Two Halves' wibbly wobbly history

Long ago, about 02005-07, I produced an RPG known as Two Halves. To this date, it is my only game other people have played. It was released in irregular betas to Kirby's Rainbow Resort — a forum I was a part of.

The story is pretty terrible. The self-insert main character was teleport-kidnapped by a space-army fixated on reviving their demi-god warrior to fight a "demon" alien. The main character was a reincarnation of half of the dead demi-god. Also an internet forum was a real world location. It's all kind of a mess because I would alter or make additions to the story over time as I was inspired to. It's really obvious when I look at it.

RM2003 Original Version

Two Halves was initially inspired Halo of all things. It starts off on a space-station, has human soldiers fighting alien ones, and it has a zombifying species that was something of the game's Demonic Spiders. Fable turns up with the self-insert sneaking into a jail to break someone out only to get captured instead. The real-world-forum's map was later redone from scratch to be reminiscent of Golden Sun's Lemuria, right down to the MIDI.

The game might not have ever even been played by anyone else if I hadn't got the idea to include the aforementioned forum as a real place, and I wanted to include a crapload of cameos of said members — which made everyone want to play it to see their character show up.

RMXP Lost Restart

I decided to drop the game so I could start it over from scratch. I realised the story was a mess and I wanted to make sure it was consistent as well as strip some of the unnecessary elements. There was also the fact that RMXP was the new and interesting engine at the time, and I was going all furry.

This version later actually forked off to become Disarrayed Unity, by abandoning one half of the story and expanding on the other.

I no longer have any record of this version, either due to drive-wipe or the one CD backup that should have it ... does not. The project folder is empty. Did the CD-R experience bitrot? Did I never actually back it up? I don't know. :c

RM2003 "Remix" Version

Further still, I get a second re-imagining idea for it. This threw out the embarrassing self-insertion that started it all, but ran with the elements that were copied from Halo: warring armies, sci-fi, and a mission-based structure. In the original, they were just chapters. This time I wanted to make the game linear, where you were free to do whatever within a mission area, but once you moved on you couldn't come back. If you completed certain conditions, you would get bonus missions between the core ones. In some regards I was trying to pull a Final Fantasy XIII before FFXIII.

The MC was now an agent (without godly reincarnation) who had snuck aboard the space-army's space station with the intent on stopping said army. Except the aliens also did that at the same time, so in the chaos he ends up betraying his employer and assisting the army after all. This concept isn't without its own issues though, centred around several single-biome-themed planets part of some interplanetary pact.

I'm not one to create space-faring style sci-fi, so I look at this and it seems too ridiculous to work. In the first version I didn't explain a demon, demi-god, technology powering magic, or all sorts... but this time I was trying to so, so for other things to be unexplained instead was weird.

RMXP/VXA Urban Fantasy Version

The third version was stripped of even more ideas. It instead follows more an overall message I had thought of for the second version, a "there are two halves to every story" sort of shtick.

It was an urban fantasy instead of a space-level sci-fi, and it focused on some teenagers trying to find their friend who had gone missing while trying not to be killed by the monster/alien soldiers. Like the original Two Halves there are points that I feel are too inspired by certain things — it being urban fantasy, characters going to school, attacked by monsters, that's all Persona 3-like. There's a scene in a subway that was inspired by Cloverfield. Some later elements and mechanics are even more Persona-like. (They basically get Personas.)

It goes out of its way to actually explain why the human soldiers are fighting the aliens, who/what the "demon" antagonist is, and it all feels a bit better than previous versions. I consider the explanations spoilers, but it was basically like this — the monsters were after the protagonists because they broke a "law" of the city that they lived in, and the human army were an illuminati-type-thing that wanted to stop the monsters from going after those that broke those laws.

The Future??

I still like the latest version. Like with many other game concepts, I am trying to finish this setup for Witness to Unity so that I can reuse it for any other game ideas. I know, I think of way too many ideas and think too big so as a result I don't get anywhere with anything.

Of course, as of 2023, I have now leaned hard into the last incarnation's Persona influence by considering just patently making a Persona game.