A Half-n-Half Affair was another one of the swapsies 2 games I was really really excited for. I had the honor to work on the second half of Mirak's game for the event and his first half had some really great humour, so I was so excited to see what he would do with this game. But believe me, I thought I knew what I was getting into thanks to having finished a game of his and knowing what kind of humour to expect, but I had no fucking idea what was really waiting for me.



A Half-n-Half Affair is about the heroes after they've defeated the dark lord in after a hilarious intro giving us some background about his heart wrenching goals that make you immediately symphatize with the villian and question the morality of the situation and ponder the meaning of life, accompanied by the best damn voice acting in the universe. They did so using the power of four crystals. And then our main character realizes months later that he was supposed to return the crystals but forgot, so now the world is in chaos again.

He teams up with an old pal, Lucinda, who has just recovered from a jaw injury and is ready to go adventuring again. Now they have to return the three crystals (one of them is taken care of automatically for you in a rather... interesting way, by our main character) to their respective owners.



The game plays out like a simple rpg from there. There are three directions in which you can go, each leading to a different spirit. You can do them out of order which is actually pretty cool. You'll encounter a lot of enemies on your way. The enemies are touch encounters that, interestingly enough, are set to initiate battle when you walk into them rather than them chasing you down. It works pretty well and ensures that it requires some skill to dodge battles. The battles themselves are fairly easy after a while. I was overpowered by the time I beat I got to the first boss, but I did try to fight as much as I could to not be underleveled and even grinded a slight bit.

And in case you're not fond of battles, no worries, the game actually presents you with a god mode! I really appreciate this for people like me who aren't big fans of battles (though I didn't end up using god mode because I wanted to give the battles a fair spin first and ended up finding them easy enough to not need it) and just wanna play for the story.

As for the visuals, the game uses RTP for the most part with occasional uses of other stock assets. Mirak does have some great original art in here. The mapping looks pretty nice and there's some creative things done with the tiles here and there that doesn't make a lot of sense perspective wise but looks pretty cool so I can forgive it. The soundtrack is a mix of stock(?) songs and instrumentals of copyrighted songs (looking back, working on Misadventures of a Fae should have definetly made me expect this) that all sound pretty jazzy. I did kinda get really excited when I heard Maniac.

Where the game easily shines the most in is the writing and the production value. The game is fucking hilarious, every second, from beginning to end. I found myself laughing out loud the entire time. Seriously, there was so much here that I want to quote, but I think this is something you seriously have to experience for yourself. This entire game is just comedy gold. The peak of all comedy. I think it's safe to say this game will be my definitive misao pick for funniest game of the year (sorry, Eat a Cactus, you're still a close second!) and I think it well deserves to win said category. Looking past the comedy, there's even some legit great stuff here. The relationship between the two leads was well built and I actually ended up liking them both a lot by the end. The three spirits are all so hilariously well written in their own ways. The game just kept on delivering and delivering increasingly funnier jokes and gimmicky situations the entire time with a constant quality. I love how Mirak even took some serious dialogue that felt like it was very obviously written by Marrend and turned it into a build up for a joke.



And the production value is amazing too, as afromentioned. The cutscenes feel very cinematic and well made. There are no jarring cuts or weird transtions, everything plays out very smoothly. From the characters just doing little spins to well timed activations of stepping animations and stuff, the cutscenes feel so alive and enhance the comedy that is already there by an extra thousand times. You can really tell Mirak knows his shit when it comes to this aspect.

A Half-n-Half Affair is an amazing combined effort that feels like it's going to go being an underrated gem, and I want to be wronged so bad. Seriously, play this game. It's not that long and it's more than worth the play.



I give it four and a half bears out of five.