this is game 11/71 form my backlog.

THIS SUCKS!

i mean, it doesn't but, holy shit there's so many things that make me not want to enjoy this game, but it's hard to ignore the positives

i'll start with the good: Artstyle is adorable newgrounds/early internet stuff, i'll be honest, i'm too young to remember that era, but i did somewhat grow up with it due to the games i played, surprised i never came across this one when i was younger, but still, it's nice seeing all the parodies and references, along with the original stuff that matt likely made simply because he thought they were cool.
the battle system is actually really nice, and basically every move is animated, the bursts specially are insanely cool to watch even if they are rudimentary, you get to choose party order mid fight, and you can also change equipment mid fight, the second one i didn't find much use for, but i'm certain someone has. exploration is highly incentivized, which i wish i realized earlier because i missed out on "dispel" which is a move that removes the buffs from your enemy, until much later than i should, oh well, my bad, remember to do the sidequests, they give you items that are extremely useful for the later game. This game is also very stable, i can't say i saw a single bug in my entire playthrough, not that i was looking for them though.

time for the bad: every single boss, all of them, all of them are horrible, plus the dificulty spike too, the difficulty curve in this game should be called a difficulty 90 degree wall, because that's what it felt to reach the desert, the plains and water areas were fine, if not the battles a bit too long, even the ice area wasn't too bad, though i had to use a poison strat to beat the wooly otherwise there was no way i would be able to advance, the bosses in this game are just stupid, they always are about as strong as you, which you'd think would make for a fair fight, but usually it doesn't, so there you go leave the fight to spend a few hours looking for equipment specifically for that fight, to then take about 1 hour of just genuine jrpg battling, that's another thing, the battles in this game go for way too goddamn long, even using optimal strats for damage, it feels like i'm barely scratching them at all, it's just very frustrating.

one other thing that makes the boss fights even worse is that this game has some kind of fetish for one-shot moves, sometimes you'll be doing perfectly fine, fully buffed, heals ready, then boom, natallie just got one shot by some random attack and now you need to spend 7 turns rebuffing (would be 3 but the enemies will keep unbuffing you), this is definitely at it's worst at the final boss, where there's always at least 2 enemies that can kill you, making death immunity a must.

overall, i can't say i didn't have fun, despite the fights being weirdly long, and them not feeling like a fair fight at all, the game always brought me at least some joy in playing it, so i can't be too harsh on the thing, and the jokes were hilarious too, so, it's a game that mostly gets carried by it's charm, but damn, that charm is effective as hell.

tl;dr: i grew up playing stupid games and this was one of them but it was actually good. play it.

i think this is the first rpg i ever played? i was 7 at the time.
i grew up playing a lot of flash games on some fuckin site called flonga. a lot of those game were credited towards one of two places: armor games, or kongregate. i eventually ended up playing most flash games on kong growing up, being the only one who preferred it to coolmathgames. i saw this game on flonga, and really only had a vague idea of what a pikachu was, but i recognized the slime on the loading screen was a pikachu. i played a lot of matt's games growing up, but was never smart enough to beat them, and none of them really left too big of a lasting impact on me, though i did remember them. bullet heaven 2 was, after all, how i got into touhou. the next year, i got pokemon white, and so thats when everything went downhill
a little bit ago, i was reminded of kongregate, i dont really remember how, but that also reminded me: kongregate had like 3 games with things that cost their fake money that costs real money, and the only one of these i was really miffed about was bullet heaven 2. i also remembered that BH2 was on steam with all the addons in one purchase. honestly? it was reasonably priced, but im a cheap bastard and waited for a sale. bought matt's whole library. EBF 1 and 2 were just gems of stupid internet humor that i missed, as well as cheeky references. i never liked them as a kid, or at least not as much as ebf3 and bh2, so i cant say they brought back much nostalgia on the games front.
this game was free, and not a part of the big collection of earlier titles. so how does this childhood "oh yeah i remember that haha" game hold up? well for starters, now i get all the references. konata is in this, as are simon yoko and kamina. (so is curly but idc about cave story.) theres plenty of other references to 2000s weebshit but those 4 are the only ones directly in the game. and as for the gameplay? SHOCKINGLY competent. gone are the 9999hp and 999mp, and come are actual rpg progression systems. the gameplay is genuinely amazing turn based combat, the mouse only control can be annoying, but i think its worth it. you can swap equipment mid battle, and all magic/abilities have their own leveling system using AP. increased power at the cost of increased cost, but with multiple levels of each spell. i saw someone say about one of these that the game is basically matt putting all of his ideas from his dream video game notebook into his own game. i do appreciate how like 10 years later his art style is still exactly the same.

Gotta love games which are clearly a product of their time, filled with little referenced that sometimes go too overboard and sometimes hit the right spot.

Compared to the earlier games which were simple battle rushes, this is an RPG with an actual overworld to explore.
Did my blind playtrough on Epic difficulty and that was quite fun to do, being challenged across every single battle and forced to adapt to each single boss. The final boss was an exercise in patience, element adapting and some RNG manipulation (and luck). I probably would have been more bored steamrolling if I did everything on normal and then on epic due to the noticeable increase in the game's length.