I guess I've "mastered" this game...I do have the one trophy on Steam for completing the game. I played this not long after it initially was released, so it's hard for me to really think back on why it was so frustrating for me, but I distinctly remember feeling extremely unfulfilled when I finished the game.

Take my rating with a grain of salt and maybe consider another review by someone who played the game recently -- this is just here for me to note my 0.5 because I still feel this really strong and negative vibe about the game every time I see it in my library or mentioned on lists. I won't go back to play it again and find out why, though.

I wanted to like To the Moon. It is earnest and sweet but also tedious and maudlin. It tells its convoluted story with the heaviest of hands, signalling exactly how to feel with every note of its score, begging for laughter with endless banter.

Its central premise – wish fulfilment via cutting-edge technology – echoes the function of many videogames, but here the game doesn’t dwell. When the tearjerking finale comes, you are meant to ignore how treacherous this technology is, how it betrays the truth of the central female character, and just bask in all the feels of a wish fulfilled.

Fuck RPG Maker XP. Fuck fuck fuck. That is not controller support. Just remove the option entirely, please. I don't know how much of this is To The Moon and how much is RPG Maker XP, but here are a couple problems.

1. no 8-directional movement
2. movement is all in blocks
3. plenty of blocks can't be moved into but that's not immediately obvious.
4. There's no grid so you can't actually see the blocks
5. Unlike with a mouse where you can just mouse over everything, with a controller you're forced to just go in front of everything and see if it's anything important
6. Movement is SLOW. I assume it's that way with a mouse too, but at least then you're not pressing down the whole time and trying to ascertain if something is a wall or not.

But if To The Moon was a good game then none of that would be a problem. Hell, I was perfectly fine dealing with that throughout the game once I got passed the starting because I thought that it was going somewhere interesting. After all the dialogue was well-written and everyone said it's a tearjerker and I like that and the ending is supposed to be the best part of the game. This sounds like exactly my type of game, right?

Fuck that. The best part of this game is act two which is anyway essentially a worse version of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The ending is so bad. SPOILERS AHEAD

So after all the Eternal Sunshine bullshit (fantastic movie btw) we get the most annoying plot device that's in everything. "Time is running out, I don't have time to explain my plan to you." The female lead then goes rogue and apparently stops Joey from getting hit by the car thus leaving his memories and his love for the stars. She then ALSO for no apparent reason moves River so that Johnny can't ask her on a date. This for some reason leads to Johnny becoming an astronaut and having no contact with her and there's a long montage being all bittersweet and trying to impart the message that brothers are more important than lovers before psych! She became an astronaut too, what were the odds. What the FUCK. First of all, fucking tell him the plan rather than leaving him trying to stop you because it looks like you're going to be an ass and ruin his life by sending him to the moon while making her have no contact with him. Second, why couldn't they go on the same trajectory just without his brother getting hit by a car? He still meets her and looks at the stars with her and thus gains a love for the stars, maybe you encourage it a bit in other ways, they stay in love, he becomes an astronaut, done! The plot makes no sense.END SPOILERS

Oh and I forgot to mention. The gameplay sucks. I'm not sure how much better it might be with a mouse since there would be less of it thanks to more automated movement, but at least without it there's just enough gameplay to be frustrating rather than a visual novel with less choice than the ones I've played provide.

In conclusion, To The Moon is a mediocre game with good dialogue and some other good elements but it mostly fails as a game especially when playing with a controller. Could probably be made into a decent book with a lot of editing, not sure. If you're going to play this, at the very least use a mouse rather than a controller, but I wouldn't bother playing at all.