In the still very early days of the App Store, back in the fall of 2009, Crescent Moon Games released a defining title for the mobile platform in Ravensword: The Fallen King. While it certainly had its flaws and rough edges, Ravensword showed that there was an appetite for an original Western-style open-world RPG on mobile. But while it offered an enjoyable adventure, Ravensword did lack in many of the RPG-like elements fans were looking for like character progression, multiple classes, and loot. Crescent Moon would address these desires about a year later with the release of another huge mobile-original RPG called Aralon: Sword and Shadow.

One of my favorite things about Aralon is how it came to be. It originally started as a project by two-person studio Galoobeth Games who spent years crafting an extremely robust RPG engine for mobile devices. The problem was that while they were fantastic coders, they weren’t all that great at art, and so early versions of Aralon looked something along the lines of an early N64 game. Basic textures, blocky character models, and stiff animations. The folks at Crescent Moon caught wind of the project and worked out a deal where they would give the game an “extreme RPG makeover" by completely redoing all the art and helping flesh it out to reach its full potential. The improvement was striking in these side-by-side before and after screenshots we posted prior to the game’s release, but it really hit home when w...