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A waste of time

  • cmmie8
  • 03/17/2020 09:18 AM
  • 1526 views
I initially wanted to play this game because I heard so much praise coming from other players. Sadly, it fell really short of my expectations. The game got boring fast, with no general aim or life long goals for the lead character and the rest of the gang with repetitive combat. I played up to the unbalanced 1st boss then dropped it like a rock.

Story
The main story is nothing original and does not offer anything new to the fantasy genre. Evil empire, evil empress, evil mobs versus the perfect good guys. Done to death like in movies such as Star Wars. If there was a gray area where the “bad guys” had morally good goals but bad methods, or vice versa, it would change the dynamic of the story and make it more interesting.
All the characters seem like a copy and paste of each other with no originality. Everyone has the same verbal patterns, the same gripes about life and makes no effort to distinguish themselves. If you swap the face sets and names around, the dialogue would still fit and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

Graphics
The standard boring Maker RTP that everyone has seen already. Some effort to customize is apparent but it is so little that it’s just a simple color swap or character generated parts that don’t fit together, namely the child face sets. More specifically, Maker MV tilesets (the worse in my opinion), are used but they are shrunken down to the style of VX Ace tilesets or even smaller, that it does not look good at all because of pixel loss. The graphics hurt my eyes, everything is so small that I have to squint my eyes to see what’s going on. It’s like looking at a street map of New York from a few meters away instead of holding it in your hand. I could only play this game for half an hour each time before taking a rest.

Battle System
The battles maybe the highlight of the game but it is the main flaw and a massive one at that. I did not enjoy them and it looked unnecessarily complicated. You can have simple battles like the Pokemon games and still enjoy them. No fancy animation or game mechanics, just good old simple exchanges of damage between opponents. It is less confusing this way.

There is so much going on during the battle that I stopped caring and started to just spam what I thought was the strongest skill. I got bored later and exploited the 100% escape chance which defeats the purpose of the battle system. Why have a battle system if you can skip it without any consequences? And being able to save anywhere dissipates any sense of danger.
Everything is color coded: type of attack, cooldown, names, variables of each skill etc, as well as the multitude of flashing icons that I have no idea what they mean. And all this is present in the very first battle with lengthy explanations that feels like a chore to read. Nobody is going to remember all that from the get-go.
When I got to the first boss, when the soldier turned into a demon, I was easily defeated by the AOE attack that it keeps spamming. The game tells me that the Soul Trigger will get me out of a sticky situation, but it did not.
If you’re going to have this over-kill of a battle system, my advice is not have everything presented all at once. Less is more.

Verdict
Most people will be turned off by this game because of its complexity. It has a steep learning curve with a broken battle system that requires a lot of time to master. Gamers just want to simply enjoy games right from the start without having to burden themselves with the excess baggage.
The only good thing about this game is the music, which I liked by the way, and is what’s stopping me from giving an even lower score.
Sorry, but this game isn't my thing.

Posts

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There's so much to dissect in this review, but very little motivation to do so. Can't please everybody *insert shrug here*. Thanks anyways for putting in the time to write a review.
Actually, the good guys do resort to a morally grey power-ups and even get called out on it in the bonus dungeon.

For the graphics size, have you tried pressing F4 to enable borderless full-screen? That might help a bit in getting the sprites to look big enough. I personally prefer having a more zoomed out view, especially when it comes to playing RPGs with touch encounters.

Also, the battle system is actually well-balanced, even on the highest difficulty. The bosses are strong, but they generally have tells for their strongest attacks, giving you an opportunity to guard through them. Your party has advantages that few other JRPG characters have, such as converting excess healing into barriers, being able to upgrade support skills to not use up a turn, using the Soul Trigger party-wide buff, etc. If you're having trouble with the first boss, there is video footage of people beating it and one player even wrote a boss guide. If it makes you feel better, I also lost to that boss on my first try.

Here's video made by BerryB for the imp boss: https://youtu.be/cjqeGemqxgY
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