figuring out my groove so it might be a little rough but I’m working on it.
Game Acquisitions
I know what you’re thinking. “Holy crap! You got so many games this week. That must’ve cost you a fortune!” Nope, this was the itch.io California Fire Relief Bundle for only $10. Tunic was definitely the big draw here with a previous historical low of $15, so everything else was just a bonus. The bundle ends this week so check it out for yourself. Obviously not sponsored, but it’s going to a great cause and you get some great games too.
# of Games: 64
Total Money Spent: $10
Price/Game: $0.16
Game Recaps
Another lighter week this week, but still better than last week. I was busy finishing my recording setup and cleaning up Final Profit. I also made a nice thumbnail for my Lunar Axe let’s play that I’m pretty proud of. Let’s move on, for the final time, to Final Profit.
So I figured out the stock market as you can see here. This was easily the most money I ever earned at one time, over 127 million coin! Crazy to think about how at the start of the game I got a bad ending for accumulating 200,000 in debt. I spent a while after this raising one billion coin to buy the Bureau which is the last property in the game. I ran into a bit of an issue though.
It turns out you can’t accumulate more than one billion coin, and I have a permanent upkeep of two. That means that even if I raised the exact amount necessary, it will decrease by two after a few seconds and I won’t have enough, nor will I get enough simply through my passive income. It was very frustrating after spending all that time raising the money necessary. I decided to skip that for now and proceeded with the final confrontation. This involves going to the top floor of the Bureau and speaking to One to recap your accomplishments, debating who should meet with the CEO, and deciding who to take with you. I decided to splice in my 100% ending intro into this next video so you can see the full conversation with One and not have to read it multiple times with very minor changes.
As you can see, I did manage to buy the Bureau when I pursued the full 100% completion. I’ll come back to that later. So I’ve heard from everyone that I can take with me to open the door to the CEO. I decided that I wanted to see every character interaction and ending so I basically picked two people at random that haven’t been picked yet. The first time around, I picked the Owl Lich and the Orange Salesman.
Oh no, that’s a game over! Good thing I saved beforehand. I picked the Orange Salesman first because he was one of the most difficult people to recruit (you have to collect all 50 apples and complete the orange labyrinth) so I figured it would be the most interesting ending. I didn’t expect a game over though. I reloaded the save and picked Bird and the Representative. In the conversation with the CEO, I went for the Top Lawyer option.
This was the first real ending to the game which is why I decided to let the credits play out here. What a pretty final shot! I don’t think I’ve seen an RPG Maker game look as good as this did. I ended up playing the new game+ for a few minutes thinking that was somehow the way to buy the Bureau but it wasn’t. You keep all your equipment but lose basically everything else and start off running the shop in Tutetown. I didn’t want to go through all that again so I reloaded the save to try to figure that out. It turns out you can earn just enough money by running the Tutetown shop for a second, then sprinting to the Bureau to buy before your upkeep payment kicks in. Seems unnecessarily complicated (and maybe unintentional?), but I eventually got it after several tries.
I also expected more fanfare. It did lead to that brief quip with One in the first video about owning the Bureau. It also unlocks another one of the endings. With a renewed confidence in achieving 100% completion, I decide to pick up the last jukebox tracks that I’m missing. I guess these only show up at certain points in the story because I definitely passed by some of the areas earlier and they weren’t there. Anyway, I grabbed all 54 tracks and scrolled through my ledger as proof of collecting everything.
Tinto’s exclusive hoard shows as 43/48 because the developer saved five slots as placeholders for future content. I got everything, I swear! You can check my earlier video about it to make sure. Now that I have officially achieved 100%, I go back to getting all the endings. My next group consists of Batnik and Queen Biremue.
Biremue must’ve had some serious dirt on the CEO if it made him kill himself. My next group is Magnolia and the Train Captain. I picked the eviction ending here which can only be achieved by buying the Bureau.
Next team-up is King Bean and Dopplebizzer. I knew I kept her alive for a reason!
I knew I shouldn’t’ve kept her alive, she betrayed me again! And the CEO later apparently. She didn’t turn over a new leaf after all, and I got another game over for it. Next up is Odina and Lady Plenty. They didn’t have any unique endings so I picked the “feign attraction” option in the conversation with the CEO.
This guy really is a pervert. Good thing Biz was able to take advantage of that. The final group is Elora and Wiz, and I appropriately picked the Final Profit ending here to wrap things up.
And that’s a wrap on Final Profit! My review is below. Have one final shot of Biz and Odina together. This is probably the prettiest shot I’ve seen from an RPG Maker game. I believe this is still considered a 2D image too which makes the perspective shift even more impressive.
I decided to play this game next because it’s the only game I have for the Legacy Games Launcher. Amazon Prime often gives away games for this launcher, but they’re usually bad hidden object games. That’s already a genre I’m not interested in so a bad game in that genre is a big no from me. I decided to claim this one though because reviews said it was better than most. Take a look at the full game and judge for yourself:
Game Reviews
Final Profit: A Shop RPG
When I was looking at my list of upcoming games last year and saw 40+ hour shop management game coming up, I was dreading it. That sounded like it would be such a slog. How can running a shop for 40 hours possibly be fun!? My worries were completely unfounded though, this game was awesome.
As the name suggests, Final Profit is a shop management game with RPG elements. It is built in the RPG Maker engine which will surely get some groans from those who are familiar. Rest assured though, this is a high quality game, and was clearly made with a lot of effort and dedication. It is definitely among my favorite RPG Maker games I’ve played. You play as Biz, an elf queen who is exiled from her town of Faeona and usurped by her daughter after the council has a disagreement over how to handle the evil Bureau of Business. Her plan is to become a successful businesswoman herself and rise up the ranks of the Bureau to destroy it from within. The council is hesitant that this will corrupt her and she’ll just become another Bureau puppet.
It's clear from the opening cutscene that this isn’t just another RPG Maker game or just another shop management sim. There’s a ton of side stuff to do, places to explore, people to meet, and upgrades to purchase. Story driven is an apt descriptor here too, it’s not just a mindless game where you run around buying and selling things for no reason. You’re slowly advancing the story by raising the money necessary to buy the next upgrade and level up which triggers the next story bit. The most satisfying part of this game is gradually automating everything until the shops almost run themselves and watching your coin balance go up faster and faster. If the thought of watching numbers go up is satisfying to you, you’ll definitely like this game.
As an RPG Maker game, the graphics are good. It has the typical pixel art graphics that the engine allows, and the tilesets aren’t too obvious. Most of the character portraits are OK and don’t seem to be default portraits I’ve seen in other RPG Maker games. The music is fun to listen to as well. I never got tired of hearing the unique music in each area so it must be doing something right. There’s no combat in this game which is unusual for the engine, but it doesn’t detract from experience at all.
If anything detracted from the experience, it would be the obtuseness of some of the mechanics and the repetition. For the first point, when you unlock the second shop in Enterpriston, a lot starts getting thrown at you and not all of it is explained well. When I was going through all the upgrade requirements, I had to consult a guide to figure out some of them. There’s also no quest log so you kind of just have to remember everything you need to do which can be overwhelming. Once you’ve figured everything out, repetition can set in where you’re just going through the motions of running the shop and going out to buy the ingredients to make the commodities when you run low. It’s broken up somewhat by side quests that trigger when you sell a certain amount of a particular item which is nice, but those eventually stop coming too. Thankfully, when you get to the endgame and make more money than God, running the shop becomes less important and you can just bulk purchase everything you need.
If the thought of playing a shop management game in RPG Maker with no combat intrigues you, you owe it to yourself to try this game. The story is great, the characters are fun, exploration and graphics are satisfactory, and the cycle of buying upgrades to make more and more money faster and faster is SO SATISFYING! Just don’t be afraid to look up guides for some of the more obscure mechanics or collectibles.
Time to beat (Completionist) - 59h:54m
Rating – 8.5/10
Lunar Axe
Unfortunately this review will not be as glowing, but it will be short like the game. Lunar Axe is a point and click adventure game about a giant mythological snake that awakens after hundreds of years and wreaks havoc. The main character must assemble the pieces of the titular axe which is the only weapon that can defeat the snake. The visuals are nice and the story is kind of interesting, but I just can’t vibe with the gameplay. I’m really bad at puzzles, and this genre is known for progression being very obtuse. Lunar Axe falls into the trap as well, and I had to once again resort to a guide to figure out what I was supposed to be doing. Using guides every once in a while in games is fine but having to keep it open for most of the game isn’t very fun. Oh well, it was a short game so no harm done. This will be a good quick completion for anyone interested in the genre, I’m just not one of those people.
Time to beat (Main+Extras) - 3h:25m
Rating – 4/10
TV/Movie Recaps
Here is everything I watched this week:
· Snowpiercer Season 1 Episode 8-Season 2 Episode 10 (still watching, show ended)
· Family Guy Season 23 Episode 3 (all caught up, show ongoing)
· American Dad Season 21 Episode 19 (all caught up, show ongoing)
· Dark City
Snowpiercer continues to be a very good show, and I’m already halfway through. Even though I’ve seen the movie and can assume the show ends the same way, I’m still on the edge of my seat every episode wondering how they’re going to get there. It could totally subvert my expectations and craft a new ending too, who knows! Dark City was a very odd sci-fi film from the 90s that I didn’t know if I was enjoying until near the end. I was worried it would be one of those films that I sit through and not have any idea what happened but thankfully it wrapped up pretty well. It didn’t quite explain everything I was hoping it would, but I did enjoy the journey nonetheless.
Conclusion/Upcoming
I still can’t believe Final Profit is finally over after all this time. I really liked it, and I’m not sure if I’ll play another game this year that will surpass. You can check my collection for top 10 games played in 2025 for my current rankings, but I’ll post it here too:
3. Lunar Axe
2. Fall of Porcupine
1. Final Profit: A Shop RPG
Only three games beaten this year so it’s not much of a list so far. I thought putting a running tally of my favorite games for the year every time it changes might be a fun thing to do with these posts. I’m also working on a couple more fun stats to include in some sort of quarterly review for the March monthly post going up hopefully on April 1st. Lemme know if there’s anything you’d like to see!
On the movie and TV front, I’m once again planning on watching Snowpiercer all week. The next movie on my list is Close Encounters of the Third Kind, an iconic sci-fi film from 1977 that I somehow have never seen. I’m excited to change that! For games, I’m starting Torment: Tides of Numenera, the spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment. I haven’t played Planescape yet, but it’s on my list. Hopefully starting with this one won’t ruin the original in any way. Hopefully more Tales of Phantasia this week too if my friend and I hang out. Have a good one!
Backlog total: 3,151 (+64!)
