Pandora's Spirit

This is a free fangame I've been whittling away at on-and-off in my personal spare time for the past 5+ years, a weird crossover between Touhou, Disgaea, BlazBlue, and a whole bunch of other things which I don't own the rights to, though the story is completely original with zero references or connection to the stories of the games I took the sprites from, and all the characters are treated as if they were original ("Patch" is technically a separate character from Patchouli Knowledge for instance) so you do not need to be familiar with any of the source material at all to get into it. (tbh I was barely familiar with the source material myself when I first started work on this, I first got the idea for it from spending a lot of time on The Spriters Resource)

You play as a mute amnesiac girl nicknamed "Pandora" (played by Utsuho Reiuji) who lost all her power and memories after being struck by lightning in a great storm. Shortly after regaining consciousness, she meets the Amitava sisters (played by Seraphina, Artina, and Sage), who were even more badly injured in the same storm, so they agree to help each other, as Pandora finds them Power Gems to get back on their feet and they can direct her to Sentinels of Ability to get her own powers back, over the course of a big Metroidvania/collect-a-thon platforming adventure across the whole continent they all live on. Though that's only the first half of the story, there's an entire equally big second adventure after that one's done in which Pandora has to save some people from ghost kidnappings only for the stakes to be raised higher than anyone would've imagined, and there's also a number of other optional side ventures and achievement missions as well including a bonus third mini-adventure where you play as one of Pandora's friends! There's an absolute ton to do, 100% completion typically takes me 2-3 days minimum, and while I tried to keep most of it on the easier side out of tending to be more of a casual-minded gamer myself, there are plenty of particularly challenging parts scattered throughout...

Contains quite a bit of swearing (mostly from one character in particular), and a few flashing images. 

UPDATE SEPTEMBER 2024: It's now been a year since I first published this game, and to celebrate I decided to publish another update! Mostly pertaining to nerfing certain parts of the game and making it easier to complete certain boss fights & missions, there's even now an optional skip for the whole Daiyamondo Temple area for anyone experiencing the framerate lag I mentioned having in that area in the Important Notes below, but I also added in a completely optional harder version of a different boss fight for after you complete one of the post-game achievements (full details can be found in my most recent devlog post which you can find further below). If you downloaded the game before, replacing the .exe file should be sufficient, though the optional boss fight will only be accessible if you also replace the "sprites" folder with what's now included in the zip. In either case so long as you don't replace the "save.ini" file, you won't lose any progress you had before.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

- The game comes with a folder of 5 fonts which you're required to install manually on your computer for everything to display correctly, just open each of the .ttf files individually and hit the "Install" button on each. Also, since two of the fonts are in the same font family, one needs to be installed before the other for it to look right, as a result I marked them with "install first" and "install second" (if the "install second" one is installed first, it replaces all instances of the first). 

- The "sprites" folder doesn't require you to do anything, just make sure it's in the same root folder as the .exe file for the game.

- A few later boss battle areas have frozen up / crashed for me while loading if I was playing for too long (e.g. if I tried to complete the whole first adventure in one sitting without closing the game). I *think* I've found a way to get those areas to consistently safely load correctly, and absolute worst-case scenario, they will always load fine if you close and reopen the game after it freezes and return to the same area, but just to be absolutely safe, those areas do have signs in front of them warning you to save before you go in. (If you can change the screen mode from fullscreen to windowed by pressing F4 while the loading icon is still onscreen, that means the game crashed and you'll need to reopen.)

- Just in case of emergency, I also have a secret debug key built into the game that can reset the current room you're in. It's not normally active but you can press Shift+F12 to turn it on (the screen will slightly flash briefly when you do), then from any point on until you close the game you can reset the room by hitting Backspace.

Less important (but still important) notes: 

- I'd recommend not having other GPU-intensive programs running at the same time as this game, that will likely cause some framerate slowdown (I noticed this while screen recording this game for a walkthrough video, the program I used to record caused some VERY noticeable slowdown in the Daiyamondo Temple area and some less obvious slowdown in a few other areas, none of which was there when I ran the game by itself. I might also just not have the best graphics card or something like that, but idk that's a thing to keep in mind)

- There is a glitch exclusive to Windows 8 and 8.1 (constant to literally anything made in Game Maker 8.0) where if enough sound effects overlap or just play too loud, the game closes automatically. I've done my best to make sure this doesn't happen and that the game should be completable on that OS, but just warning you that's a thing that happens. Win10 users obviously need not worry about this point.

- I programmed this game on Windows 10 (and started work for the first two years on a Windows 8.1 machine, all the while using the old 8.0 version of Game Maker which came out in the Windows XP era to program all of it). I haven't tested it on Win11, or Win7 or older since I don't have access to any working computers with those OSs, so sorry if some random glitch I don't know about comes up on those. 

I really don't have any expectations of this game getting any kind of wider attention, but hey, I had fun making it and thought it was worth putting out in the world, so I hope anyone who might come across it by chance ends up enjoying it :)

If you get lost and want a walkthrough for the game (or if you're the kind of person who'd prefer to watch the game over playing it, absolutely no shame if you are and people just experiencing the story will still very much make me happy), I've uploaded one to YouTube which can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5vahqGQFWfykyiQIsj5CYMEk8ADW2QK6