grabbed this cheap to get a Metroidvania fix based on steam tags, but it's more of an action RPG along the lines of Odin Sphere. Not what I was looking for, but I'm not complaining. Very fun ~10 hour experience, with satisfying fast paced combat and a tropey-but-engaging-enough story. The human character designs are absolute whack, but I really enjoyed the art for the environments and enemies. There's some odd design choices and minor frustrations here and there, but none of it really got in the way of enjoying the game.

There isn't much to this game besides the art (even that is well done, but not interesting), so I abandoned it.

The art is good and clearly inspired by Vanillaware but not really as evocative or interesting. These look like copies of Vanillaware characters, rather than being unique designs in this style. It is all certainly pretty to look at though.

The combat is mostly responsive, but very basic and spammy. It plays like a much less interesting version of Odin Sphere and I think it is actually broken until you unlock the roll in the skill tree.
Double-tap and hold to run is a bad choice.
The Map in this game is astoundingly bad. It works like Odin Sphere or Valkyrie Profile, but the relative locations on the map have nothing to do with the actual world, so you will exit an area on the right, the map shows it looping down and around to enter the top of an area across the world. It is really strange and makes the map and objective markers on it pointless. Other small problems like campfires (save points) and warp tablets (save point + fast travel) having the same icon on the map also sort of point to a poorly thought-out system.

The narrative slid right off my brain. It feels like a bunch of excuses to send me on fetch quests with no real throughline holding things together (at least up until I abandoned it).

I could have almost gone with two stars on this game... it isn't necessarily bad it just isn't doing much of interest in any regard.

What is this extremely underrated game? It is so far one of my favourite Metroidvania games!

The art is on point - although the size of the female characters' breasts is exaggerated -, the soundtrack is on point, the plot is actually pretty good and sad - and it has different endings, the combos are satisfying, and sometimes the difficulty is hard and annoying, but the game is still beatable! It felt weird playing it because the keyboard controls are odd, but I got used to it very quickly.

Overall, this is a must-play!

A pretty pleasant surprise of a game, with very obvious inspirations from Vanillaware. The environments looks great, with gorgeous or horrifying backdrops across the scenes, backed up by a good variety of enemies with pretty interesting lore if you take the time to look in the Monsterpedia. The story is pretty alright, nothing spectacular, but far from boring with some interesting backstories being fed to you as you go throughout the dungeons.

The combat is probably what I enjoyed the least about the game; enemies get juggled very easily while combo creativity isn't really there. Boss fights felt pretty forgettable, while any difficult encounters only felt challenging just because there was a bloat of enemies on the screen instead of any real interesting interactions going on. I also played on Very Hard for my first playthrough, so enemy health was very bloated and I'd sometimes just get one-shot or stunned to death from some attack with little telegraph to it or spell that had its sigil obscured by some other enemy or on-screen effect. So I'd recommend you pick a difficulty below that for your first playthrough.

Pretty good game, though.