That single word is what you'll be saying when you play through the game. After having the developer, Clareain_Christopher, play through my game, he asked me to play through his and give a review, which is what I'm doing right now.

Lets get to it!


Gameplay


Here's where a good portion of the "what" will be going into.

I'll start with the battle system. On the surface, it seems pretty simple: basic attack, skill, guard, item, equip, escape. Seems simple enough, right? WRONG. The abilities are (pardon my language) confusing as fuck. Why does Dawnstrike have that gigantic vertical white cursor when Grieving Dusk doesn't? Why does Dawnstrike either hit multiple enemies or hit one single enemy? What the hell does 5TCD mean? Why does Soothing Grace have that little blue circle? What does 100 explosion-thingy mean? Why can't I use Grieving Dusk again? What the crap is CoR? Of course, you find all these things out later, but the game certainly doesn't tell you anything! Many of the skills are allowed to be used with no cost of any sorts, but they need a cool-down time before you can use it again (TCD apparently means turn cool-down). Certain skills need a certain SP amount before it can be used. To get SP, you need to attack enemies, heal yourself, buff yourself...basically, you just need to do things. I have to admit, a lot of these concepts are pretty cool. I especially like the idea of having a move that hits enemies based off of area. The only thing is that it's badly executed and just not explained. It's a pain in the ass to figure these things out myself. I know it's explained on the blog, but it shouldn't have to be! It should be explained well enough in-game that you don't need a pamphlet to figure it out.

One of the things that annoyed me about the battle system is the horribly inconsistent battle curve it has. Sometimes I'm able to kill four enemies at once and plow through the battle with nary a scratch on me, and at other times I get a doom state on me, get put to sleep, and get half of my health lost before I can even freaking attack. This is within the same dungeon, might I add. This wouldn't be too much of a problem if it didn't take forever to level up. I'm not too big on grinding, and if it takes half an hour to level up before I can descend a floor into a dungeon, I just give up. I've actually raegquitted a good three or four times while playing the game. With a bit of balancing, this problem can be fixed easily.

Then comes the combo thing. Many of the moves are multi-hit, and they show that through a combo pop-up that appears on the top-right of the screen that shows the total amount of damage dealt and the amount of hits landed on the foe. The thing is, though, it doesn't really do much, and if it does I just can't see it at all. It's purely aesthetic, and has no real point in being there.

The skill system combines a skill-buying tree with skill equips and passive skills. It's a solid system, and it works well. The only problem with it goes back into the leveling problem I mentioned before. You can't buy anything until you're level 10 and have 10,000 JP (that's a LOT of JP to get, mind you.) Again, this can easily be fixed through a bit of level balancing.

The menu...normally I wouldn't bring this up until at least the graphic section, since this kind of thing is more based on graphics anyway, but one of the options in there confuses me. The Camp option, when selected, opens up a sub-menu that allows you to look at your mission summery (spelling mistake, by the way), reorganize your party, rest and heal up, fuse skills, take a look at your achievements, and look at the points gathered in the moral alignment system. I like the idea of a sub-menu within the game, but the way it implemented it is bad. For one thing, it uses a text box selection instead of a menu window selection. Fixing it just requires making it a window selection instead of a text box selection.

In the game, the easiest way to get money is to sell off Loot, which are little packages of money dropped by enemies. The higher the ranking it has, the more money you'll get from selling it. It's a nice idea, but the Loot's only purpose is to get you money. It can easily be removed for, say, actual money drops.

Overall it's ok, but there were a bunch of glitches. Twice during my playthrough the game crashed for no explained reason. There was no script error, no missing graphic; it just popped up saying that it crashed.

Rating: 3/5 (There are a lot of ideas, but they're either implemented badly or can be completely removed.)


Story

Here's another "what" moment.

The story starts off with a little girl inside of her home on a rainy day. As she tries to go to sleep, the Goddess of Change comes in and steals her soul...or something. She says that she has to use her soul (which is in the form of a crystal) to have it moulded into a weapon of some sorts. They don't really explain that deeply, though. The Goddess of Change then walks through the walls and brings the crystal into Santoo Rinba, which is an alternate dimension parallel to our own (or something like that) while the Diva Dance song from the Fifth Element plays in the background. Thought I wouldn't catch that, did you?

After that scene, the story takes a complete u-turn and goes to Zirodolla, an anmesiac who wakes up in the middle of a forest in the middle of who-the-hell-knows-where-ville. After bumbling about in the forest for a while, she faints and wakes up in Hightide Village, a large town next to the sea. She finds herself becoming hired by the town to do a bunch of jobs for them. At this point I just stopped paying attention to the plot, which is a sign that the plot doesn't have much of a hook to keep the player interested..

The story itself is alright, albiet a tad cliche (protagonist with amnesia?). The only real problem is the dialogue seems really awkward throughout the entire game. There are abnormally long pauses where there shouldn't be, and everything just seems really robotic. Then comes the intro scene. It...really doesn't have anything to do with anything, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and say that it'll be explained in a later chapter. The moral choice system is a nice touch, but I don't really think it works (as in the mechanic itself is buggy. There were two points in the game where I had a choice between three options (which I just figured to be the good, bad, and neutral options) but when I checked to see how many points I had nothing happened. Either they weren't actually a part of the choice system or the system isn't working.

My biggest complaint here would be the lack of NPC dialogue. There are a lot of people scattered throught Hightide Village, but you can only talk to one or two of them. You should be able to talk to everybody in the town. You can give them whatever dialogue, but you should have the ability to talk to them if need be.

Rating: 2/5 (A lot of the dialogue needs reworking, NPC's need dialogue, and the choice system needs to be checked if it actually does work.)


Music

I don't criticize much for music, since I don't know much about it myself. The music for all of the dungeons work well, but after a while they get droning. The Forest of Resting, for example. I spent a good hour or so in there, and the music just got completely annoying after a while. It's good music, but you hear it forever and ever, so the quality of it gets drowned underneath "oh god how long will it be till another battle hrng."

Rating: 3.5/5 (It's good music, but the way the game works the songs get drowned under feelings of dullness, which makes the music itself dull)


Graphics

I'll admit, they're pretty. The maps are pretty, Hightide Village is pretty, everything is pretty. Now that that's out of the way, let's talk about the problems.

Clutter is the biggest problem. The Forest of Resting has so much crap on there that I could hardly tell what I could and could not walk on. In the second part of the forest, I got stuck on this one part because I believed the path was blocked, when in fact you could walk on it perfeclty fine. It's incredibly confusing.

The tints on the maps, for the most part, tend to be really strong. If nighttime passes on the world map, I can hardly see where the hell I'm going. In the Forest of Resting, everything looks like a big orange mess. Santoo Rinba also suffers what Enelysion had with overlays. Since they're technically stuck on the screen, movement with overlays looks like something's obscuring my vision instead of it being a shadow or light beams.

Rating: 3/5 (pretty, yet clutterific)



Overall Rating: 2.5/5 (It has a lot of good ideas, but they're either executed badly or not thorougly explained enough.)