Wow... where to begin?

Well, I'll start by situating myself as a player with particular tastes and a particular gaming history, cause my opinions are greatly influenced by that. Briefly, I've always loved RPGs, I was a desperate fan of games like FFVI and Chrono Trigger, but I grew old and tired and cranky, and at present I got little patience for games, little patience for predictability, and I'm always looking for games which bring me something new, fresh and interesting. That's me as a player.

My first impression of Leo and Leah was "this is a good game, but I'm not really going to enjoy it... I would 10 years ago". I saw it as a cute little game with some nifty custom systems and good overall polishing. Good game, but not enough to draw my interest. But then people started saying "OMG this game is awesome", it got features, and NewBlack wrote a review saying

This game's deep. It feels odd to say it, but it really is. This game is deceptive, it lures you in, anesthetizes you with it's wit, presentation and silliness; only to smack you in the face with a huge slab of deep character introspection, semi-disturbing themes, philosophical questions and existential angst

THAT was enough to make me want to play it. And I did it with high hopes and hypes.

Now... I have VERY mixed feelings about this game. I just finished it... I can't describe an overall feeling just now. So let's follow some standards and break this review up.

Graphics
This is an aspect of the game about which I DON'T have mixed feelings, cause it's GOOD. Very good. Every single map is very beautiful and colorful, full of details and consistent. It shows hard work, and it's tasteful. From characters to expressions and animations, everything is very nice and pleasant to the eyes (even darker areas). It's full of rips and recognizable stuff, but it didn't bother me. It was all carefully chosen, and it looks great and cute.

Sound and Music
This is another aspect I loved. Music had some nice choices, and some interesting choices... and I liked all of it. Some soundtrack choices were quite bold, but they worked.
Sound effects were also nice. There were many subtle effects for events and transitions, and they did a great job at creating an immersive atmosphere. You'll often catch yourself FEELING the effects of this game's carefully prepared presentation, but not quite noticing the details at a conscious level. This is just awesome for a game. There is also some amazing synchrony between some screen transitions, scene events and specific sound effects or song bits. Big round of applause for that. \o/

Presentation, Setting and Pacing
I guess sometimes you miss things while talking about graphics and sounds separately, but the real important thing is how they work together. Like I said, this game's overall presentation is surprisingly outstanding. There's no real complex coding or obscure resourcing behind it... it's just intelligent and tasteful use of standard RPG Maker stuff. It works well.
The world of Leo and Leah is also very interesting. You start in very traditional-looking wilderness areas, like jungles or caves... moving on to other RPG-ish places, like castles and dungeons... but later on, things get a little more... "dreamy". Like NewBlack said on his review, the game uses some cliche areas and funny dialogs and cutesy animals to trick you into thinking this is going to be a lighthearted fun experience. But it carefully drags you the opposite way, sometimes slowly and subtly, sometimes abruptly and shockingly. Clever.
I was not too happy about some pacing aspects of this game though. Some maps were too big and full of enemies. No point. I got lost (not knowing what to do next) more than once, even though the game TRIES to give you clear pointers, but it doesn't always succeed. There's also a fair amount of backtracking, going back to some areas, and I was not happy with it.

Gameplay
This is where I start to get my mixed feelings. Although there are a lot of custom systems and RM2K3 DBS customization, Leo and Leah plays as a traditional RPG. You walk around, you fight, you level up, use skills, buy items, etc. Like I said in the introduction of this review, this is not the kind of gaming I enjoy any longer, but I can bear it. The customization didn't really help much.
Battles were frustrating for me. I died many times in this game. You have an SP meter, which are basically your skill points. You spend them to use skills. Battling without skills is much much harder, so you can't just mash the attack button. But SP is not easy to replenish. Enemies also deal a decent amount of damage, even weaker ones. So you're bound to leave any simple battle with a fair impact on your HP and SP values, meaning you have to manage your resources carefully. You can't just walk around and grind, cause you'll die quickly unless you use lots of healing items. Items are not scarce, but are not too abundant either. Point is: you just CANNOT run carelessly into random enemies, cause they may kill you. And there are a lot of them. You can't avoid them all either, cause you'll get underleveled.
Well, some people found this game easy, but I didn't. My solution not to die all the time was resting. You regain HP and SP by not doing anything, or just walking. The recovery rate is very slow, so you really won't regain much accidentally... you'd have to purposely WAIT and DO NOTHING to recover. That's VERY BAD for a game's pacing. The game also uses a slow speed, even though you can run any time, but if you run you don't recover HP/SP, so running is not a good idea. I basically felt forced to slow-walk and walk-in-circles to recover way too often, and that wasn't fun. I mean, I felt a certain tranquility by the fact I could recover just by doing nothing, but the final effect wasn't pleasant.
The custom abilities were nice. You can dash into enemies, at a certain point you can wear a bug suit to fly and talk to enemies, and there's an item that allows you to avoid battles. Those were fun.
Leo and Leah has something of a Secret of Mana feel, and I think an ABS would have made this game much better, no matter how simple it was.
Basically... this game managed to kept me playing to the end, but DESPITE the gameplay, not BECAUSE of it. It IS good if you're not tired of standard RPG. But I am. Welp.

Story and Characterization
This is where my feelings about this game get really mixed. Some of what I'll say below may be somewhat spoilerish, but whatever.
Leo and Leah is a love story. It's about a lion pup boy who loves a lion pup girl, the girl is captured, and the boy will do anything to get her back. I guess the whole point of this game is that THE BOY WILL DO ANYTHING TO GET HER BACK (emphasis on ANYTHING). I didn't feel it much. I mean, Leo is cute. But his love is not really palpable. He never says anything, and you never get to know who Leah is, other that a pink lion who runs around with Leo. The game gives you no chance to get attached to these characters or their relationship, so I didn't get to feel intrinsical motivation about the plot.
There are other characters, and they are more interesting cause... well, they talk. None of them is particularly relevant though, as they don't last long in the game. As weird as it may seem, I think what made me really like this game were the random-talking NPCs scattered around the world, and their twisted exaggerated talk about love.



I liked the black cat saying "I know it's creepy, but I secretly love you", the circus girl saying "I'm sad cause my date stood me up", and all those "random" love references all around. IMHO, they made Leo and Leah work.
Ok, I'll give Strangeluv that, this is a love story, and this game has a potent take on it. I didn't think it plausible, convincing, or easy to relate to. But it's powerful nonetheless, and strong, and emotional. I felt things playing this game, from the naive intro scene to the strange Void creatures speech. I often didn't know what the feelings were, but they were there.
I guess I have to credit some of that feeling to how the game was narrated, the references to Darwin, and references to myself as a player (other than the characters). It worked well on creating a weird and nice effect on meself.
I guess I should also mention the game's villain, Brandy. She's interesting. She's a psycho girl with a shotgun in a world full of animals. She's cool because you don't fight her until late, cause of the feeling she's too strong for you to take. But I didn't get to love her or hate her.
Oh, and the game ending is GREAT.

Final Words
I'm not very good at being brief and direct when writing reviews. Let me try to sum all of this up in short sentences then:
- Leo and Leah is a good and intelligent game in more than one way. Play it.
- This game's presentation is outstanding and inspiring.
- It's an intriguing and emotional game, but often in confusing ways to make it a solid experience.
- Gameplay = traditional RPG.
- I don't share NewBlack's view. I failed to notice the subversiveness of this game, the deep introspection and the existential angst. It felt more crazy than deep.

But still...