Alluna and Brie Re-Tentacled

Esta chistoso, el modo de combate da ternura jaja. Aun no lo acabo pero me va gustando. Consejo: durante las actividades en la ciudad aveces te mandan advertencias e incluso hay unas que vienen del juego anterior como cuando max le daba de comer al pato xd, no las ignoren y guarden la partida que algunas si se hacen realidad :v.

A really promising game with some really derpy design choices. There are some pretty good reviews already, so I want to hit on points I don't think are mentioned as much. So here's a list of my criticisms and peeves with the game. Everything about the game is a little "off" and I wish they would fix some of the mistakes. The UI has with a strange pink and blue color scheme which never seems to make clear which selection is highlighted. Music is very good, especially the 80's-themed "night" theme of the game, but volume is all over the place. Sometimes special moves and attacks have a voiceover and accompanying sound effect. Sometimes they are totally silent. There is a LOT of written dialogue for this game, and some of it is very interesting and entertaining. The main character (Brie, despite her name being second in the title) has a multi-faceted personality, which is both good and bad. She is very unique, but with no really strong traits to latch on to, she seems very "all-purpose." She's kind of shy 'goth', but also a talkative partier. She deals with bullies, but she's not a picked-on 'loser' and fights back pretty well. She is "good" but prioritizes self-interest and preservation. This makes for a well-rounded realistic human character, but if you are going to have your protagonist be a outgoing and socially prominent, they should have some tighter, more pronounced characteristics. The game has a "pokemon go"-style minigame, which is kind of neat, except the tournament "battles" are the worst. You passively observe as your 'bug' attacks the other. If you happen to use a tanky, heal-oriented bug against another, you should go make something to eat, because the fight is going to go on for quite a long time, and you only have two options- forfeit entirely or watch two bugs try to whittle eachother down extremely slowly. (This can seriously take 8 minutes or so.) The multitude of background images and character portrait "costumes" are fantastic, and each character seems to have an entire wardrobe of varied clothing- and seeing them is a big highlight of the game. It really had me wishing that the battle sprites could also wear different costumes. Speaking of battle sprites, the battle animations are extremely stiff and awkward. (Small grievance, but Brie's toes appear to be curling upwards in costumes that show them?) I think this might make sense if you've played the entire series of games, but in a fairly small cast, did there really need to be MULTIPLE characters that with a history of drug-trafficking? Anyway, I criticize because I think the game seems to have a lot of love put into it- I want it to succeed.

I like the writing for the most part and the combat isn't bad, but the rpg systems are severely lacking. There is no way to check stat changes when selecting equipment until you have equipped it, plus the equipment is just in a single long list with latest aquisitions at the bottom and no separation based upon the 3 categories (you choose weapon, armour, and accessory during the same session from the same list that's awkward to navigate). There is also no way to view stats such as resistances or currently available moves for a character (as far as I can tell) until you are in combat. Additionally, two more gripes I have with the barebones rpg system are that you can't swap party members during combat despite having no way to know in advance what resistances the enemies in your next fight will have, and more importantly, despite only being allowed to have 4 of the 8 characters in your active party, only the active members at the end of combat (which is also excluding anybody who was defeated and still down at the end of an encounter) will actually gain experience, which inevitable means that with no way (again, as far as I can tell, since I'm only in chapter 3 of the story) to grind experience without the time/energy constraints or redoing dungeons that were already cleared, you either swap members around after every fight and inevitable get defeated in the late-game due to being under-levelled or leave certain members permanently out of your party because they are stuck at a lower level and would immediately die if brought out in an area above their level. Overall while I enjoy some of the humour and the gameplay is passable, I can't recommend this game with it's rather poor RPG system.

This was a nice little surprise. I've been a fan of these devs for awhile and decided to check this out after Max's Big Bust. It's a fairly meaty RPG/life management sort of game where you go fight monstergirls in another dimension while balancing personality stat building and dating sim bits. Think Persona but your main character is a bisexual magical girl with the power to summon cheese sandwiches. It's a great effort for a team not used to balancing an RPG, just in terms of nailing a gameplay loop, partly thanks to the fun writing and characters. Brie is really fun as a lead, a good balance of normal and extremely strange at the least expected moments. The combat is simple, but that really clicks with me, offering just enough layers through the large party pool and the elemental system to not become boring. It's a great game you can lose yourself in for a good chunk of time, and it has a lot of content to find and explore. Please consider purchasing this or the team's other games (mainly the Max's Big Bust visual novels), the main dev is currently working from a laptop since their main computer is down and I'd love for them to be able to repair or replace it to offer an update to this one. You can tell this one in particular was made with a lot of love and effort, the little flaws here and there just make me appreciate what it nails more (I kind of feel the same about the first Mass Effect's jankiness).

I really liked the story, but I do not think it is standalone as it is marketed: I found several jokes funnier due to things I had known from the previous game. Still, it is a read I would recommend. At its core, the combat is balanced, but is a bit ruined by the fact the game gives you so much money that you will be able to buy more healing items that you will ever need, outhealing any fight the game throws at you. The time management is good: not so long that you will become bored, but not so short that it deprives the player of wiggle room. Lastly, the art is of good quality, but it lacks a gallery to lock at the cgs again. Ultimately I enjoyed this game and would definitely try out any future game by Lached Up Games.

Really fun and funny game it doesn’t take itself seriously like west of loathing or neptunia and it takes place in Australia so the Australian lingo and humor is really funny There’s way more cursing then neptunia they say the f word a lot but it’s so over done that it’s funny. The charcters like neptunia are funny and you can’t wait to do there side events or advance the story because it’s fun and funny and entertaining. The music is cute like neptunia. It’s similar if neptunia took place in Australia and didn’t break the fourth wall as much as neptunia does. The dungeons are pretty simple and the gameplay. The npcs are quite funny to especially the equipment shop toward the beginning. The story is hard to explain like neptunia it’s kinda zany and a crazy story but really cute also. I would look into this if you like neptunia or west of loathings humor. Iam just about done with the main story but now Iam working on the side events there’s 10 characters you can talk to and get their heart meter up for different events. Which are just as funny as the main story. Remember neptunia was really funny from the optional side events and charcters you could talk to. It really makes you want to see all the events in this game like in neptunia. It’s really fun and funny. Or someone likes humor games or visual novels or likes neptunia. You will definitely like this. It’s worth the 20 plus hours if you want to explore everything. Nice job who made this. :). 5 stars.

The spin-off / sequel to Max's Big Bust, this game carries on the good writing and over-the-top humor as well as the overall art style. It is still first and foremost a visual novel, with a JRPG parody tacked on. -= TL;DR =- Despite all of its various flaws, the art and writing is still very much a pleasure that makes this worth a play through, especially if you catch it on sale. -= TL;DR =- The main draw is still the writing, hands down. The main character, Brie, has her own charm and it works well. The story is fine, though it doesn't feel as involved as the previous title, which isn't helped by being broken up by the jrpg elements. The JRPG elements are... well... ok. Not great. But ok. They do all tend to get rather grindy fairly quickly though and will end up feeling more like a chore you do to get to the next bit of writing. I think the game would have been better overall (and much much shorter) without them. Attack animations take far too long, there are no interesting mechanics to take it past the most bare-bones rpg experience, and it doesn't really serve the story all that much other than to be the butt of a few jokes about the tropes in use. Some of the returning characters have new art for... reasons? Some work well (like Holly), some really don't (Evelyn was completely unrecognizable and Ember lost her big fiery mane for example) and some are just a little odd like Max's new ganglier look with a long pony tail. Music is more of the same. It's fine, but the loops get repetitive after a while so you'll probably turn it down / off. The voice acting just felt odd to me, so it was also turned off pretty quickly. By the time I hit the 20hr mark I'd essentially turned off all the audio and did not miss it at all. I don't see this game having any replay value to speak off. The only real change to be found is which romance option you pick, but slogging through all the sluggish combat grind more than once is just not happening, and you can do virtually all of the character specific scenes on one playthrough anyway so you won't miss much of anything. That brings up another nitpick, in that even with the grind, there wasn't nearly enough content to fill the required game time. I wound up spending 6 of the last 7 weeks in game just napping because i already had high levels, good gear, maxxed morale stats, maxxed Heart Beats with everyone, and so on and just had nothing left to do but wait for the next timed in-game event.

Very cute RPG featuring TF/TG Themes, very Persona coded in time and relationship management.

from a player perspective, this game only really consists of 3 parts: the turn based combat system, the time management system and of course, the visual novel side of things. The visual novel part of this is easy to talk about since it's pretty much just the last game all over again, but vaguely better. I reviewed Max's big bust not too long ago so you can go read it if you need more info, you may as well also go play that since this game essentially requires you to play that for you to understand the context of pretty much everything that happens in this game. Summing it, up, I said Max was a dumb poorly put together game that was so bad that it's good, due to it's unique surreal take on common anime and visual novel conventions. The main thing that's notably different here is that this game doesn't take multiple chapters to figure out its own identity and starts stronger. This also has better art, I won't say it's perfect, there's still a bunch that I find problematic or artistically debatable, Stuff like how A lot of the maps in this look nice but are hard to understand at a glance, or how characters still only have one idle CG because apparently being able to easily edit stuff for dress up is regarded as more important than having characters who can actually emote with body language (like I said, debatable)… But that aside, the rough edges and hanky janky proportions of the first game are mostly all gone and are replaced with very competent newer designs, with the worst examples only being the legacy assets kept from the first game. I do think the writing is also better, though I don't really know how to articulate why, it still has bad elements like how the women still feel like they're written by horny teenage boys, but it feels less abrasive and in your face compared to before. The characters don't feel so samey dialogue wise either. I dunno, perhaps it's more self aware than the first game was in a way that goes beyond lamp-shading every single issue and that's lead to a better form of dialogue flow. Or Perhaps I've just become adjusted to it, I dunno? Writing isn't really my wheelhouse when it comes to working on these games, I prefer to focus my work on the art. I should probably also talk about the dating stuff I guess? I don't think I've really cared about dating mechanics since I was a teen, and I certainly don't care about them now that the hormones I take has left me with a horniness level of approximately nada. But they're a much stronger focal point here compared to the first game, so I may as well say something. For the most part romance mechanics, in general, tend to suck, since having to write the game open ended enough to allow for multiple love interests prevents you from writing anything truly interesting that can actually affect the status quo. Cause of this, even if you like romance, which I do, these mechanics tend to be tedious compared to just having a single linear love interest and actually writing something impactful or full of actual drama. This game thankfully avoids some of that by using the dating mechanics as a vehicle for world building, which is nice. The dating itself is a bit ham fisted though, it's really feels like kind of a stretch as to why every character in this would be attracted to the protag... there's chemistry, but its iffy and hard to believe. There are some interesting dynamics though, such as the one with eldoris (that one honestly could have just been written as a standalone canonical romance and would have actually been interesting as it felt more unique that others I've seen). The turn based stuff is….eh? I think if you've played one final fantasy/dragon quest inspired system, you've played them all. I don't hate it, but I don't have any strong feelings towards it as it didn't require any real strategy. what I'm trying to say is that its not bad, it's okay; it's very obvious that time and effort was put into it, but the end result is something I've seen done better in smaller games that just said "screw it" and used rpgmaker assets instead of putting time and effort into their work I think the strongest feelings I had about it was not liking how it looked. The paper doll animation just doesn't look good, especially over static backgrounds displaying things that should be animated, I don't think I ever really adjusted to how the characters spasmically jerk around. Things would probably have turned out better if the game just went with single sprites to show character states lastly, the time management stuff Systems like these don't really need to be a big sprawling forest of mechanics, I think they just need to vibe, and this vibes which is good. The game doesn't really do a good job of introducing it though; after what feels like a slow simple tutorial, the game suddenly dumps all its info on you at once and then tells you that you have a week to get it done. dumping everything on the player at once like this is not nice; it's confusing and leads to folks balking and giving up, which is a shame since the time limit isn't actually a concern, I wasn't trying to speed through this game and I still managed to complete all the side content and max all the mental state by the 3rd chapter of the game, there really is no time pressure. So yeah, that's the game, fun dumb vn stuff, a kind of eh turn based combat system and a time mechanic system that vibes well enough but suffers from a misleading introduction. overall its a decent rpg and I'd like to see more of it, but with something other than turnbased combat So that's everyth- oh wait no There's the interface… Look, I can be forgiving towards ui's, When I reviewed max, I don't think I brought up the issues I had with that. the interface for this game however is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ joke, and I don't say that lightly. Firstly, there's minimal input support, the only thing this game recognises is the keyboard, which wouldn't be the worst if the game was designed around keyboard controls, but it isn't. Then there's the colour choice for menu bars, non highlighted bars are red pink whilst highlighted ones are blue, setting aside how confusingly unintuitive this is, it's also an accessibility issue; there are four or five people I know who I genuinely can't recommend this to because they very likely will have trouble understanding the menus due to their red blue colour blindness. And then there are the bugs. I lost count of the number of times I loaded multiple screens at once, got locked out of menu controls and a dozen other things. The game never hard locked, crashed, or corrupted data, but I saved often because I felt like I was constantly minutes away from something nasty happening Side notes: wanted to include these somewhere, but couldn't find anywhere appropriate as they affect me more than they might affect others and don't really work well as part of a holistic review Firstly, the game references Australia's practice of putting asylum seekers in detention; it's still an ongoing human rights violation and it should be talked about, but this game kind of misrepresents it in a way that doesn't really do the harsh reality of the situation justice. And secondly, there's one scenario in this where a character rants about femboys/genderfluid males, calling them trash and using nb slurs, without any kind of retribution (Yes, t**p is a slur, I don't care about whatever ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ anime nerds have to say on the matter, ♥♥♥♥ you). I don't currently believe that this was Lachlan airing his own crappy opinions, their attitudes elsewhere don't seem consistent with this, though that said, I don't know much about him, I don't follow his social media, I just know him through these games but, ye, if it was his actual opinion, ♥♥♥♥ him. only fecking ♥♥♥♥♥ and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ call NBs that ♥♥♥♥. I have a hard enough time dealing with people ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ on my own gender situation irl I didn't need to see those same dickish attitudes here. So yeah, that's me review

very fun