EARLY ACCESS REVIEW:
I’ve been highly anticipating it ever since I saw the fantastic art style and thought I’d take a chance on early access, even knowing that it’s pretty unpolished. The presentation is better than screenshots capture. There’s a great twist that the 2d environments “shift” into 3D when 3D-modeled bosses appear. Fantastic vision and well executed.
It definitely pulls a lot of inspiration from the Kiseki games, with its sense of humor/puns and fourth wall breaking by clicking on different objects. You can also have your character do silly things that subvert the forward progression of the game. The battle system has a very solid, if simple, foundation. It’s not challenging, but the beginning of JRPGs hardly ever are. The enemy encounters and animations definitely take inspiration from Chrono Trigger, and there’s a scene at the end of the first chapter that really drives that home.
But unfortunately despite its short length, it does not really value the player’s time. For example, the main protagonist’s journey starts with her teacher lampshading that he’s assigning you menial tasks. And menial they are. At one point, one of the quest givers/protagonists of another story was sleeping, and I asked for a list of supplies they wanted me to buy. But I missed part of it and clicked again to read it and the character went back to sleep and wouldn’t wake up as a joke. So I literally had to just find a walkthrough video and scrub through to rewatch it. Leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. It’s made all the weirder that the game as it is right now is made up of 3 5-hour character stories and this is how the time is spent. Hopefully the stories get better, but for now they are by far the most amateurish part of the game. This type of nonsense does not seem like it would be changed, unless they kind of rewrite the whole thing. There’s so much great potential here but I have a feeling it might always come across as a pretty amateur effort as a result of the tone set by the weak story.
I’ve been highly anticipating it ever since I saw the fantastic art style and thought I’d take a chance on early access, even knowing that it’s pretty unpolished. The presentation is better than screenshots capture. There’s a great twist that the 2d environments “shift” into 3D when 3D-modeled bosses appear. Fantastic vision and well executed.
It definitely pulls a lot of inspiration from the Kiseki games, with its sense of humor/puns and fourth wall breaking by clicking on different objects. You can also have your character do silly things that subvert the forward progression of the game. The battle system has a very solid, if simple, foundation. It’s not challenging, but the beginning of JRPGs hardly ever are. The enemy encounters and animations definitely take inspiration from Chrono Trigger, and there’s a scene at the end of the first chapter that really drives that home.
But unfortunately despite its short length, it does not really value the player’s time. For example, the main protagonist’s journey starts with her teacher lampshading that he’s assigning you menial tasks. And menial they are. At one point, one of the quest givers/protagonists of another story was sleeping, and I asked for a list of supplies they wanted me to buy. But I missed part of it and clicked again to read it and the character went back to sleep and wouldn’t wake up as a joke. So I literally had to just find a walkthrough video and scrub through to rewatch it. Leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. It’s made all the weirder that the game as it is right now is made up of 3 5-hour character stories and this is how the time is spent. Hopefully the stories get better, but for now they are by far the most amateurish part of the game. This type of nonsense does not seem like it would be changed, unless they kind of rewrite the whole thing. There’s so much great potential here but I have a feeling it might always come across as a pretty amateur effort as a result of the tone set by the weak story.