It is very hard to give this game stars or a full review as I was sadly one of the victims of its poor optimization. I still want to put down my thoughts as I believe this has the potential to be a big hit and I enjoy a lot of its features as of currently, but the state of bugs and optimization simply made it so I was unable to experience most of it for myself and had to resort to watching gameplay from streamers and friends to form a lot of my opinions.
My thoughts on this review are primarily influenced by my own playtime and my thoughts on aspects such as the lore are influenced from watching it through other players.
Positives, things I enjoyed a lot and hope the game focuses on:
- World exploration. I was initially iffy about the world of the game during the first promotional material, but I genuinely loved exploring everything I managed to see. The world is beautiful; the mechanics of features such as double jump, pretty fast run and dash, grappling hook and running up walls made it very pleasant to spend my time running around and discovering the landscapes. I could not experience some quest-locked areas for myself, but even through the gameplay of others I enjoyed the locations very much.
- Combat - the combat of this game is simple, yet fun. It relies on the player's skill to plan teams and combos, control their movement and dodge which gives a chance to take on harder bosses early on. I personally love games that reward and punish the player for their skill and see a lot of potential for future characters.
- VFX. A small thing not a lot of players notice or care about, but I believe the VFX team did pretty well with a lot of character skills and abilities.
Things I am neutral on:
- Gacha system - the gacha system so far seems to be just fine. The pity system is normal and could be considered less predatory (as much as you can consider a gambling system unpredatory) by many other games' standards.
- Voice acting - the VO quality varies over languages. I played with the English dub which I personally disliked, but watched my friend play with the Japanese one which seemed to fair a bit better. A lot of VO direction seemed messy, but it could be related to the writing quality of the quests.
- Character designs - I'm personally not a fan of a lot of the designs in this game, but this aspect does not matter to me as much as the gameplay aspect. I prefer to choose my teams based on how fun I find their gameplay to be and their synergy, so this part doesn't bother me. The game is still in an early state so they could always release a character I enjoy.
Negatives, things I hate or want to be fixed:
- Optimization. The game has a lot of bugs, glitches, performance issues and I thought I was personally having a bad time due to system requirements before checking online and seeing a lot of people with better systems than mine experiencing the same.
I want to be kind to the studio and give them the benefit of the doubt as glitches and server issues in a newly released Open world RPG are to be expected, especially for the studio's first attempt at one, but the state of the game upon release and as of the time I am writing this is still saddening. I expected to have a higher ping, some unpatched glitches or bugs, but I did not expect my game to be unplayable due to constantly jumping 500ms. Cutscenes forced my game to close or froze my screen. Loading screens took an incredibly long time to process. At one point, during the story, the dialogue refused to continue so I was stuck on one part for 5 minutes before restarting. The optimization of this game was the main reason I dropped it and I hope it gets fixed.
- Story. The story feels incredibly rushed for an Introductory arc - I do not mind it when games and stories introduce terms that are to be explained further on later, but this game's introductory arc gives such an infodump of information that I found myself spacing out many times before eventually deciding that I would stop trying to remember everything.
The first arc has many interesting points and Scar's story can be interesting on paper, but suffers from a very rushed pacing and execution. As the main character in this game who is new to this world, I do not want the story to spoon-feed me information at all times, but I do not want to be introduced to this world as if I am visiting a neighboring country I've heard about before (when I haven't.) Ignoring alleged comments about how the story experienced rewrites, I think there is potential as some side quests seemed to be more comprehensive than the main story, but as an introductory arc it did not grab me.
To conclude, I would like to have faith in this studio and believe that they will continue working on this game. They have already gathered an audience that will follow them into the next updates and I would like to come back to this game . . . but not in the state it is in right now.
My thoughts on this review are primarily influenced by my own playtime and my thoughts on aspects such as the lore are influenced from watching it through other players.
Positives, things I enjoyed a lot and hope the game focuses on:
- World exploration. I was initially iffy about the world of the game during the first promotional material, but I genuinely loved exploring everything I managed to see. The world is beautiful; the mechanics of features such as double jump, pretty fast run and dash, grappling hook and running up walls made it very pleasant to spend my time running around and discovering the landscapes. I could not experience some quest-locked areas for myself, but even through the gameplay of others I enjoyed the locations very much.
- Combat - the combat of this game is simple, yet fun. It relies on the player's skill to plan teams and combos, control their movement and dodge which gives a chance to take on harder bosses early on. I personally love games that reward and punish the player for their skill and see a lot of potential for future characters.
- VFX. A small thing not a lot of players notice or care about, but I believe the VFX team did pretty well with a lot of character skills and abilities.
Things I am neutral on:
- Gacha system - the gacha system so far seems to be just fine. The pity system is normal and could be considered less predatory (as much as you can consider a gambling system unpredatory) by many other games' standards.
- Voice acting - the VO quality varies over languages. I played with the English dub which I personally disliked, but watched my friend play with the Japanese one which seemed to fair a bit better. A lot of VO direction seemed messy, but it could be related to the writing quality of the quests.
- Character designs - I'm personally not a fan of a lot of the designs in this game, but this aspect does not matter to me as much as the gameplay aspect. I prefer to choose my teams based on how fun I find their gameplay to be and their synergy, so this part doesn't bother me. The game is still in an early state so they could always release a character I enjoy.
Negatives, things I hate or want to be fixed:
- Optimization. The game has a lot of bugs, glitches, performance issues and I thought I was personally having a bad time due to system requirements before checking online and seeing a lot of people with better systems than mine experiencing the same.
I want to be kind to the studio and give them the benefit of the doubt as glitches and server issues in a newly released Open world RPG are to be expected, especially for the studio's first attempt at one, but the state of the game upon release and as of the time I am writing this is still saddening. I expected to have a higher ping, some unpatched glitches or bugs, but I did not expect my game to be unplayable due to constantly jumping 500ms. Cutscenes forced my game to close or froze my screen. Loading screens took an incredibly long time to process. At one point, during the story, the dialogue refused to continue so I was stuck on one part for 5 minutes before restarting. The optimization of this game was the main reason I dropped it and I hope it gets fixed.
- Story. The story feels incredibly rushed for an Introductory arc - I do not mind it when games and stories introduce terms that are to be explained further on later, but this game's introductory arc gives such an infodump of information that I found myself spacing out many times before eventually deciding that I would stop trying to remember everything.
The first arc has many interesting points and Scar's story can be interesting on paper, but suffers from a very rushed pacing and execution. As the main character in this game who is new to this world, I do not want the story to spoon-feed me information at all times, but I do not want to be introduced to this world as if I am visiting a neighboring country I've heard about before (when I haven't.) Ignoring alleged comments about how the story experienced rewrites, I think there is potential as some side quests seemed to be more comprehensive than the main story, but as an introductory arc it did not grab me.
To conclude, I would like to have faith in this studio and believe that they will continue working on this game. They have already gathered an audience that will follow them into the next updates and I would like to come back to this game . . . but not in the state it is in right now.