Honestly, I don't see what all the fuss is about.
Full disclosure, I played until fourside. I reached a section where I had to backtrack through that desert where you get a sunstroke every 8 seconds, before realising I really have better things to do with my time.
The only thing this game has going for it is the quirky aesthetic (which it does really well). Remove that, and you have a boring JRPG with some clunky-ass gameplay systems.
Said quirkiness sometimes contributes to making the gameplay worse. I'll give you one example: sure, it's "cute" for the game to have near-useless, "flavour" items, and single-use items (like the pencil sharpener). But the cuteness is overshadowed by the annoyance of having all this useless clutter in your inventory (which is already painfully small and cumbersome to manage).
Sure, you can have those surplus items sent to storage. But since the game is committed to being quirky to a fault, in order to send items into storage you have to: phone a delivery company (thorough a phone that takes up an item slot btw), read the same few lines of flavour text by your sister, wait for the damn delivery guy to arrive, and then individually pick out no more than 3 items for him to take into storage. This takes an ungodly amount of button presses and even some waiting time, when it really should take, like, 5 seconds and 2 submenus at most.
In general, the UI is a design nightmare, with vital info tucked away in submenus, or even inaccessible in some instances. What's that? You are in a fight and you want to heal a status effect, but you don't remember what status effects are healed by "healing alpha"? Or maybe you want to use an item like, say, the slime generator, but you don't remember what its effect is? Well, kid, you are shit out of luck, the only way to find out is trial and error.
Gameplay is the standard old-style jrpg. That is to say that it's boring and outdated. Sure, the enemies are cute and weird and wacky, but their uniqueness is skin-deep. Mechanically, they don't have anything interesting to offer that wasn't already done to death in, say, a dragon quest, or a final fantasy. I understand that this game aims to be a parody of those titles, but nevertheless, it should strive to improve on what those titles did.
Although some design ideas are pretty neat: being able to see enemies in the overworld is nice, and 100 times better than random encounters. Also, auto-resolving fights against weaker enemies is a great idea.
Moving away from gameplay, the story is pretty much nonexistent. There are some episodic shenanigans in every town you visit (which I don't mind), but I really didn't feel the sense of being on an overarching grand adventure. The fact that "main story" events mostly boil down to activating the typical 6 (or however many) JRPG mcguffins™ doesn't help.
Character motivation is nowhere to be found, but that's understandable because the characters also have little to no personality to begin with. Really, you could describe each one of them in a single (and short) sentence. And that's what really kills my interest in an RPG.
I love the aesthetic, and especially the god-tier soundtrack, so I have a great deal of appreciation and respect for it from an artistic point of view. But I really don't care for it as a game.
Full disclosure, I played until fourside. I reached a section where I had to backtrack through that desert where you get a sunstroke every 8 seconds, before realising I really have better things to do with my time.
The only thing this game has going for it is the quirky aesthetic (which it does really well). Remove that, and you have a boring JRPG with some clunky-ass gameplay systems.
Said quirkiness sometimes contributes to making the gameplay worse. I'll give you one example: sure, it's "cute" for the game to have near-useless, "flavour" items, and single-use items (like the pencil sharpener). But the cuteness is overshadowed by the annoyance of having all this useless clutter in your inventory (which is already painfully small and cumbersome to manage).
Sure, you can have those surplus items sent to storage. But since the game is committed to being quirky to a fault, in order to send items into storage you have to: phone a delivery company (thorough a phone that takes up an item slot btw), read the same few lines of flavour text by your sister, wait for the damn delivery guy to arrive, and then individually pick out no more than 3 items for him to take into storage. This takes an ungodly amount of button presses and even some waiting time, when it really should take, like, 5 seconds and 2 submenus at most.
In general, the UI is a design nightmare, with vital info tucked away in submenus, or even inaccessible in some instances. What's that? You are in a fight and you want to heal a status effect, but you don't remember what status effects are healed by "healing alpha"? Or maybe you want to use an item like, say, the slime generator, but you don't remember what its effect is? Well, kid, you are shit out of luck, the only way to find out is trial and error.
Gameplay is the standard old-style jrpg. That is to say that it's boring and outdated. Sure, the enemies are cute and weird and wacky, but their uniqueness is skin-deep. Mechanically, they don't have anything interesting to offer that wasn't already done to death in, say, a dragon quest, or a final fantasy. I understand that this game aims to be a parody of those titles, but nevertheless, it should strive to improve on what those titles did.
Although some design ideas are pretty neat: being able to see enemies in the overworld is nice, and 100 times better than random encounters. Also, auto-resolving fights against weaker enemies is a great idea.
Moving away from gameplay, the story is pretty much nonexistent. There are some episodic shenanigans in every town you visit (which I don't mind), but I really didn't feel the sense of being on an overarching grand adventure. The fact that "main story" events mostly boil down to activating the typical 6 (or however many) JRPG mcguffins™ doesn't help.
Character motivation is nowhere to be found, but that's understandable because the characters also have little to no personality to begin with. Really, you could describe each one of them in a single (and short) sentence. And that's what really kills my interest in an RPG.
I love the aesthetic, and especially the god-tier soundtrack, so I have a great deal of appreciation and respect for it from an artistic point of view. But I really don't care for it as a game.