Preface: This review is heavy on critical analysis. Spoilers ahoy!

So this guy named Will meets up with some friends of his. While they are driving to a restaurant a truck driver crashes into them. They end up in hell where they must confront their demons, both figuratively and literally, In order to escape their prison they must become better people as well as -

Oh wait, that’s what I wanted the game to be about. Sorry, my mistake.

This game is a prettied up mishmash of potentially good ideas and script errors by a group of well-known rm* developers - LouisCyphre, Archeia Nessiah and Happy. It was also supposed to be released roughly three years before it actually was for a short game contest - but you know that phrase, something or other about plans and mice.

Let’s get to that review, shall we?

1. The World

The setting can effectively be defined as a loose reimagining of hell. ‘Hell’ is made up of seven tiers and comes in a variety of flavors depending on your current tier: cavernous, lava-filled, cold and spacey, swamp-like and so on. The visuals go a long way towards presenting a world of dark mystery and ominous foreboding, while the audio is usually well-chosen and suitably atmospheric.

Narratively, the setting is... somewhat neat, but the problems that infect the story and characters eventually drag down our pseudo-hell, as well. The place becomes significantly less interesting the more characters talk about it - it ends up being a relatively tame and normal monarchical society (but with demons!) instead of some creepy atmospheric limbo wherein our characters must struggle to survive. That is not to say the former couldn’t have worked, but we were initially lead to believe it would be the latter, and...

You know what? Let’s just go on to the next section.

2. The Narrative

Ill Will is the result of two different authors wanting to write two different stories.

One author wanted this to be a character-driven piece. In this story, doubt, fear and paranoia drive a wedge between the party as they scramble about and try to survive the hellish denizens of purgatory. A demon named Loki appears and, for his own amusement, psychologically tortures them via false hope and general demon trickery. Only after hours of psychologically torture and angsting would they realize they belong on this hell because they are horrible people. Or maybe they’d even escape somehow, after sufficient navel-gazing.

The other author wanted this to be a story about the setting. In this story, there’s a stronger focus on demon politics and hierarchy. The characters want to escape, and in doing so they effectively become citizens of purgatory, using their powers and abilities to work their way up the tiers. A demon named Loki appears and he has a plan to overthrow the current demon despot, Flamberge. He manipulates the party into screwing Flamberge over and claiming the world of Purgatory for himself.

Both ideas are potentially good, but neither author was strong enough to pull it off and it transformed into some horrifying half-breed that takes the worst elements of both stories and throws it into a melting pot of Engrish and typos.

In the beginning, dysfunction, doubt and lack of trust are established amongst the party, but it is all swept under the rug by the fourth tier. Suddenly, we are talking about demon cities, and are attempting to prevent demon overlord Flamberge from being assassinated or something! The entire cast proceeds to play catch with the idiot ball and everyone falls for the worst and most obvious ploy ever devised by an antagonist. Even when the characters do figure out Loki’s trick, everyone’s content to beat the shit out of eachother anyway.

After you kill everyone for no reason at all, you then have to fight the main character’s big brother. He’s a whiny, self-loathing prick who feels the need to prove himself. To do this, he sent you into hell via a demonic rite so that you could conveniently meet Loki, obtain magic powers, kill everything that moves and display your horrible decision-making skills. He then transforms into the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca to kill you. For reference:

Tezcatlipoca (English pronunciation: /tɛskɑːtliˈpɒkə/, Classical Nahuatl: Tezcatlipōca pronounced ) was a central deity in Aztec religion, and his main festival was the Toxcatl ceremony celebrated in the month of May. One of the four sons of Ometeotl, he is associated with a wide range of concepts, including the night sky, the night winds, hurricanes, the north, the earth, obsidian, enmity, discord, rulership, divination, temptation, jaguars, sorcery, beauty, war and strife. His name in the Nahuatl language is often translated as "Smoking Mirror" and alludes to his connection to obsidian, the material from whichmirrors were made in Mesoamerica and which was used for shamanic rituals.

So did I enjoy the story?

Sort of. Just not for the right reasons.

3. The Characters

As was mentioned in the previous section, the initial setup for the characters suggests that they will be an inherently dysfunctional group that needs to work together to survive. This could have been interesting if done right, even if my initial impression was that they were all annoying.

As of the fourth tier, however, all the infighting and character development stops entirely. The result is a significant mood whiplash - suddenly, everyone’s happy to work together and no one has any doubts. Sure, they each still remember to say something in every cutscene, but they no longer develop as people and no one has any sort of climax. It makes the late game a real drag because you aren’t at all motivated to see these characters through their adventure. It doesn't help that no one has any sort of personality - well, except Jo, Will’s former girlfriend - but she's still just the one-dimensional 'snotty pretty girl' who's been in every teen romcom since time immemorial.

So the player characters are left half-baked. What about the NPCs? Well, everyone except Loki appears past the halfway point so there’s no time to get invested in them. You also end up fighting every single one of them with paper-thin rationale. There’s a bit more going on with Loki, but his scheming and trickery ends up being cheesy and contrived - by the end he’s every generic jRPG villain ever and impossible to take seriously. Loki is then one-upped by Will’s older brother, who is most certainly a top contender for worst rm* antagonist ever.

So yeah. Don’t expect anything out of the characters.


Red King and his pal are complete boneheads. Terrible pun intended.

4. The Gameplay

The combat itself is probably the game’s single finest quality, which is good because it’s also what you will be engaging yourself in 90% of the time. Combat is challenging and involved - jamming the attack key will most certainly get you killed. Each enemy attacks in a distinct manner and learning how to deal with each of them is rewarded. You can customize your main character’s stats, too, which is neat. Dungeons are single-minded in their pursuit of getting you into combat as much as possible, and while the frequency of monster encounter pits is irritating it is pretty easy to avoid them if you are paying attention. It’s pretty good stuff on a fundamental level.

Then there’s traces. Traces are your only slot of equipment. They are also the way you learn skills - level up with a trace equipped and you will learn its associated skills. This is sort of okay, but it gets really annoying to micromanage all the traces you have, as you gather tons of the suckers. For the main character it is especially obnoxious, as you need to swap traces nigh constantly to learn all the new skills. For some reason traces have a level requirement, but they are for the most part meaningless - in most instances you will already be past the level requirements by the time you get the trace. Additionally, it would really be nice to have more variety in trace effects. New traces don’t really feel new because they are simply the ones you got on the prior floor with slightly improved stats. It was a bit disappointing!

As for the negatives... Well, there are most certainly balance issues. Aaron and Ethan are weak when it comes to dealing damage, so they are relegated to support characters if you use them - which would be fine, but their wide array of offensive options goes pretty much unused. Francesca gets the full range of fire magic but is absolutely terrible as a mage, frequently doing zilch for damage with any of the spells. The spell costs for some abilities are outrageously high - to the point where it is difficult for characters without magic drain to cast a high-end spell more than once or twice. The options for physical skills are oddly specialized and only a couple are useful. The final traces all contain terrible spells and abilities, which was rather disappointing. None of these problems is really a big deal by itself, but they add up and the basic result is that even though you have tons of options for skills to put on your characters, only the main character really has a diverse set of options - your four friends end up pigeon-holed, using only the most practical of abilities.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of gameplay comes in the form of ailments. Any enemy that constantly spams status spells is a bastard - especially if they are of the (alarmingly common) AoE variety. Many of these fights can get obnoxious, and sometimes downright unfun. There’s seriously a boss that just sits there and spams sleep and poison the entire fight, which is incredibly irritating and a waste of my time. The prominence of these enemies would be more acceptable if the developer gave more options to deal with ailments - lord knows there’s tons of things to protect you from magic - but no. Only two things in the entire game can protect you: the spell Status Lock and a Null Ailment passive that shows up extremely late in the game. The Null Ailment passive is naturally great, but shows up when you are like level 80 and can only be used by two characters. Why are there no lesser versions that nullify specific ailments? I’d have used them!

As for the Status Lock spell... Well, how to put this nicely...


Ill Will is a buggy piece of shit.


The lack of testing is glaring, especially later in the game. Status Lock doesn’t work, a skill named Predator crashes the game under certain conditions, tons of enemies will just run out of MP and stop acting entirely, two traces don’t teach you skills they should, returning to certain cutscene maps after you leave results in NPCs that shouldn’t be there, some maps lose their special effects or have weird visual glitches that occur under certain conditions, some spells that clearly should have spell costs don’t... The list goes on and on. Some of these are so obvious and so easy to fix - I have no idea why they are still present.

It’s also worth noting that you might need to restart the last boss several times even though he is a pushover simply because he uses Predator. This is as aggravating as it sounds and made me want to strangle the developer, because he clearly never tested this fight.

So yeah, the game is fun... When you aren’t cursing at the monitor, anyway.

5. The Aesthetics

Game looks and sounds good! The combat interface and menus are clean and easy to read, the music is appropriately used and well chosen, the character sprites are nice-looking and have a variety of poses, the maps are pretty and atmospheric and the face art is pleasant. I do have some issues with the map visuals, however, because it was really easy to accidentally run into monster pits due to how dark some areas were. On some maps it actually gets kind of frustrating.

Special mention goes to the brief combat animations. Skills are used with great frequency, but attention to this detail allowed battles to proceed at a very nice clip. It’s something that is frequently overlooked in combat-heavy games - I really appreciated it here.

6. Summary

Here be the list:

Pros/Cons
+ Very pretty. Great presentation. Sounds and looks good.
+ The battles are engaging and challenging. Strong feeling of progression.
+ The atmosphere and concept are compelling, even if the writing is not.
- Late game can be frustrating due to cheap boss design and way too much skill and trace management.
- Bugs come in droves, and only some are fixed with the downloadable patch.
- Clearly written by two authors who have different opinions on what this game should be about.

7. The Word

3 / 5

Dante’s Inferno as written by a bipolar Persona fan.


Subtlety is overrated.