Lilly and Sasha Guardian Angels

I went in knowing this was the third entry in a low-budget RPG Maker trilogy, and that context matters a lot for how you feel about it. Guardian Angels is a solo-player, top-down RPG built in RPG Maker, released in July 2015 by one-person studio John Wizard. The story picks up directly from the second game's cliffhanger, splitting the cast so that twin sisters Lilly and Sasha are separated while the villain Zahhak grows stronger. Two separate party threads converge across roughly 17 hours of main content, with optional side quests bundled into a dedicated quest hub town called Balyang. The thing this series has always done better than its production values suggest it should is light puzzle design woven into exploration. Guardian Angels adds new items like the bird whistle and crane controller specifically to give those puzzles fresh shapes. Combat uses touch encounters rather than random battles, which means you can dodge fights you don't want, and the three difficulty settings let you tune how much the turn-based battling actually matters. You can field seven party members across rotating groups of two to three, and pets fight alongside you, which is a small but welcome touch. A quest journal tracks everything, which any RPG Maker game without one desperately needs. The rough edges are real and worth knowing upfront. The developer's own website went offline years ago, leaving players hunting GameFAQs for a community-written guide when they get stuck. Some maps are recycled from earlier games with cosmetic aging applied, and the interface received no visible polish between entries. A money cap can lock you out of the best weapons if you don't manage gold carefully, and backtracking to earlier areas is not possible, so missed items stay missed. There was also at least one reported soft-lock tied to alt-tabbing, a quirk of the RPG Maker engine. The old user score on Steam hovered around 55 percent, which is a fair reflection of a game that does exactly what it promises but has no ambition to do more. The community reception is genuinely warm from series fans and lukewarm from everyone else. People who played the first two games describe the trilogy as a hidden gem for laid-back RPG fans who appreciate humor, reasonable length, and puzzles over grinding. If you have not played the first two, Guardian Angels will make very little narrative sense, so this is firmly a part-three experience. The save-carry feature from prior entries is there if you want to bring your characters forward, which is a nice bit of continuity for dedicated players. For the right player, which is someone who likes low-stakes RPGs with puzzle dungeons and a light comedic tone and has already spent time with the earlier games, this lands as a satisfying conclusion. For anyone else, the production floor and the lack of developer support today make it a tougher sell.

Alex · Scout Team

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