Grimm's Hollow sweet little experience that unfortunately reaches the end just as it feels like it's getting started. The premise, getting dropped into purgatory as a reaper not yet ready for the afterlife is pretty damn cool and explores the idea fairly well for as long as its given to do so. The main cast are all fun and nicely fleshed out, again relatively to the game's length. This is all accented with a solid soundtrack and visuals, including some nice little visual set pieces, all working very well together. The last area in particular really sells its strong feeling of mourning, an appropriate endcap to where the game ends up at.

One of my least favorite forms of combat rears its head again, Active Time Battle, and this game sure doesn't change my mind on the system--but it's fiiiiiine. The game has solid fundamentals, with a nice variety of enemies, with each one having its own tangible niche: one gives shields to other enemies, one slowly picks up speed to steamroll you if you don't take it out quickly, one constantly buffs other enemies, etc. On paper, each combination of enemies could be an interesting enough fight to take on, if not for the combination of the game feeling both fairly nebulous and overly easy (the former playing into the later).

A standard level up system is eschewed for XP being used on a skill tree, where you can directly level up your core stats and unlock or upgrade new spells to use. Its a novel enough system, and there is something fun to being able to pop points into something new every few battles, but it makes the player character feel incredibly amorphous. There's never really a point when you can get a sense of how much damage you're dealing or taking when those numbers end up changing after almost every battle, making it hard to ever form much of a strategy. Not to mention the ever-present spectre of ATB, where enemy moves just kinda... happen when they happen. These rough parts don't matter all too much though, when the game is near-trivially easy, even when playing on the harder difficulty. Most enemies would go down with a standard attack to build MP, then a defense-piercing blow to finish them off.

Once I reached the end of the game, there is a bit of a feeling of "oh that's it huh?" as you get backloaded with a lot of details on the main characters at once. It's also where I cleaned up unlocking the rest of the skill tree to reach the true ending, which oddly required reloading the game twice (the only way to respawn enemies as far as I know) since otherwise collecting every item and defeating every enemy got me bizarrely close to the total XP needed without actually reaching it. Still, going through the true ending itself was really sweet, just like the rest of the game! Yes, I do wish there was more meat here, but it's largely because the ideas and systems present feel far more well developed than warranted for a game of this scope.

It's kinda funny to come out of it with my main "complaint" being that the game feels too good for what it is, but I hope it just means the developer is using this to make a bigger experience in the future--and that could really be something special.

This game was very cute, almost sickeningly so. I'm very impressed by all that was able to be done in RPG Maker 2003. I'd like to have a project copy of this game to dig around in.

That being said, there were a few things about it, like any game, that were a bit off. It has a pretty good and in depth tutorial for the simple mechanics it presents, which I like. I also really like the skill tree. However, the battles themselves were a bit lacking. In all fairness, I did play casual mode, so it may just be that, but despite having a swathe of skills to learn and upgrade, including some semblance of a type or color chart, the game just wasn't long enough to fully expand or make use of any of them. I was able to mow through most of the enemies by dedicating all of my points to upgrading my attack stat, which honestly felt pretty satisfying to me. But this was lost during the final boss, where it culminated in me having to use my regular attack for every turn because sprinkling special moves in either didn't do as much damage or didn't seem to change the battle. For example, the skill that halves or 'destroys' the enemy's defense didn't make my attacks do more damage. Was this a self-dug grave? Maybe. I'm willing to take that. But I still think it made the final boss kind of just exhausting because it was essentially the same turn on repeat about 15 to 20 times.

The game also uses a QTE for it's regular attack and special evade commands. This is ultimately why I chose to use the regular attack as often as I could, both because it felt a bit more 'active' to combat the timer-turn system, but also because you start each battle with no MP and gain it as you deal damage, so you have to use it to charge your MP. So in my mind, why not just stick to the regular attack, especially if it's able to do as much damage as it does? Not to mention the fact that MP is zeroed out at the end of every battle (or at least, in my time it was, the MP bar is visible when you open the menu so maybe there's a way to preserve it) so it's not like you can stockpile it for future combat. There's also the issue of the QTE's not overriding the menu during combat, so it's possible for a QTE to be covered up by a menu you have open. They're also quite easily cheesed because you can spam the button you need to press (or at least, you can for the evade one). However, I'm sure those are faults of the engine and not something the developer has control of, I know how finicky RPG Maker can be.

Overall fun experience. The few flaws it does have are not enough to degrade or distract from the time I had with it.

As it says on the tin, short and sweet.

A heartfelt, lovingly-crafted little game that tackles some nuanced topics in a respectful and tactful way, while having an interesting combat system and adorable character designs.

The developer is inclusive of everyone and gives the player a choice between an rpg experience with normal difficulty as well as an easier difficulty for people who just want to enjoy the story and the art the game has to offer.

Grimm's Hollow only asks of your time, and in return it delivers utter joy.
Highly recommended to anyone.