Magic Pengel is a fun, short (~13h for me), cute RPG game where you draw your monsters and fight battles in the arena to help a girl win her house back. It's also very much a budget title, and you can see it in every aspect of it.

The small OST, repeated (and low quality) voicelines, rudimentary... everything. And long, loooooong loading screen between the few areas in the game. And the simplistic gameplay loop that goes like this:

Cutscene at home -> walk to the plaza (load) -> walk to arena (load) -> battle -> walk back (load) -> walk back (load) -> cutscene -> repeat

If doodling wasn't fun and the game wasn't so charming I would take off a lot more points for how obscene the loading screens are, even for a budget title.

The battles are doable, it's rock paper scissors which means there is some luck involved, but you can strategize your way through once it clicks. It's a very kid-friendly easy game, which means you don't lose anything if you die, even the final boss gauntlet lets you pick up from the phase you were at just to spare you any possible headache.

It's worth a try if you think RPG where you fight with your doodles is fun, but the loading can absolutely kill it for some people.

This is a remake of the Saturn/PSX original, and it's one of the weirdest remakes I've seen be done.

Gameplay is switched from 1st to 3rd person, areas are expanded and take way longer to go through, and fighting enemies with the bad attack animations is ugly, boring, and frustrating. Just about everything here is worse.
On top of that, the ambient noise soundtrack is replaced with mindnumbing techno loops that I had to mute after the second run.

But let's talk about the elephant in the room. The style change.
It goes for a different aesthetic, from "weird anime" to "generic anime".
Imagine waking up to find all Giger paintings look like Disney princesses.

Does it "miss the point"? Yeah, it's no longer scary.
Is it "completely different"? Kind of.
Does it "ruin the story?" No, because it's the same. It just has anime-er people tell it.

Changing "text on a black screen" to a proper cutscene just shows how bad it was in the first place, although the clunky animation certainly doesn't help.

The mystique from a lot of moments is removed, and the story is exposed as what it really is: a boring, messy, but slightly interesting ordeal.

The vibes are gone, the atmosphere is gone, and the fun-ish gameplay loop is gone, and those were the only redeeming things about the original.
So what's left?

Nothing but the story, being told properly.

And it still sucks.

A freaky roguelite dungeon crawler with a borderline incomprehensible plot and unexplained game mechanics that require wasting runs to understand. It's novel, at least.

The gameplay is serviceable despite not explaining anything about the systems, the atmosphere is outstanding, and the core loop can get fun if you don't exclusively get bad items or spawn between two enemies. It succeeds at being fun while also being scary, despite some enemies being horribly designed.

The main issue is the story and the lack of any explanations in the game itself.
Usually, I wouldn't mind it, and wouldn't count it as a negative, if it wasn't for the fact that it was a deliberate choice to sell it as separate material and separate novels instead of including the texts as an obtainable "lore" section/item in the game. The integrity of the storytelling is blown to shreds.

I love obscure storytelling that makes me think, I do not enjoy being deprived of already-written content because they wanted me to go read the author's blog about it, and also buy his books and drop by comiket.
If you are the type of person that gets obsessed and digs through archived posts from two decades ago to understand one comment that should've been in the game to begin with, you have plenty to look at here.
But I'm not.
And I'm not going to judge it based off external material written post-release either. And if I had to, the rating would be even lower.

Not that the story or world itself was good either, it's trying too hard and the execution is too flawed to be truly enjoyable. It's just very interesting to look at.

The cutscenes and their execution range from expertly crafted bizarre artpieces to a black screen with text on it for two minutes, most likely due to lack of budget.

Overall, it's fine.
If you don't care about any of the above and play games only for the vibe and gameplay, this is a fun time.