So this was something I saw a bunch of trailers for and I thought it looked pretty cool. There was a demo that I didn’t play. It was getting pretty good comments. So I figured I’d check it out.

So anyway I just finished it yesterday evening, and here’s a quick mini-review!

Let’s go! There will be very minor spoilers.

What I liked

The graphics look great. I’d be happy with them being a bit more colorful, but the sprites are big and detailed and the animation for most of them is fucking great. Just really cool enemy designs, some of the characters look good, basically no problems here. Really love how this looks for the most part.

The core gameplay is solid. It’s an RPG with puzzle elements in dungeons. Game flow is overly linear as, even when you have travel mechanics like a boat or fast travel, it’s all pointless because you basically just have to go where the world map tells you to go and there’s never anything to do outside of that until the very end of the game. The world map has no battles, battles are only in actual “dungeons” , and the enemies show up at set places, kinda like Chrono Trigger. You can pretty much entirely avoid combat, though of course you do need to fight to level up. Getting an enemy from behind gives you a very small extra hit and generates mana pellets, if you have the grappling hook that’s way easier to do.

The combat takes place in regular turn-based fashion. Enemies will have a number above them saying in how many of your characters’ turns they’ll attack. Some attacks will display icons for attack types (slashing, blunt, poison, sun, moon, arcane), dealing one hit of a type will grey out one of the icons, grey them all out and the attack gets stopped (if you don’t stop it, damage might be reduced anyways if you took care of some icons). Attacks all have timed hits, like in Mario RPG. These will either deal more hits or just more damage, as does defending against enemy attacks to reduce damage dealt to you. More hits is useful, of course, because you can take care of more icons from enemy attacks with one attack. Oh, and there’s the mana pellet things, there can be up to 3 at once, and normal attacks generate 1. On a turn you can absorb those and make your normal attack of that character’s element and make your skills/combos/attacks stronger. And finally you can swap to one of the 2 reserve characters for free whenever you want on a turn.

And then there’s combos. The combo meter goes up as you use skills and attack and defend, when you have at least one point in there the combo menu shows up which you can select to do an attack with another character. The timed hit will be some variation of one of the normal skills, but it hits harder and usually hits for more types of damage. There’s a separate Ultimate meter as well, for when you start having ultimate attacks. The only one really worth using is Resh’an’s because it deals good damage and heals your party.

The puzzles are okay, my problem with them is that they’re too easy. But it’s still cool to have a game like this where dungeons aren’t just walking and maybe taking alternate paths to get treasures, with random battles. Gives some Lufia 2/Golden Sun feels. You have a few tools, namely a wind burst and a grappling hook, and there’s places where you push blocks, hit switches and stuff. These are kinda fun, I just wish they were a bit less straightforward and easy. Maybe have more tools and have puzzles where you have to use multiple of them at once.

In addition to normal progress, there’s a bunch of extra stuff to do. You get to those mostly later. There’s a board game of sorts which is pretty okay called Wheels, there’s an arena, there’s hidden rainbow conches all over the place, and there’s sidequests where you get some bonus boss battles that are a bit tougher than most other battles (but still easy). Most of that is fun enough.

What I didn’t like

You don’t get a lot of attacks. Each character gets 3 skills alongside their normal attack, and then each character gets a combo or two with one of the other characters (and, late in the game, an ultimate). It does get a bit meh to have very little attack variety for each type of damage. Wanna do moon damage? Moonerang is the only real option. Sun damage? 2 of Zale’s attacks do this but only one sun hit (there’s a combo with Valere that does more hits). Poison and arcane have a one or 2 viable options each. I thought early in the game that you’d learn a few more spells as you leveled up but it never happened. Really would’ve liked more attack variety.

The main ending was fucking whack (and it’s the only ending you can get at first). The writing of the game is overall a bit eh, lots of millenial writing (one of the characters is literally called “Ye’et”… it throws your party to different places), but not Borderlands levels of bad. But the main ending… Big oof. There is a “true ending” that I didn’t get because fuck doing all the side shit (no I will not find all the rainbow conches fuck you). So the main ending. You beat what should be, at best, a sub boss before the final boss. Then the last boss shows up, another character just says he lost and to go away, so he does… then Zale and Valere are all like “Yeah we have to go kill this never-before-mentioned-unless-they-were-in-the-lore-books World Eater thing” and the game becomes a really bad Shmup for 2 minutes. Then we get the regular sort of ending scenes where we see where the remaining characters are after the story… the fuck was that?

Garl is clearly the main character (despite spoilers) but he’s also a Gary Stu. In fact there’s a weird amount of characters knowing things they have no idea about, or just saying random shit and the story bending itself in pretzels to accomodate for them. Oh yeah let’s totally wake up this world-destroying dragon by baking bread, that will make him not evil for no reason at all. Makes total sense. And the game agrees, for no reason at all. Fuck off Garl. It’s funny because I actually like Garl in general, but he has some really bullshit moments for no reason at all.

The difficulty relics are stupid. The game, without any of them, is already easy. Making it easier is really not needed and relics should’ve had different functions. One non-boss battle gave me issues because I went into it with a nearly-dead party and I still won, and no boss battle was difficult (to be clear, there’s a boss or two I didn’t fight because I didn’t get the “true ending”). I did no grinding, every battle was just not difficult to win and I never died once. I think one of the relics makes things harder, but I didn’t feel like doing it, because what it does is make enemies hit harder, and, even though every battle is easy, enemies not hitting hard isn’t the problem (so many attacks nearly one-shot you already, a few actually do if you mistime the defense). In fact, getting damaged a bunch is fine because your characters don’t die. They just get knocked out for 2 rounds, then come back with like 60% hp for free (and can be revived earlier if you really feel like it). It’s barely a punishment, especially if you have ninja girl and alchemist guy still alive because you can just delay enemies a bunch so you don’t lose your other characters in the meantime. Legitimately I think you need to put effort into losing battles because they’re so easy.

I also kinda hate that flying is only available once the final dungeon is open. Even when you get the boat, there’s no freedom, because going anywhere other than where you’re supposed to go leads to literally nothing. Literally, the only time there’s actually freedom is once the final dungeon opens up, then you can start doing sidequests. The content itself is fine, as discussed earlier, but the game is a complete straight line until the final dungeon. Kind of a weird decision.

Overall

A lot of people have been comparing this to Super Mario RPG and Chrono Trigger, and while that comparison does make sense as far as the timed hits and combo attacks… This isn’t anywhere near as good as either of those. Not bad, but also not amazing.

It looks great, it plays well, the difficulty is almost okay (would be better if characters actually died instead of being knocked out for 2 turns), and overall it’s not a bad time until the main ending which was just pure confusion. I kinda hate that the true ending is tied behind finding the conches, that’s so dumb. All the other stuff required for it, fine, but not the conches. Fuck the conches.

I know I had lots of minor negatives, but in the end the game’s still good.

I’d give this a mild recommendation.