Such a shame the 1st fee hours of this game had a great impression, game had great potential but alas it just end up boring, the POSITIVES are that this game had one of the best looking cell shaded artstyle with phenomenal skyboxes, the towns in this game blew me away, the large amount of character u can unlock and play with each having distinct but basic combat system, the huge set pieces are also really great.

NEGATIVES story is a snooze fest, the combat started out great but after few hours become boring there is no new combos no new ways to make combat feel fresh all the time, just feel stale and very basic, enemies and bosses also great but bogged down by them having huge health bars its just feels like u mashing attack button for minutes on end and special powers, the progression system is also ok at best.
I really wanted to enjoy this game but this gameplay is just too basic for my taste, wish they focused leas on having more character and make combat system more deep and satisfying.
6/10

Idk what tf a granblue is but the combat is up there with the ARPG greats (maybe with a couple tweaks like why tf does it auto game over when the meter runs out instead of after everyone dies) and I was very impressed by how uniquely fun all the characters I tried out were.

Unfortunately where the development hell shows is everywhere else. The cities? bam, only 2 of them, non factor. The characters? bam, no development, non factor. Explorable world? none, bam non factor. The story? absolute nothing burger, bam non factor.

I think a sequel building off this games combat with a more typical RPG length/format and more fleshed out narrative could be a recipe for one of the best ARPGs we've seen in a long ass time.

JRPGs are a genre that is divisive in part because it has some built in give and take. The often excessive length makes you care more for the characters, the world and the story being told. The simple mechanics provide a very low skill floor, but there's often room to display mastery.
First Departure R kinda turns all of that on its head.
The 20ish hour campaign has about 20 minutes total of character development and story combined. It's full of complex systems that don't get explained in the least, are extremely prone to failure(love that even a skill that you have leveled up to 10 on a character that has specific talents for it still fails like 30% of the time), and yet the gameplay never goes beyond mashing X and hoping the AI companions don't act too stupid.
Both the length/story problem is massively exacerbated by the fact at least a third of the game is backtracking, and yet you're expected to keep on leveling up as if you're climbing a progression curve. If you don't, you get stat checked into oblivion.
I eventually did a cheese quick level strat and the latter half of the game was mostly a breeze, despite continuing to be annoying(worth saying that the encounter rate is ridiculous, even with the Lv10 Scouting skill lowering encounters it's still like 3 a screen).
Another hilariously frustrating thing is how some enemies have movement skills that make them effectively impossible to hit, so there's a bunch of battles in which my option was to trigger the 10sec long escape function or take the gamble and spam X and watch as my entire party chases around the enemy and hope that turns out quicker. Since I'm a stubborn idiot I almost always did the latter... It almost never turned out quicker.
Overall... It's not a good experience. If it wasn't for the level strat I'd probably have dropped this, and it made me commit a major JRPG sin - knowingly skipping sidequests.

A game whose primary concern is reminding me of better GameCube games that I’ve already played. From Super Mario Sunshine to The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, to Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, A Hat in Time is somehow lesser in every way than the sum of all its parts. It's the perfect example of a game made by somebody whose only life experience they have to draw upon for their art is that they played other videogames.
How very sad.

In every discipline, A Hat in Time is wildly unfocused. Each world having different rules for doling out its missions does not suit its own Act structure. Quantity of ideas does not equal the quality of them. The same goes for its moveset. Traversal options as wide as an ocean but shallow as a puddle. This game would’ve been tremendously improved without the badge system in order to better hone the level design to certain flavors of movement. But of course, Paper Mario did it, so I guess this has to too for some reason.

There's an obsessive devotion on display here to replicating its own influences with no cohesive reasoning besides them being things that Jonas Kaerlev personally liked.
This is not how games should be made.

Each world is profoundly unmemorable and uninteresting.
Mafia Town is way too big and samey-looking for an introductory area to acquaint players with. Of course, the developers didn't care, because like with everything about this game, they mistook the fact that they could make every aspect of it "the most", they should make it "the most." Clearly nobody at Gears for Breakfast is familiar with the term "too much."
Dead Bird Studios is severely hampered by having little shared space between its individual Acts. These are spaces that at first look like they're designed for multiple objectives, but are thrown away too quickly to do anything with. Because of that, they fail to work as purely linear stages either. However, I'll admit that Train Rush is a decent linear setpiece.
Subcon Forest is another casualty of the terminal too-big-for-its-own-good disease that this entire game suffers from... but this time with lots of fog and invisible walls so it's even harder to tell where you're going! The massive tree you have to climb is an absolute nightmare of camera control. I'm shocked that it made it into the finished product. I immediately rolled my eyes whenever The Snatcher came on screen. Yes, the curses in The Thousand-Year Door were cute. Why should I care exactly that you're doing the same routine?
Alpine Skyline is where all of these problems come to a head and where the game just completely stops caring. You can tell this game went through absolute development hell because this is where they put all their assets for previously-scrapped ideas that had no place of their own. Unbelievably messy. Having 30-second sequences where you have to watch Hat Kid travel along the ziplines is ridiculously tedious. It's like they looked at the Launch Stars from Super Mario Galaxy and conspired to make the worst version of it that they possibly could.

Also was I the only one who raised an eyebrow at this plot?
"Hairy woman who wants to tell everybody what to do; led on by a misguided belief that she’s carrying out justice, takes things too far and starts hurting innocent people for minor offences, and is ultimately defeated by everybody yelling at her and telling her to go away." This reads to me like an anti-SJW parable that a Redditor wrote in 2013…
Oh wait, this game IS from 2013! Hmm…
Considering that JonTron is literally in this game I suspect that the right-wing messaging is not unintentional. People who complain about cancel culture will love this game.

Disappointingly, many will overlook A Hat in Time's numerous flaws because they think it’s funny that Hat Kid says “boop” and they mistake appreciation for its influences as appreciation for the game itself. One of the most frustratingly overrated games I've come across in recent years.

Play literally any other video game that this claims to be inspired by and you’ll have a much better time.

Kinda disappointing.

The moveset here for me is the only thing really keeping me from calling this a bad game, it all controls pretty well and feels great.

the game other than that does nothing for me, it's hard to care about any of the characters for me, they don't really change or stick with me to create any sort of emotion, especially in the final boss I wanted to laugh, but they never sort of created that much of a connection. almost all of the guys told me to get lost by the end of their chapters why should I care about them helping me now? why would they do that sort of thing?

My biggest issue is the levels themselves though, they feel big and open, begging to be explored, but the actual missions for the hourglass feel small and linear. Nothing ever motivated me to explore, other than that I should for more hourglasses. Except the Alpine skylines, but that level is so disjointed and TOO big. Chapter 2 was my favorite because it actually benefited from the linear missions and made more small linear areas, it was tons of fun, but that was the only chapter I really enjoyed.

None of the mechanics ever feel to fleshed out either, I only ever felt the need to use 2 badges (the Hookshot and magnet). and the games combat never gets experimental with it or more advanced.


Also I don't like the look of the game that much, I know it tries to have that same charm as the N64/GameCube look but it falls flat for me, I don't like how people's facial features are 2d and floating of their face it doesn't look that appealing.

I hope there's a sequel or another game that this studio makes that can further these mechanics or make them a bit better designed because as is, this game is sort of bleh to me. Good music and controls, but that's it for me.

It's a subpar platformer propped up by about a dozen coats of polish. After thinking about it, my main issue is with the game's moveset which, although it may seem to be the opposite at a surface level, is actually pretty restrictive. Let me put it this way. In the air, you have three options: a double jump, a dive, and a flip. However, the flip can only be done directly after a dive, and the double jump can't be done if you've already used a dive. What this means is that if you want to use all of your moves in a single jump, there's only one order you can do them in: double jump -> dive -> flip. This ends up making it so that jumps can't be designed in a way that would require you to use your moves in a different order, leading to just the same set of inputs over and over again for the entire game. What's more inexcusable is the fact that it doesn't even attempt any original mechanics, it's all just so basic. Moving platforms, springs, ropes to swing on, there's nothing new here to figure out. Combine this with the poor moveset and it creates a perfect storm of frustratingly low difficulty. I'd have a hard time believing anyone who has played a 3D platformer before would struggle with any part of this game, and it's not like it even punishes you for dying in the first place. To top it off there's also the badge and yarn systems. Neither of them are well-thought-out at all and their usefulness as collectables ends after about a fifth of the game, which ends up making them feel like huge misses in an understanding of what makes these types of games good.

The counterargument to my thoughts here would be that the game isn't supposed to be a platformer first and foremost and instead an adventure game where the main appeal is reaching varied environments and meeting a unique cast of characters, but I'd disagree with this as well. Something like Psychonauts or Super Mario Galaxy puts the actual platforming in the backseat in favor of interesting experiences, which I'm fine with, but A Hat in Time goes even further and ends up crossing a line. The platforming here feels like a formality, like the sequence of events was thought up first and the platforming is just there to fill in the gaps. Pyschonauts has unique mechanics depending on whose brain you're currently occupying, and Super Mario Galaxy consistently uses its outer space setting to vary up the gameplay. Take away the presentation from A Hat in Time and every world is the exact same, and that's my bottom line. The particle effects, the loading screen art and other 2D assets, the soundtrack, the UI. It's all fantastic but none of it works in service of the goal of creating a good platformer.