Postknight
is an Action RPG released for iOS and Android, created and published by Kurechii. You play as a Postknight, a pink-haired knight who delivers post around the kingdom of Kurestal and resolves whatever conflict happens to occur with the simple tool of fighting the enemies off.
A sequel, Postknight 2 was available through early access for Android and through Testflight on iOS, and was officially released on December 2, 2021. It is set seven years after the events of the original game and follows a new Postknight recruit and their adventures under the shadow of the previous protagonist, now referred to as the "Legendary Postknight".
Postknight and its sequel have examples of:
- Ad Reward: Instead of spending gems, you can watch ads (or use a special ring) to reset the refresh timers on shops, fully recover your health outside of battle, or heal yourself at a route checkpoint if you're injured.
- Ambiguously Bi: Due to the nature of the second protagonist not having a defined or selectable gender aside from body type, the player character and all the love interests in Postknight 2 may appear as such.
- Blow You Away:
- Griffondell is high up in the mountains featuring enemies which can use wind magic. Of note is the boss of the area, the Scandit Chief, who has a Zephyrite Blaster which uses the properties of Zephrite to blast harsh winds to push you back and slow you down.
- The power of wind returns in Quivtol, where Sylphs and Venti can summon tornadoes that hit multiple times, and Venti can blow gusts of wind that do almost no damage, but inflict heavy knockback.
- Cap: Your maximum level in Postknight is 99. As of v2.0, Postknight 2 caps at Level 90, increasing by 10 for each update that introduces a new area.
- Character Customization: You can choose the name of the Postknight you play as, equip various equipment, and increase your stats every time you level up. Postknight 2 adds options to customize your appearance, and vanity items to wear on top of your gear.
- Character Level: You gather Experience Points, and once you gather enough, you can level up and increase your stats.
- Collision Damage: You automatically trade blows with the enemy until either of them goes down. Even if you are the one to attack, you still take contact damage.
- Combat Exclusive Healing: Your healing potion can only be used when you're on a mission. While you're idling in town, you have to wait for your health to recover on its own, or consume food at the inn that recovers health instantly.
- Dash Attack: The very first skill you learn is the Charge, where you point the weapon forward and dash towards the enemy. It deals more damage than a regular attack, and closes the gap against ranged enemies, though it has a cooldown. Heavy weapons in Postknight 2 can also dash forward with Bash, their main defensive move.
- Dark Is Evil: Dark Knight Kraig is associated with Darkness and is the scumbag behind the plague.
- Dark Is Not Evil: Some powerful weapon sets are based around the Darkness, but you can use them for good. The Chaos set is a good example.
- Diminishing Returns for Balance: While the benefits from each stat remain fixed, the costs to raise them gradually increase the higher the stats go up.
- Dump Stat: Early in Postknight, the stats are fairly balanced, but this balance breaks down significantly after a few areas, with INT and VIT becoming far less useful. Postknight 2 makes both stats more useful by improving their defensive utility and making sure to give special bonuses every five points.
- INT provides magic defense, but enemies later on do too much damage for the defense to be useful. Its other effect, boosting your experience gain, is surely convenient, but reaching the level cap is easier than it seems because you have to constantly grind trails for coins and item drops.
- VIT increases your maximum health by 12 points, a minimal bonus when enemies typically deal hundreds of points of damage per hit even with endgame armor and defense buffs. Leveling up also increases your maximum health, and by a higher amount than VIT.
- An Economy Is You: Merchants in each area sell items useful to the Postknight, may they be gifts, monster drops, or new weapons and armor specific to that area. Downplayed, since in the delivery quests you sometimes have to act as a third party between a merchant and their client.
- Elaborate Equals Effective: Most weapons and equipment start off plain and simple, but as they are upgraded by a blacksmith, they get additional decoration and fancy designs which somehow improves their stat bonuses.
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep":
- Due to the Hello, [Insert Name Here] nature of the Postknight protagonist, people in the sequel usually address him, if ever, as the "Legendary Postknight".
- The bosses in Postknight do not have a proper name, and are only referred to by their title (Bandit Chief, Pirate Darkbeard, etc.)
- Experience Points: Earn by defeating monsters and delivering knightmail while you're not playing the game.
- Experience Booster: Multiple methods:
- Each INT stat boosts experience by 2%.
- Some equipment sets boost experience, like the Adventurer's Set which boosts experience gain by 5%.
- Some equipment have the hidden property "Thrive High", which gives a 5% experience boost, or the better "Thrive High II", which gives a 10% experience boost.
- The Experience Ring boosts experience gain by 100% permanently.
- Fireballs: Bandit Mages and cultists fire them. So do some slugs in Helix.
- Flavor Text: Every item, enemy, and skill has some description for it whether it be related to the subject itself, a quote from a historical figure, or a summary of a fictional story.
- Flowers of Romance: You deliver a bouquet for someone's date in one of the Delivery Quests at Shello Bay. In the second game, in the Blossom Fastival, you can deliver such bouquets in several Delivery Quests and give flowers to all your love interests for memories!
- Forced Level-Grinding: Because Postknight does not let you avoid enemy attacks manually and consistently, you can come across tough enemies that can overwhelm you through sheer stats. You would have to grind for materials and experience and improve your stats and equipment to stand a chance.
- "Get Back Here!" Boss: Postknight features bosses at the end of every area who cycle between running away from you and launching a ranged attack, ensuring you cannot deal damage unless you actively charge at them.
- A Girl in Every Port: In each town you visit, you will far more often than not meet a new love interest in the area.
- Hammerspace: Items to be delivered are stored in a different dimension through spatial scrolls, allowing Postknights to deliver entire buildings with relative ease.
- Hard Levels, Easy Bosses: In the first game, most bosses are basically block projectiles, charge at them, repeat, and can easily be stunned. The mobs, on the other hand, are dangerous if combined well. The sequel averts this, as while the mobs are hard, so are the later bosses.
- Harem Genre: The first game can play out like this due to the Relationship system. The sequel keeps the system, but adds in male characters to the harem mix as the new protagonist is not defined by gender and can wear both male and female outfits. Even acknowledged by Dahlia in the sequel as she reminisces the time she and Camellia both fell in love with the Legendary Postknight a few years ago.
- Healing Potion: The Potion is one of the three actions Postknights can do in combat. Aside from recovering health, they also temporarily buff one of your stats. Your starting Red Potion, for example, recovers health and grants a bit of defense against melee attacks.
- Hello, [Insert Name Here]: Before your duty as a Postknight even begins, you are given a prompt to decide on the name the Captain in charge would address you.
- Humans Are the Real Monsters:
- In the first game, while you face actual monsters, they are never the true threat. Human gangs are.
- Subverted in the Sagacia area of the second game. The feared Evil Demon is a human, but he is no worse than the Aegles and is also the benevolent Kind Spirit.
- Improbable Use of a Weapon: The protagonist of Postknight would always use a thrusting attack as part of their Charge, even with weapons that would deal more damage with being swung around. Justified as they haven't learned the appropriate fighting stances and techniques for the other weapons and instead do what comes natural to them.
- Job Title: Postknights are your average individuals turned knights by an organization, and given combat training to ensure they can deliver goods safely across dangerous paths.
- Legacy Character: Downplayed (?) in the sequel. The second game's protagonist, while not having any connection to the first, is said by many to resemble the Legendary Postknight, who is none other than the first protagonist. The Legendary Postknight has not made an appearance in the game and his whereabouts have been left ambiguous at best, but tales of his deeds in the first game are still being told.
- Life Meter: Present during gameplay and in the main hub. Restoring health in battle requires potions, skills, or held items, while health slowly regenerates outside of battle. You cannot enter a battle at critical HP unless sufficient health is restored (either by waiting, using resources, or watching an ad).
- Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Postknights can defend themselves with a shield to block incoming projectiles and weaken enemy blows for a short while, also decreasing knockback, which lets them close the distance on ranged enemies.
- Luck Stat: AGI (DEX in some localizations) affects the chance of landing Critical Hits or randomly dodging enemy attacks. Outside of special skills or perks, these are the only game mechanics which occur at random.
- Mass Monster-Slaughter Sidequest: Bounty quests appear on the notice board, which involve defeating a certain type of enemy, and are a consistent source of gems. How difficult they are depends on how generous the game is with spawning them.
- Metal Slime: Postknight 2 has the Blooplet, a Cute Slime Mook stealing a bag of scrolls which appears very rarely on partially-cleared patrols. The moment they spot you, they run away and use water magic to keep you at bay. While they take only 1 or 2 damage from every hit, they have very low HP and reward you with loads of coins and the rare Bag of Bloops upon defeat.
- Money Spider: Defeated enemies drop money, though human enemies usually drop more than the average Mook.
- More Friends, More Benefits: Every character you can bond with will give more items periodically depending on their current Relationship Values.
- Only Shop in Town: There's only one firmly-established market in each area that handles everything they would need. All the other buildings are there for upgrading your equipment.
- Power-Up Food: Postknight 2 introduces various food items which either recover some health or provide temporary boosts to stats. These food items include muffins, soup, fish, bacon, and steak.
- Recurring Boss: The boss you fight at the end of every area is the same person, just with different clothes and weapon. Specifically, he is a former Postknight who was poor at his job, seeking revenge after losing his chance at inheriting the title of Commander to his more competent brother.
- Regenerating Health: While in the main area, offline or not, you slowly regenerate health. In Postknight, you can spend coins at the inn to slightly raise the recovery rate and get back in action sooner. For Postknight 2, eating food raises food by a percentage or specific HP.
- Relationship Values: On your journey to deliver mail, you can come across characters you can bond with outside of the story. By giving them gifts they like, you can improve your relations with them and they will give better gifts in return.
- In Postknight, the characters can sometimes appear at checkpoints on the routes, replacing the Travelling Merchant, and they will fully heal you for free as opposed to requiring an ad to heal only 1000 HP for the latter. Increasing your relationship level improves the rate at which they appear.
- Repeatable Quest: Postknights can accept deliveries from postboxes, which rewards them with Postknight Tokens to improve their standing, as well as light item drops and EXP. These quests are predetermined and involve delivering the same item to the same NPC.
- Rocket-Tag Gameplay: Late in the first game, defensive stats become very weak compared to raw offensive power.note This notably applies to both you and the enemy, resulting in characters getting knocked out in at most eight to ten hits. The defensive measures which remain useful at this point, like evading attacks or stunning the opponent, are usually dictated by the Random Number God.
- "Save the World" Climax: In the first game, the stakes are very low most of the time, as you simply make deliveries, win the hearts of women and fend off criminal gangs. But in Fractured Forest, the stakes rise exponentially, as you have to save the whole Kurestal from a lethal plague.
- Scratch Damage: No matter how much defense you have, you always take at least 1 point of damage from attacks. Enemies can also receive scratch damage if your Attack isn't high enough, with Blooplets in Postknight 2 always taking scratch damage due to their 100% physical damage reduction.
- Shared Universe: Is part of Kurechii's line of games that feature the kingdom of Kurestal. There are instances where some characters from one series pop up in another. For example, Daphne from King's League II appears in Postknight 2 as the player's go-to merchant for its "Dungeons" game mode.
- Sirens Are Mermaids: The Sirens of Shello Bay have female upper bodies, but fish tail lower bodies.
- Sugar Apocalypse: While you're working on passing your exams in the sequel, word gets out that a dragon incinerated Pompon, and by the time you arrive, only the inn is left standing. Magnolia's the only one still there, and the village chief from the first game died of old age before he could name a successor.
- Tennis Boss:
- The Pirate Boss of Shello Bay fires three cannonballs at you. If you have your shield up you can deflect the third shot back at him, stunning him for a while.
- The pirate captain of Eventide Cove, Baaleen, can only be stunned if you use the offensive skill to send his bomb back at him.
- Tier System: The area where you found your equipment dictates how high their stat bonuses are, with later areas having equipment with higher stats.
- Took a Level in Badass:
- Tedric in the first game is a struggling Postknight. In the second game, he is an instructor.
- Each time you face the villain of the first game, he grows stronger.
- The Blooplets in the first game are an average Mook. In the second game, they are slippery thieves that reward you greatly if you catch them.
- Unstoppable Mailman: The Postknight is basically a mailman who fights through hordes of monsters and bandits to make deliveries.
- Wake-Up Call Boss:
- In the sequel, Dark Knight Kraig is the first serious boss you will face. He is very aggressive and leaves next to no breathing room, has a stance that punishes you for attacking him, and has a three-hit attack which is difficult to block.
- While Kraig tests your stats, his daughter Razielle is the first boss that tests how well you manage your skills. She uses her Guardians to keep you at bay, and charges up a devastating magical explosion at low health.
- Wing Ding Eyes: The Postknight has swirled eyes when stunned or knocked out.
- Wrench Wench: Asteria, one of the girls you can bond with in the first game, is a blacksmith, and she shows it in the second game.
