Castle of the Underdogs : Episode 1

About this game

Castle of the Underdogs is a comedy JRPG game inspired by Suikoden-like games, with strategic turn-based combat, mass recruiting and a castle HQ.



Join Hikaru, a mischevous and carefree girl that learns magic, in an absurd adventure where she must recruit dozens of friends in order to restore the peace in the Bestann Federation despite spreading chaos to most places she steps on.

• A hilarious JRPG
  A story driven comedy with unpredictable situations and outcomes.
  
• Lots of recruitable characters and Castle headquarters
  Recruit characters during your adventure, each with his own ridiculous backstory, and visit them at your Castle HQ. From guys having problems distinguishing reality from fiction to plunger-throwing failed ninjas.
  
• Classic JRPG gameplay
  Learn spells and abilities, steal equipment, explore the country, assault and loot the villagers' houses, find treasures and fight against the bad guys.

• Strategic battle
  Turn-based JRPG battle system that draws its features from both Final Fantasy X and Suikoden series.
  
• Quick tagging
  Control 6 players in battle, 3 at the same time, and tag between them strategically.
  
• Unite Attacks
  Make several characters collaborate to unleash special attacks combining their skills.
  
• Knowledge system
  A complex knowledge system that allows you to discover the enemies strengths and weaknesses, allowing you to plan your battle actions accordingly, as well as collecting the bestiary data.
  
• Create your own runes.
  Imbue the knowledge learnt during your adventure and combine it to create more powerful runes.

• Adjust difficult any time
  5 difficulty levels to choose from, you can either enjoy the adventure without any battle hassle or be challenged by mighty foes.
  
• Flexible save system
  99 saveslots for each playthrough, and all the playthroughs you want.
  
• Minigames
  Several minigames available that will be expanded in both content and number in the following episodes.

Latest news

• Announcements·14 Apr 2023Official

  Castle of the Underdogs released from Early Access!

  {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36669583/e5a749a0e26475cd5034ac69f6becd11189a09bd.png First of all, thanks a lot to everyone who supported and helped me throughout the game's Early Access! The final version of Castle of the Underdogs Ep1 is finally here. Early Access has been a long but fulfilling journey, during which I added most of the features I wanted for the first episode (especially during the first few months of EA). The late EA section was devoted mostly to bring heavyweight features like the Japanese translation, and the low powered GPU renderer, which have helped me releasing on Switch. There are a few bugs that I still need to iron out. Most of them have already been fixed, but I didn't want to risk doing a patch so soon before the game's release without proper testing. I hope you enjoy the game as much as I've enjoyed making it, and thanks again to everybody for your continued support.
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• Announcements·8 Apr 2023Official

  Japanese language added

  {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36669583/e5a749a0e26475cd5034ac69f6becd11189a09bd.png I'm happy to share with you that I have added the Japanese language to my game. As someone who has dreamed of creating a JRPG since childhood, this is a significant milestone for me and a tribute to the country that pioneered this beloved genre. This build is also the release candidate, which brings the Switch and Steam versions to par with each other one week before the launch. Game will be released on both platforms on April 14th.
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• Announcements·5 Nov 2022Official

  Added support for low-end GPUs

  {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36669583/ba36b8811df105f89f9f7a5c6ec0f8b3d87dc113.png After too many months working behind the courtains to port the game to other platforms, I'm 'backporting' the low-end GPU rendering mode to PC. You can choose between the classic and the low-end mode in the graphics options menu. This makes the game playable with decent framerates even on intel GPUs. Several bugs have also been fixed in the process.
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• Patch Notes·14 Jan 2022Official

  Small debug patch

  No meaningful changes made, just added debug code to improve my chances to find a crash I've been searching for a while.
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• Patch Notes·24 Dec 2021Official

  Patch #16 : Release candidate... probably.

  {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36669583/ba36b8811df105f89f9f7a5c6ec0f8b3d87dc113.png This it the first version with all the projected features implemented and a release candidate for the full release. In this update: Added the last achievements, including the Very hard + no flee one. This is a quite tough achievement for people who really like challenges. Now when you're using a Phoenix Hair, the timebar updates so that you know when the revived character's next turn will be. Fixed the poison damage amount, which was incorrectly calculated when waiting. Several memory optimizations and hiccup reduction. A few world map features wouldn't show a message in order for the player to know they could enter a new map by pressing the action button. Now they have it. Fixed a few bugs related to cutscene skipping. Sometimes some characters would get in the middle of the camera when doing an unite. Fixed. Sometimes some characters would get in the middle of the camera when watching an enemy's stats. Fixed. Fixed some problems when retrying battles. From now on my focus will be on fixing bugs and improving the performance of the game. I'm considering moving the game to NetCore to further improve performance, as I'm not very happy with some aspects of the game (specially some hiccups that have proved very hard to fix). If I decide to do the move a big round of testing will be needed again, however if the NetCore version does not significatively improve the problems I'm trying to avoid, this version is a release candidate. Thanks for your understanding and support!
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