A game that tries to be a full console game, but is much more suited to that of a hand-held such as the vita. Story was a unique experience, where your alignment very much falls into chaotic neutral.
Music was fitting, story was great fun. Levels have a strange art direction, that feels a bit out of the ordinary, especially since the character stills look great.
Gameplay is average at best. You take a top down view attack enemies with a few weapon types. The game revolves around a stamina bar, which means you just end up running around, hit an enemy moving back and waiting for stamina to return. Boss battles reward you for totally ignoring the boss until after they've attacked, rather than it's goal of pushing the player to put himself in danger to attack before the enemy does. You're only in danger when an enemy damages you more than you expected, and this just becomes frustrating. On top of this you are given a timer to complete areas, forcing you to move in and out of levels multiple times.

If the gameplay was more enticing, I could see this game being a lot more popular, but as it stands, it's hard to recommend.

I really don't know what I was doing with my life when I stubbornly decided to not only finish, but to platinum, this game, when it really isn't very good at all. It's actually pretty terrible in almost every way.

What sucked me in and made me enjoy the game to begin with was that this is one of those highly technical japanese nerd games that offer a million mechanics to dig into, and also has some roguelike influence, not necessarily in the whole permadeath aspect, but in other details. You can level up your character and your weapons in many different ways and there's lots of loots and various little mechanics to tinker with, which is my kind of game and why I even continued this game past one of the worst introductions I've ever seen. The game begins with an enormously condescending, longwinded and poorly written tutorial that goes over incredibly inane details like how switches work, but forgets to teach you the game's unique mechanics and I almost rage quit the game before it began, but then it gets better as you're allowed to start adventuring, before it gets much worse again.

I will say two final positive things before I begin the negative rant: this game has an actual, true banger soundtrack, and it has a really fun and interesting idea for the core combat. The music is just your typical "quirky J-RPG/anime" style soundtrack with lots of accordion jams and such, but it's just really damn good. Whoever composed for this game is really slumming it and if they haven't moved onto bigger and better things in the decade since this game was made, that is some kind of crime against music. The interesting combat quirk is that you can equip and mix and match up to five weapons, which allows you to create free-form combos where you might slot a fast weapon in slot 1, a medium speed one in slot 2 and then finishing with a heavy blow in slot 3. You get the idea and it's a simple but very neat and fun system.

That's it. That's all the praise I can give this game, because everything else just kind of sucks. The inventory system is a flashback to, like, 1984 and the game isn't capable of stacking items, so those 250 Fool's Rock will have to be manually scrolled-by every time you want to look at the things lower in the inventory sorting. And, yes, you have to sell them one by one whenever you need to empty your miniscule inventory. The combat never really amounts to anything beyond the basic neat idea. The game is still just a hollow button-masher due to how enemy attack patterns work, which is just a nice way for me to say that the enemy/attack design is completely pathetic. Some of the worst I've ever seen. Probably actually the worst boss gallery I've seen with absolutely miserable designs. All you do in this game is slam the attack button like you're trying to win one of those mashing minigames in Mario Party, because not only are the enemy attack patterns pathetic, the game has the strangets visual sludge I think I've ever seen in that when you strike an enemy, the game pops up the damage number, the worst "(In)effective!" to indicate if you're hitting with the right element, a "CRITICAL!" banner if you crit, an extremely superfluous icon that shows you what kind of element damage you just did (yes, very redundant with the aforementioned other indicator) and, because the dves realized that this is too much sludge and that you can't see your tiny little knight behind all of this text, they decided to make it worse by also having an icon indicating that an enemy is about to attack. This makes the combat just completely clumsy and stupid. There is no tight dodging because you can't see jack shit of what's happening so all you do is hammer that attack button while randomly dodging, hoping that you end up succeeding. The absolute worst visual mistake is a completely baffling one that I just can't figure out how it happened; the graphics are too tall. As in the trees and walls and houses and whatever else that surround your tiny little 2-foot knight are just too tall, which doesn't work with the size of your character and the camera angle. Not only is your battle blocked by a million "CRITICAL! pop-ups and such, there's also a giant-ass tree covering your line of sight no matter how you spin the camera. Because you're in a forest and every tree is way too tall. It's such a mystifying and bizarre mistake to make. How does that make it past the earliest alpha phase without anyone on the dev team noticing that this just does not work?

I could do on, and I actually wrote a list of bullet points of things that suck or are just plain stupid in this game, and that list is actually like 5 times longer than this review, but I'm not going to bore you with all of that and will just say that the list of dumb mistakes like the above just keeps going and it affects every single aspect of this game. Outside of the banger soundtrack, there is nothing here that isn't stupid or frustrating. I'm not exaggerating or being a hater; literally everything here either kind of sucks or completely sucks. Let's not even get into how this script has that edgy 00's internet humor with, for example, the titular witch calling all of her rival witches "whores" as often as she can, as well as making rape jokes and shit. It vibes like 4chan incels on Discord trying to impress other 4chan incels with their edgy and dark sense of humor and, if you think this script is brilliant, you should maybe ask yourself if this has something to do with the fact that you can't find a girlfriend. I would've said "or boyfriend", but we all know that isn't relevant here. If I haven't been clear so far, let me finish by saying that while I tortured myself through this game, I fucking hated it and will tell everyone that shows any interest in it to stay as far away as possible. This game is absolute trash and only delusional weebs will be able to tell themselves that it isn't.

CW: implied rape/sexual assault (sometimes played for humor), torture, transmisogyny, body horror, some nudity

this game is my poor little meow meow ):
it has so many problems that in good conscience i cant rate it higher than a 3 (rollercoaster difficulty curves, horribly designed bosses, very poor-taste humor at times even for a game where you play as a bad guy)
but it really is quite a bit of fun when you can look past all of it