I was expecting to enjoy this game, but it really blew my expectations out of the water.
The story follows four main characters. Melody is a fox girl who has started training to become a paladin in order to support her girlfriend Allison, a rabbit who has decided to start adventuring as a fighter. They've formed a guild with their friends Claire, a cow mage and Jodie, a tiger knight. While training Melody and Allison through some introductory dungeon crawling, they stumble into a world-ending problem way out of their control. The basis for the story is nothing you haven't heard before, but it gets elevated by the characters. While most the development does focus on the main four, there's plenty of focus put on the side characters too, with them offering side quests that can shed light on their relation to the party and the world, with a few really sweet ones that also serve as ways to teach your party new skills. There's also plenty of flavour text in the world from talking to characters and interacting with objects, and I found myself interacting with as much as I could just to hear the characters talk more.
Combat itself was pretty simple, but I still found the encounters fun. It's a standard RPG battle system with basic attacks and spells the characters can use, but it mixes it up with two systems. Star power, which is a meter that builds if you do actions that fit your characters class (healer gains some by healing, mage by casting spells, etc.). This can then be spent on powerful moves. There's also spellbooks, which are items you can equip to characters that give them a new set of abilities to use. This was a unique idea I don't think I've seen done before, and gives players that might want to experiment with character builds a way to do that, while also keeping things straightforward for players that would rather just stick the healing spellbook on the healer. It is worth noting that this game isn't too difficult: I never saw the game over screen, and I was able to beat all the side-content without having to do any extra levelling. This may be an issue for some, but it's really nice to have an RPG where you can just do everything without having to worry about grinding (the game does put rooms specifically for grinding right before boss encounters though, which is appreciated.)
Other things to mention are the music, which didn't blow me away as much as similar games did but was still nice to listen too. The artstyle is charming, especially the art used for character portraits and enemies in battle. This isn't to take away from the pixel art, as it's also really good and they do some creative things with it at points in the game. And if it wasn't clear enough from the title, this game is real gay, with plenty of other queer identities present in the story. It was nice to see that the game didn't constantly bring up the 'struggles of being queer' as part of the story too, with only a couple of throwaway lines about coming out being difficult or something similar. It's nice to have a character driven story with queer characters that doesn't constantly focus on that.
Overall, a really sweet game that is 100% worth playing if you are queer (especially if you're trans or a lesbian), and definitely worth giving a look if you're a fan of RPGs and games with a really sweet story. I'm really hoping this game starts picking up in popularity, because games this unapologetic and earnest with how they tell their story deserve it.
The story follows four main characters. Melody is a fox girl who has started training to become a paladin in order to support her girlfriend Allison, a rabbit who has decided to start adventuring as a fighter. They've formed a guild with their friends Claire, a cow mage and Jodie, a tiger knight. While training Melody and Allison through some introductory dungeon crawling, they stumble into a world-ending problem way out of their control. The basis for the story is nothing you haven't heard before, but it gets elevated by the characters. While most the development does focus on the main four, there's plenty of focus put on the side characters too, with them offering side quests that can shed light on their relation to the party and the world, with a few really sweet ones that also serve as ways to teach your party new skills. There's also plenty of flavour text in the world from talking to characters and interacting with objects, and I found myself interacting with as much as I could just to hear the characters talk more.
Combat itself was pretty simple, but I still found the encounters fun. It's a standard RPG battle system with basic attacks and spells the characters can use, but it mixes it up with two systems. Star power, which is a meter that builds if you do actions that fit your characters class (healer gains some by healing, mage by casting spells, etc.). This can then be spent on powerful moves. There's also spellbooks, which are items you can equip to characters that give them a new set of abilities to use. This was a unique idea I don't think I've seen done before, and gives players that might want to experiment with character builds a way to do that, while also keeping things straightforward for players that would rather just stick the healing spellbook on the healer. It is worth noting that this game isn't too difficult: I never saw the game over screen, and I was able to beat all the side-content without having to do any extra levelling. This may be an issue for some, but it's really nice to have an RPG where you can just do everything without having to worry about grinding (the game does put rooms specifically for grinding right before boss encounters though, which is appreciated.)
Other things to mention are the music, which didn't blow me away as much as similar games did but was still nice to listen too. The artstyle is charming, especially the art used for character portraits and enemies in battle. This isn't to take away from the pixel art, as it's also really good and they do some creative things with it at points in the game. And if it wasn't clear enough from the title, this game is real gay, with plenty of other queer identities present in the story. It was nice to see that the game didn't constantly bring up the 'struggles of being queer' as part of the story too, with only a couple of throwaway lines about coming out being difficult or something similar. It's nice to have a character driven story with queer characters that doesn't constantly focus on that.
Overall, a really sweet game that is 100% worth playing if you are queer (especially if you're trans or a lesbian), and definitely worth giving a look if you're a fan of RPGs and games with a really sweet story. I'm really hoping this game starts picking up in popularity, because games this unapologetic and earnest with how they tell their story deserve it.