WrestleQuest does get the aesthetic down excellently, but the combat is fairly slow at times, as is the movement speed. Dungeons can be a slog with how many enemies there are and how large they are. The story does cut away from a group entirely too often, which drags the game down a bit.

Despite that, when the game nails what it's trying to do with its inspiration, it does it mostly well. But it comes at the cost of a very slow and disjointed narrative.

One thing that should have been taught a little better was what hype offers in terms of combat benefits. We get a short explainer, and no info in the Wrestlepedia.

There are also an extensive number of bugs plaguing this game, such as slowdown, incorrect information on menu screens, and in two cases in a short period of time, equipment just vanishing off of one of my characters. The game needs way more fixes than it's received.

In addition, there are several unnecessary required mini-games that really slow down the action and control poorly.

I really dig the style of this game and the music is pretty damn good, the rest is abysmal.

The game mixes wrestling and all the tropes that come with that, with a turn based RPG. All cities are dedicated to various classic wrestlers and themed around this. All attacks are based around this as well. Stylistically, it all works really well.

Then you play it, and it stops working well.

The gameplay itself is boring and maddening. Especially given the game length (my playthrough was a little over 40 hours while skipping a lot of side quests). The various special attacks/tag team/triple team moves almost all feature QTE. Most of the time, your special attacks are the quickest way to get through these fights, so you'll be doing QTE pretty much every attack for 40+ hours.

The game features a ton of playable characters but the core mechanics will not change a whole lot.

You can move around the various stages and avoid some battles (the enemies you have to fight will be seen on screen at all times) luckily, but not everything can be avoided. Plus, you do have to be leveling up to get through the game.

Throughout the stages, you'll come across items that can damage you. Oftentimes these will dish out a ton of damage. The hit detection is bad too, so there were times I never really felt like I had hit something, only to get hit with a big spike to my health. To make matters worse, you don't really get a lot of time where you're invulnerable after taking environmental damage, so one fluky hit from a spike sticking out or a fireball can turn into multiple hits or death.

The game lets you save whenever you're not in a battle but there were a few time where I'd lose progress because I forgot to save after something and then get killed by environmental damage.

The game attempts to break up the monotony by adding racing levels or various other types of gameplay. None of these were enjoyable. The car levels in particular were frustrating because of the hit detection and invulnerability period issues this game has. These areas would often feature car damage meters where, if the meter hits zero, game over.

The game has a healthy amount of characters that, because of the story, you'll be constantly swapping between. It gets to be a little too much near the middle part of this game, where it felt at times where I'd have one conversation with something or exit one area with a group, only to immediately swap over to a different group of characters to play as.

The biggest annoyance though with this is, because of the swapping and the fact that damage taken carries over, and that all these groups have separate money/inventory/equipment, it gets to be a pain remembering to heal, stock up on supplies and new gear, and all that with groups you are constantly ping ponging around. The game also sometimes auto fills spots in your party when you obtain characters but then sometimes it doesn't. So sometimes I was walking around with two party members with one just in reserve because the game just didn't feel like adding them to my party.

I could keep nitpicking this game to death but I just can't keep going. This game could've been something really neat and fun. Instead, it's just a major disappointment.

I can think of no better example of the sunk cost falacy than my experience playing this game. When I started playing the game, I'll be honest, I didn't look too hard into it, other than seeing a slick trailer of characters slamming, and the cover with some wrestlers from the 70s/80s and my mind ran wild. "An RPG where you are a wrestler? What a fun idea". Then I started and it turns out you're toys, and not every toy is a wrestling toy, but plays off of greater pop -culture in general. To say this was a disappointment is a minor understatement. After playing for a while I learned to accept this direction and even enjoyed it.

After getting about 30 or so hours into it, the game literally started to fall apart. The game started to crash constantly, and the auto-save feature would take your back to the beginning of a dungeon or sequence, so fuck you if the game crashes in the middle of a stretch where you can't manually save. At this point I found the game becoming tedious with the story beats having you run around to several previous locations without a fast travel.

Which man, the design is somewhat almost sinful at times. When switching screens from entering a door or map, there are several occasions where the logical direction you would go may send you back to the previous screen. Imagine walking to the left on a screen, then appear in the new location facing right, but you are now located on the left side of the screen. You may already be holding left, which now sends you to your previous screen. This happens in many locations. My other major complaint is there are button mashing moments in combat that sometimes the UI will cover the button you need to press for the first quarter of time available. How can the devs think that's okay?!

Otherwise the story has it's moments, but it just lasts far too long.

This is one of the most disappointing games I've ever played.

When I heard there was a retro turn-based RPG where everyone was wrestlers, I was so excited. But, I somehow missed that they were also toys, a whole aesthetic that really just didn't hit with me. But, that would have been fine if the game was fun to play. And, it's not. It's so meandering, it introduces so many strange controls and elements just for one mission, and it's just frustrating. Not to mention that it's buggy as hell and crashes all the damn time. It's like they had a million ideas, and stuck them all in this game as some sort of grand statement, instead of actually making a game that's fun. I should have loved this, by the end I have a rag-tag group of heroes flying around on an airship, giving me big Final Fantasy 6 vibes, but it was just a joyless slog that I was thrilled to be over with.

I love wrestling, I've been a fan since I was a little kid, I watch weekly, I keep up with independent/international wrestling and I have a close to encyclopedic knowledge when it comes to wrestling... EXCEPT for the "Golden Era" of wrestling, which is exactly the market that this game is pandering to. (It was always way too cartoony for me idk)

With all of that being said, this game has SO much promise and looks so interesting, but the actual combat is so slow and boring. This seriously bums me out because I have played for like 4/5 hours and I was looking forward to unlocking all of the cool summons and I have absolutely no interest in continuing this. I'm still happy that I am supporting the development of stuff like this, but I really hope that they make a sequel to this game that really refines the combat and fingers crossed focusing on a different era of the industry. (That part is a fever dream given that a lot of the people are tied up in WWE Legends contracts.)