Definitely an unorthodox game, but considering this games background that's to be expected. You run a blacksmithing weapon shop with your burly mentor figure, forging weapons that various people can use to complete their quests and solve their problems. Forging weapons is done through this strange rhythm minigame where you tap different parts of a molten slab to a rhythm in order to strengthen different stats, but the game really doesn't do a good job explaining how to consistently make weapons with good base stats so it felt like complete RNG as to whether or not the game said I made a dull piece of garbage or a god-slaying masterpiece. Hell, maybe it actually is RNG, who knows.

Rather than outright sell the weapons you make, the shop you run has a weird rental system. Weapons are rented out, and only once your clients clear their quest will they pay you for your services whereas if they fail they both don't give you shit AND lose the weapon you gave out to them. Since weapons level up and grow in stats the more times they are used and successfully return, you definitely want to make sure you assign the right weapons to the right clients or else you might accidentally lose something decent. The weapons are also equipped with the "Grindcast", which is a twitter-like media feed that broadcasts whatever it is that the renters are questing in real time, and it plays all throughout the game (even during the parts where you are focused on something else, which can and will lead to moments where you miss some story beats entirely due to your attention being elsewhere. Maybe if the grindcast was voiced instead of a text log it would have worked better as an in-game podcast but then the rhythm gameplay would be harder and yeah i don't think they really thought that one all the way through). Customers also come in and out of the store as they please, and it gives the game this very passive vibe. Like there's just a lot of downtime as you just kinda work on making and polishing weapons while waiting for the game to send someone in. Or sometimes the game will throw countless random unnamed NPCs at you to rent random shit while you are trying to actually make what you need to make before an actual named important client comes back looking for the weapon you promised them. The pacing is borderline nonexistent and the gameplay almost borders on idle-game territory at points.

The real point of the game though is in its writing. It's clear that the weird rental nature and Grindcast feed system are all in place as a way to keep the player involved with the world and characters despite being confined within the four walls of the weapon shop for the entire game. The game was written and directed by Yoshiyuki Hirai of the Japanese comedy group America Zarigani, so the emphasis is on the gags within the NPCs and the quirks that each of the characters have. That being said, I think that the localization team might have translated some of the gags a bit too literally because the writing felt really dry and the jokes usually tended to fall under a very particular singular sense of humor that I honestly can't even describe in words. A lot of the bits didn't really hit for me, and I honestly can't really tell if that's due to the brand of humor that Hirai has in the first place, the localization team being too direct with their translation, or some combination of both. Even the games ending is a bit that just fell flat on its face to me...

I definitely think the game runs a bit too long for its own good, especially given the downtimey gameplay and flat writing that make the game feel far longer than the roughly 10-hour runtime actually is. Unlike the other Guild games having been developed by established and esteemed developers that have intricate experience on how to make games, this game was made by an entire outsider to the industry and honestly I respect that. Since Hirai has done voicework for other Level5 games I wouldn't be surprised if he got onboard for the project by just pitching this idea for a weapon shop game he thought up some time ago (yet didn't fully think through in a gameplay mechanical sense). You don't really see experimental titles like that from complete outsiders get made very often, stuff like the Mother series, Takeshi's Challenge, Penn & Tellers Smoke and Mirrors, Otocky, etc. Just people that don't typically make games having an off-beat idea and a publisher willing to take a chance on it. Even if the end result might be something that's kinda eh to play and doesn't feel very properly thought-out, I can't hate the ambition and adore how absolutely unique games like this always turn out to be.

It's a twist on Breakout, though I'm not particularly sure if it twists things in a substantially better or worse way tbh. Instead of having one ball bounce between a paddle you have two clowns bouncing off of a see-saw, and you gotta position things right and account for physics n shit to get good hits. The bricks are balloons now and are now constantly moving, with the line going in a loop constantly. It's cool in the way that you can get a clown stuck at the top sandwiched between two balloons as they keep moving into his bounces, but idk doesn't feel as inherently satisfying as calculating a shot to get stuck in the ceiling in breakout. The physics with the see-saw seem a bit inconsistent to me as well, as most of the bounces I had didn't even really launch the clowns high enough to hit the balloons in the first place. The balloons also repopulate on a per-row basis instead of everything refilling at once when the board is clear, which I thought was weird at first but upon playing the game type that refreshes in the traditional breakout way and being stuck trying to hit that last moving balloon by hoping it just happens to move into my clown ass I realized why they made the default refresh how it is. There are also game types that add extra barriers that move in a row below all the balloons, which add another layer of unpredictability to the game. At the end of the day it's breakout but with a lot of extra moving parts, and those moving parts can make it both more interesting due to the seeming random chaos that can happen while that same chaos can make the game less satisfying and engaging as sometimes you can get a crazy point combo by complete accident. I can definitely respect the thought that went into trying to make breakout more complex, but I don't really think it substantially adds or detracts to the block-breaking genre, it's just different. Despite being a circus game, you wouldn't have to be a clown to enjoy what's on offer here.