Jay's Journey

"Oh my gosh! A talking kitty!"

An Affectionate Parody RPG made for RPG Maker 2000.

Jay, an everyman living in a town like any other, and his friend Carol, are having an average day... until they encounter a talking lion. Said lion was once a man named Atolla, who was turned into his current form by the evil wizard Antignarot, who wants to - you guessed it - Take Over the World. Atolla enlists Jay and Carol to aid him in his quest to stop Antignarot, and thus begins the titular Journey.

Said Journey is full of colorful characters, witty dialogue, and every RPG trope and cliche in the book, which are relentlessly skewered by the cast. Lampshades for everyone!

The game is noteworthy in that 90% of its graphics and music are made up of the default RPG Maker 2000 materials - more often than not, a sign of a game to avoid - but it makes up for this with clever design and superb writing.

It can be downloaded here.

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Tropes used in Jay's Journey include:

• All in a Row: In towns only. On the world map the party's in your pocket.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: According to Jay, the party's limited to four because the game was made with RPG Maker.
• Bait and Switch Credits: You can safely ignore everything in the opening scroll; it even eventually admits, toward the end, that it's got nothing to do with the game.
• Baleful Polymorph: Atolla
• Bare Clawed Lion: Atolla. No skills and no weapons, but doesn't need them: his normal attack hits like a truck. Puff and Globule can't equip weapons either, although they do have skills.
  • Atolla also turns out to have the Martial Artist class once you turn him back into a human, if only to justify why he still can't equip weapons. Oddly, his attack animation is the same as in lion form, implying he has claw weapons of some kind.
• Can Not Tell a Lie: Puff, just like all the other wind dragons, is literally unable to speak falsehoods.
• Captain Ersatz: Shade strongly resembles Shadow from FFVI, down to having a past revealed entirely through flashbacks.
• Chain of Deals: The game contains an extensive trading sidequest. You need to complete most of it to get the airship, and, optionally, the rest of it to get Jay's Infinity+1 Sword.
• Color Coded for Your Convenience: The gem dragons.
• The Ditz: Max.
• Dreaming the Truth: Gaia gets a dream that consists entirely of characters repeating lines from earlier in the game (and her reactions to them), which helps her realize some important things. And to repeat all of the game's Running Gags in a single scene.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: The six elements come in pairs that are strong against each other: fire vs. ice, wind vs. earth, and light vs. dark. In addition, each magic-user (Carol, Frost, Puff, Gaia, Cindel, Shade, and Pixie) in the party specializes in one element.
  • Except Globule.
• Frictionless Ice: In the bonus dungeon. Frost can walk on it normally, however.
• Funetik Aksent: One NPC in Jay's hometown of Pecot speaks with a cockney accent for no apparent reason.
• Glass Cannon: Pixie is the best example of this, as she learns ridiculously strong nonelemental magic but has few hitpoints.
• Global Airship: You go through several boats as well as a baloon and a tank. The different vehicles can only travel over certain terrains (shallow water, deep water, cliffs, mountains), requiring you to switch between them so often that the characters begin complaining that they really need an airship. They get one.
• Goldfish Poop Gang: Thinbeard the pirate and his dragon, Az. Thinbeard is constantly referred to, in game, as "Annoying recurring wannabe RPG villain".
• Half-Human Hybrid: Carol, who is one-quarter elf.
• The Hero: Jay, of course.
• Idiot Hero: Max. Of course, what do you expect from someone whose brain has been scrambled by an evil spell?
• Inexplicable Treasure Chests: Lampshaded, of course.
• Interchangeable Antimatter Keys: Keys tend of mysteriously disappear once used. Jay thinks he keeps dropping them at first.
• Irrelevant Sidequest: The trading sidequest.
• Lethal Joke Character: See Magikarp Power, below. Also, Max is the best healer in the game.
• Let's Split Up, Gang!: The final dungeon AND boss.
• Load-Bearing Boss: Antignarot
• Lost Forever: Ames will be lost forever as a party member if he dies fighting the Emerald Dragon. You either need to beat the dragon with just Ames and Cindel or use a secret passage to fight it with Jay and the others first.
• Love Potion: Once you find her again, Carol is under the influence of one of these. Luckily, Gaia finds out and swaps it with grape juice.
• Magikarp Power: Globule the slime starts out with pathetically low stats, but levels up much faster than the others and gains huge stat growths at later levels. By max level, all his stats are maxed automatically and he learns devastating spells.
• Magic Knight: Cindel is the leader of the magic division of Pecot's military.
• The Medic: Max only learns healing magic, although most of the mages learn at least one healing move.
• Medium Awareness: Almost every character exhibits this.
• Metal Slime: Purple slimes evade most physical attacks and tend to flee but drop tons of experience.
• The Mole: Frost. Despite the fact that you also have a mind-reader on the team. He comes back.
• My Name Is Not Durwood: Jay can never remember Antignarot's name. He later admits that he's just doing it to annoy him/for fun.
• No Fourth Wall: Really, the game doesn't break the fourth wall so much as burn it to the ground and gleefully dance on the ashes, from the introductory sequence onwards. It's where half of the humor in the game comes from.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Antignarot becomes one of these after Jay and Carol put the idea in his head.
• One-Winged Angel: Antignarot does this after you beat his human form.
• Party Scattering: Happens fairly early on; it even takes a while before Jay manages to find all of his old teammates.
• Plot Tailored to the Party: Each of the puzzles in the bonus dungeon can only be solved by one party member except Ames, who just gets a teleporter to the end. This prompts him to yell at the programmer for being uncreative and not giving him a unique skill.
• Pop Quiz: One pops up randomly in Antignarot's tower. Jay stammers a bit from sheer confusion.
• Redemption Demotion: Used and lampshaded when Shade joins you. See this game's entry on the article.
• Running Gag: "It's the truth!" Max's stupidity and obsession with talking kitties.
• Save the Princess: Your primary goal for the first section of the game is to rescue the queen of Pecot.
• Secret Character: There are two: Globule the slime, who can be found in the Pecot castle sewer, and Ames, who joins you if he doesn't die fighting the Emerald Dragon.
• Sequel Hook: So many. The hooded lady, the pendant, Carol's elf grandmother, Pixie's seal on Xanabas... Too bad the sequel was canceled.
• Solve the Soup Cans: Lampshaded with the Puzzle Rooms in each town and Antignarot's fortress.
• Standard Status Effects: There's even a character who specializes in them.
• Stripperiffic: Lampshaded heavily with Gaia, the flirty earth mage who runs around in a bikini.
• Take Over the World: Antignarot's original goal is to take over the world because it sounds like fun. He gives this up once Jay explains to him the exact logistics behind what taking over the world would entail. Hearing this, Antignarot resolves to simply destroy the world instead. Much simpler.
• That Man Is Dead: "Shade" says this of Tezla. Unusually for this trope, she isn't speaking in metaphor.
• The Unintelligible: Globule talks in phrases similar to "glubble blub blubble". Upon completing a sidequest to get a Slime Medal, Globule and another slime spew out so many message boxes consisting of nothing but bubble-speech, even the game gets confused.
• Urban Legend of Zelda: If you don't rescue Ames, then when you reach the Dragon's Den, you'll find Ames who claims to still be alive through one of these. Then he admits he's just messing with you, tricks like those never work.
• Weapon of Choice: All the human player characters except Ames can equip two different weapons. For example, Jay can equip swords and katanas, and Carol can equip staves and bows.
• Welcome to Corneria: Lampshaded when an NPC won't respond to Jay's requests to unblock the path to a shortcut.
  • At one point, Jay also demonstrates that invoking this is the best way to fool someone who is looking for a main/player character.
• White Magic: Cindel is a white mage, specializing in Light elemental magic. However, she is not the best healer.
• You Called Him X, It Must Be Serious: You can tell when things get serious when Jay calls Antignarot by his proper name.