Overall, I’d give this a positive review, for the following reasons:
—Great pixel art, especially for an RPG-maker game (which seems to get a bad rap, but you can tell when a dev puts extra time & effort into making that generic RPGM-artwork into something much more special—and that’s definitely done here).
—Good story—for the most part. I won’t give spoilers of course, but I feel like the end is kinda rushed. No…not kinda. It’s rushed, lol. The game leaves you wanting to know a lot more about exactly what happened and more importantly (maybe) WHY it happened…and in my humble opinion—that needs to be remedied. Maybe it’s implied based on certain backstories, but it just didn’t sit well overall. I’ve heard that there’s possibly some kind of DLC coming, so maybe we’re left wondering “WTH” for good reason? Idk, but if so then my apologies, and I should practice patience. I will say that I did care a lot about what happens to (most) of the main characters, and that does need good story development. But there are a couple of them, one in particular, that just *poof* come into the story, and it’s not really ever explained much at all.
—Fun combat. BUT—then again, I’m probably not the one who should measure that, bc I play RPGs and JRPGs mainly for the story, and *despite* the combat. So take that with a grain of salt, but it IS varied and fun, and there are options for different difficulty modes too, if that’s important to you.
Cons:
—sprite movement. It definitely felt sluggish & unresponsive at times, and I would actually alternate between using the left stick and the directional arrows on my Steam Deck…both weren’t great, and caused me to misstep at times. Not a game-breaking thing, but it can definitely break immersion a bit.
—a pretty big one: game crashing. Like I said, I played this on Steam Deck, so it’s possible that this may not have been an issue on my PC, but there were times that I was reloading save files as often as every 20-30 minutes. No lie. (This occurred mainly when I was grinding in one particular area, and it crashed this often because I was purposely entering battles over & over.) This is a long game as you can see by my play time, so that obviously became quite annoying, ESPECIALLY because there are really long cut scenes in places that I had to rewatch as well. Just…save a lot, ok? As others have mentioned, the game auto saves, but NOT often. Idk if that’s a common thing to happen to other people, but I just can’t not mention this.
I’ll give a REALLY annoying example, actually (sorry, I know this is long): this was during the endgame scenes, and it’s a veeeeery long fight. So…I get past the first 2 bosses of the fight, and onto the third and final one…and then, right as I’m finishing it off…yep. *CRASH*. Hmm. Yeah, ok no…I’m done then.
Because it was such a long fight, I ended up watching a YouTube video to see the end of the game, bc no way was I doing all of that again.
I noticed that some gave negative reviews specifically because of the crashing, but I just didn’t want to do that. Because the truth is, I DID enjoy my time playing this game, and it deserves an overall positive review. A cautiously positive one. It really is a lot of fun, but it has flaws. My hope is that there will be a patch in the future that’ll at least address the crashing.
TL;DR—great game in most ways, but can be prone to crashing at times (usually after a cutscene or a fight). So if you’re gonna play—and you should, it’s worth it—save pretty dang often.
