HERE'S MY REVIEW OF ASDIVINE HEARTS (NINTENDO SWITCH.)

Here's my review for Asdivine Hearts, published by KEMCO and developed by Exe Create Inc. It will be lengthy and spoiler free.

I just beat this game 20 mins ago and man.... I don't even know where to begin with this. Writing reviews aren't really my thing, but this prompted me to do just that.

MUSIC:

This section will be really short as I don't have much to say. The music, while not anything special it's also not terrible. It feels standard for what you expect out of a run of the mil RPG. All areas seem to have matching music. I did like the battle theme though, it has a lot of energy.

GRAPHICS: (Brace yourself, I have a lot to say here.)

Oh boy..... the graphics, I'll start with the good. The sprites could use some more frames, but they are designed well, especially the important characters. The towns, the caves, the forests and all the other areas are colorful..... that's where the good ends.

The NPCs seem to ALL use the same sprite, there's really not so much as a color change. One guy might be a salesman in one town, then a mayor in another, then a bandit in another. Like seriously, outside of the important characters the developers got REALLY lazy with this aspect. It's really jarring and hard to take the game seriously when the guy that tried to rob you is the same exact sprite as the guy that is a mayor of a city, but NOT the same person.

The dungeons, OMG! The layouts are terrible and that's coming from me, a guy that kinda sucks sometimes at maps in RPG Maker. It seems like every area used a generator and that's it. They are all bland and boring, there's very little in the way of "clutter" to shine up the place. Like flowers here and there, different color trees, box or barrels. Almost nothing, it seems like their goal was to speed run the areas to get the game out and do virtually no quality control. You'll see like 4 or 5 different map styles, meaning you'll see the same tile set in multiple areas. They couldn't even at least do a color change. You'd think that for the final area they would put some effort in, but nope.... all the issues above are present.

The monster sprites in battle however are fantastic, they have a ton of detail and animate smoothly. Which is weird that they put so much effort into that, but for like everything else they gave up.

BATTLE SYSTEM: (See the "Various Things" section for a deal breaker about the battle system.)

It's standard fair for a JRPG, with a few exceptions. You have attack, defend, flee, item expected stuff. You have MAGIC and SKILL for the characters "abilities." Magic works as you'd expect, cast a skill for the required MP cost. Skill uses SP, which a character has a limited amount of. Say you use a skill that cost 5 SP, you have to wait an amount of turns for it to come back, or you could use items/magic to do that as well. The one really cool thing is called a Trust Gauge. if you have a full party of the 5 main cast, you can up your Trust Gauge to a max of 100% and once you do, you can use something that's akin to limit break from FF7. Each character has their own "Trust" skill, keep in mind that you have to decide which of the 5 "Trust" skills meet the situation.

STORY:

It's not good and it's not bad, it's just blah. It's what you may expect from a first RPG from a rookie developer. It's the big bad guy trying to destroy everything for plot reason you can read a mile away. The heroes are very cookie cutter, which is not good or bad, just predictable. You can tell the writing isn't done by a group that want's people to actually read all of the text. It has a tendency to ramble and make a 2 min conversation turn into a 5 min conversation. And while some people may be adults, most of them seem to speak like teenagers.... it's weird. All in all, the game took me like 40 hours when it really should have been 20 some. There's way to much backtracking for illogical reasons that just seem like time padding.

VARIOUS THINGS:

Difficulty - Easy.... way to easy, but it shouldn't be due to one fatal flaw. Remember the "Trust" skills, well. One of the main cast has a skill that causes several harsh status effects to the WHOLE enemy group. That includes poison, paralyze and many more. Meaning every time that enemies turn comes up, not only do they not act.... they take massive damage and you can.... USE IT ON ALL BOSSES, including the final one. You have to have all 5 heroes in the party, which you do for the majority of the time. So I would just grind for like 15 min before every boss fight making it trivial. Even without that, there's very little strategy. Once you find a small set of skills, you'll stick with that. Speaking of skills....

Skills - The game as a whole is fairly simple, but the magics/skills can be way to complicated and/or wordy, here's an example. There's a skill called "You have my support" it's description is "A parasol stab with a smile, 1/3 of damage is restored to the party divided by their numbers." There's many skills with long titles and lengthy complicated descriptions. So when you have a battle system as a whole that's boring/easy and mix it with this.... yikes!

Crafting - There's a simple but effective crafting system. I never really needed to grind for resources, because they seems to drop at a fast enough rate from battle. At some point though, because of how easy the game is I didn't feel the need to put time into it much.

Rubix/Jewel System - This is how characters get their skills. You equip a Rubix that you then attach Jewels to, think Materia in FF7. You will get a 4x4 Rubix and jewels with have to fit within that space. It may be a straight line, or look like a Tetris block. It really depends on the jewel and what it does. Over time you will gain bigger Rubix. It creates a interesting dynamic, do you equip that large strength+ 16% or do you equip the light jewel 2 that gives you access to good skills? There's many other examples of things like that.

OVERALL: It was a slog, I didn't have much fun after the first handful of hours. It has a new game plus type of thing, but I won't be doing it. It's not the worst RPG I've ever play, but it's nowhere near the best. I've played MANY games that are better. Hell, most of the RPG Maker games I've played are better then it. I don't mean that as a knock to RPG Maker games, but a knock at a company versus usually a single person. I bought the 4 game switch pack, but honestly I don't know that I'll be playing the other Asdivine games. With it being to easy, broken, boring and visually uninteresting.... this game is better left in it's case on a shelf.