On its current state the game has more annoyances than enjoyment.

The design choices are the worst type for a roguelike: grind otherwise you are not winning.

Grind to get better gear with minimal % upgrades (but maybe you can get a bonus armor! just grind more please cause its random when you upgrade)

Grind so you have more money to keep doing tries cause getting back to a level cost money exponentially.

But you also don't want to do this and its better to do the whole section all over again cause you can't buy consumables on base and one of them (at least for the first boss) makes the fight like 90% easier.

If you die you lose absolutely everything you had on that run, so better grind again the gear you lost, then making another run to fix that gear, then making another run to get consumables for the boss that would probably kill you.

If you also add the fact that there is a weight system on this game so when you want to do a run where you want to kill the boss you dont want any items on your inventory cause they would make you slow, and you don't want that cause as a said before, dying is horrible on this game.

The devs have addressed this by saying they are going to add a mode for the people that don't want a roguelike, so this will be shelved until that mode happens.

Before playing this, I have obviously heard about how infamously bad it was, but mostly on a storytelling perspective. From the combat I heard it was boring so the combination of the two made it a game not worth to play. I would lie if I say I played this cause I was excited to play it, but also I want to clarify that I didn’t come to the game with a “I want to see how bad it is” but more of a “I want to see why everyone say is so bad”.

I played the game on version 1.25, without elemental affinity, without beat down and with the original edit of the game. For context, this is the closest you can get to the original version of the game. But also I tried to play with the new additions to put perspective.

I’m writing this big intro just to give weight to my words. No matter the options I picked, no matter if I came with a fair try, I truly believe this is the worst game I have ever finished.

This review is story spoilers free.

Let’s just say the good thing about the game: The music is cool, it has some well-known composers (toby fox is in here) so some songs are good. That’s it, that’s the only thing I can give the game. Everything else is so unbelievable bad from start to finish that I can’t believe someone thought that they were a good idea.

From how convoluted, confusing, bad written, unfunny, and boring the story was. Literally nothing makes sense at the end, you are literally in disbelief that what you witnessed has any relationship from what you started with. To the characters: every single one is either too unfunny and an asshole, or too perfect to the point where they are just not a character anymore. We are on a RPG, the characters are one of the most important parts of this genre and they didn’t even get this right. They are also kind of unimportant at the end, which can be a pain or a blessing.

Now if you know about Yiik you may know about the main character: Alex, the ginger boy. He is very annoying, pretentious, a piece of shit in general. He has some options during the game that are laughable. The worst part is that it can seem to be pointed out that he is like this for outside reasons, or at least, you could pick that at the end, so it does come across as a very unlikable character which is not what you want on your story (specially with the themes of the story). He also has some internal monologues across the story (if you select the original edit, which btw, is not the recommended option anymore) that make him look more like a piece of shit, and also are very long sometimes, and pointless.

On the actual game side, the combat is god awful. It’s a turn base RPG with a system like Paper Mario where you have to do a mini game on every skill you have. The problem with this is that most of the mini games are awful, or very long. For reference, there is a mini game of a character that, to do the max damage, you have to do for 17 seconds. Imagine having to spend 17 seconds of inputs just so at the end the character do minimal damage.

That’s another point, most of the combat in here is braindead and pointless. There are ways to increase the combos of your mini game to do more damage, but they will only increase (at least on the first half) like 2-3 more points of damage, which is not worth the effort. The combat it’s truly boring and bad designed. The worst part is that they had change it a little bit, and it’s still bad.

The level system is also pretty weird. You store experience and at the end have to do a weird menuing on a tower to apply points to each stat. You have to do this on a specific location too, so it’s very annoying to do.

The game is also not very well made. I almost soft lock myself at least 2 times (one of which I had to actually restart the game). It has constant movement glitches, duplicate items, and clunky interactions. Also if you ever play the game (why would you after reading this), play with the football on the main city. I can’t believe you would let that on a fully release game.

Just to end this horrible rant, I just want to say something about the design choices at the end, so if you don’t want to even get an indirect spoiler you can skip this paragraph: The last 2 chapters are one of the worst things I have ever witnessed in a videogame, there is no way someone thought that people would want to play whatever happens in the first one, and I can’t believe someone thought that the last one was a cool conclusion that people would be excited to play. Even if what you want to give a commentary on the RPG genre, the reality is that the point was missed at the end, and it came out as one of the worst last chapters ever, and probably the worst final boss in a RPG I have played.

So I’m Yiiking out of my mind after playing this. I did stream this game so I had fun even while being miserable playing it, but if you are a normal player that want to play this on their own to see how bad it is: Trust me, it is actually not worth to play. This game is not funny bad, its godawful bad on a design and storytelling level that there is not worth spending the time laughing at it. May as well just watch a YouTube video about it, or a gameplay so you don’t have to suffer doing 10 minutes of normal enemy battles in a RPG.

Oh boy, this is going a be a long one. If you want to just read about my final thoughts, read the last paragraph.

Team ninja is the type of guy that would construct a homemade megaphone using some string, a squirrel, and a megaphone.

They are pretty good at making a good combat system that feels nice to play, while also creating cool and terrifying bosses that complement it. But then the motherfuckers like to add 200 useless, convoluded, broken and dumb systems to make everything feel worse.

Nioh 1 was a fun time for me, even if i played the game wrong, i could beat it with the restrictions i put myself. Nioh 2 however was a broken mess that, if i dare to play wrong, the game was impossible, but once i started playing with the minimum intended way, the game became a cake walk where i would just spam one attack and basically killing everything. This game went the extra mile, by making the game easier if i played it wrong, because the new systems added made it possible.

If you dont know about it, this game is Sekiro. The main mechanic you have to do apart of your usual souls like attacks is parrying: your dodge is a parry that if timed correctly generates you energy, with a lot of energy you can do heavy attacks that destroys the energy of your enemies, which would let you do a critical attack that does a lot of damage.

This is the only good thing the game has, and basically what it carrys it. The combat feels good to play WHEN YOU ARE PLAYING WITH THE PARRY SYSTEM.

They added another mechanic: a morale system. Basically, you and your enemies have a stage only level, the more level you have, the less damage you receive from them, and the more you do to them. You gain morale by various stuff, but mostly by killing enemies and finding flags around the stage. Every time you find a flag (some are like bonfires, others no), you increase your minimum cap, so if you die, you will be in that morale. This creates 2 situations: either you die, and your level cap is low cause you didnt find enough flags, and the enemies are much harder, or, if you are a little competent, you never died since the start of the stage, making you over leveled of morale, which would cause you to resist a lot and do a lot of damage, to the point where you wouldnt need to parry anymore. And with that the game is broken.

The first half the game was fun because i didnt understand enough to broke the system, but once i found the weak points of morale, and also understand how the UI works (cause let me tell you... this UI is a complete mess), i started just to breeze the stages, to the point where i would be 25 morale (the maximum) agaisnt the poor 20 morale boss, while just spamming X without needing to parry cause the damage wouuld be enough to ignore the main gameplay.

And with that, the second half is ruined. But not so much like the port. This PC port fucking sucks. Bad performance, ugly graphics, crashes that happend during the after boss cinematic, making you having to do the boss again. It is pathetic and Team ninja deserves the mostly negatives the game has.

A lot of stuff from Nioh also came here to ruin the game. Does Team ninja don't know how to make a gear system that isn't rng based like diablo? At least this time they don't have levels but you are still filling your bags with useless gear with 4 rarities. The map and quest system also is back, but instead of sending you to it after each mission, you have to manually go there to look for side quest, which i would be honest, i didnt know they existed until like 10 hours of playing. The difficulty system also came back from Nioh, and no i'm not speaking about the great boss and mob design the game has to create difficulty, i'm talking about increasing 10 levels out of nowhere between missions to make you grind or you will be having a hard time.

There are some other nickpicks, like tutorials showing up even if you already look at them (did you know about the little panda that eat stuff????), poor enemy variety, and you not getting more arrows from your storage every flag reset (seriously wtf is this shit, Nioh had this).

Ultimately, what carries this game to not be a piece of shit is the only thing Team ninja does right: a cool feeling and looking combat system, but this time, their poor design decisions and port performance brought them down to reality, and i hope they use this opportunity to learn and changing their core ideas to make more cool games with better systems.

Eastward suffers from one of my biggest problems with indie developers nowdays: Make the game pretty, forget to make it fun.

But it also goes an extra mile by trying to be something that truly didnt need to: Earthbound

And also failing doing it.

Ignoring the obvious praise of the art direction of this game (seriously is real good) the game is basically a slog to play. According to the devs its 30 hours long (it took me 24 hours with like 3 being on a mini game that is more fun than the game itself) which you would mostly spend talking with NPCs, putting bombs to solve easy puzzles and talking to more NPCs for the first 10 hours of the game.

Then after it you would unlock the other mechanic of the game which would add another button to your current putting bomb button. Repeat this for another 10 hours.

While doing this you also get to read the story which, on a basic level, it has a lot of potential with an interesting setting and lore behind but that it crashes by the awful pacing and obvious lack of direction cause at the end of the day, the devs didnt know what to do with their characters.

There are, in my opinion, 6 prominent characters in this game, that you get to know during it just so at the end most of them end up doing nothing. It's a great disrepect for probably one of the 3 interesting aspects of the game.

Speaking of characters, this game could theorically have a rock or a box as the main character and i dont think it would change anything. So much shit happening in this world and in front of his eyes and he doesn't react or act to almost anything. It also doesn't help that his sprite makes him look like the most boring and uninterested person ever.

Then, after 20 hours of slog, you reach the final 2 chapters, which are filled with interesting concepts not only story wise but gameplay wise and you are wondering why wasn't the game cut 10 hours so you could just play this sections earlier.

And at the end of the day, thats the real curprit i mentioned earlier: this game is too big. Too big of a story that wasn't developed well enough. Too big of a game that was basically empty from mechanics up to the last 2 hours.

And too big of a disappointment, cause when you really think about the good parts, you can only think what this game could have been if it wasn't trying to be what it isnt.

1 week before release i played the demo, it was a 20 minutes demo that was very underwhelming, but i still thought i should give the game a chance to see if it gets better later on.

It doesn't.

So the first thing i read about this game in the embed of the steam link was "a fresh take on the jrpg genre", and its probably the biggest problem of the game. It is really the most basic, mediocre turn base combat you can find.

Turn base combat, rock paper scissor elemental types plus physical, materia base skills with few spots (i had only 4 skills activated), no gear, no party. Does that sound like a fresh take to you?

So if the gameplay is so barebones it means is at least hard right? Well no, it is basic and easy. The start is easy, in the mid part they blow up the HP of enemies so you understand you should buy new skills, and once you do it the game is easy again. Mob enemies are generally harder than bosses because you are 1vs3 most of the time, while in bosses you can just debuff it and make it slow, while you have 2 turns to spam healings and hitting. There also some questionable decisions on the minor mechanics of the combat system but i don't think they matter (see some paragraphs below)

Now here is what is really the "fresh take": the setting being cyberpunk. Everything is written with tech terminology. The mana is called data, block and delay turn is called cache, melee combat is called hack? some of the terms don't even make sense of what they actually do. Also because we obviously live in a technological society we have people called "V-sync" or "Nullpointer", expresions like "Digits!" or "Oh my grind!", you know, normal behaviour if you ask me.

The story is pretty standard for a futuristic setting, it wasn't bad but also it wasn't good, pretty normal.

The artstyle is cool, the music is generally cool, which i think its why most people would don't mind the boring gameplay and will just play for the story, which is also present in the game itself because you have options to either skip every random encounter (yeah we have those here) or to insta win every battle when you want it.

So if you want to try this game because of the "fresh take in the jrpg genre" you will be disappointed, if you have played jrpgs before there is nothing new in this game, you have already played it before.

In its current state the game is not worth it.

It has so many gamebreaking bugs that your experience will be ruined if you encounter one, like me who encountered 1 softlock bug each day for the 3 days i played this game.

Also the game kind of sucks? its not bad but also its not good, the roguelike dungeon gameplay is pretty simple and boring, and the town section is interesting at the start but becames boring at the middle and end, to the point where i dont even pay attention to it. The progress system is also very boring.

So yeah, if you have any interest in playing this game dont play it now, wait until it leave early access... what do you mean this is a full release?