I'm glad I waited until the very end to review this game, because my opinion constantly shifted as I played through it. I thought hard about whether to recommend this or not, and the final dungeon was the deciding factor (more on that later). A lot of care and effort went into this game, but unfortunately, I cannot recommend it to anyone but the MOST die-hard JRPG fans - not because it's difficult, but because its deliberate emphasis on reproducing old-school frustration and grind will probably exceed most peoples' patience. With better tuning of the mid to late game, this could have been great, but I ultimately just found it exhausting.
First, the pros, which honestly count for a lot:
+ The rough-edged early 16-bit presentation is unique and appealing, and sets it clearly apart from the default RPG Maker look (though I recognized some stock assets) or the soft-shaded late SquareSoft style that is popular with indies.
+ Very stiff challenge. Honestly, this is the main selling point. Character advancement is very slow, but tangible, and clearing dungeons and killing bosses feels satisfying. I kept playing more than anything else because I craved overcoming the next challenge.
+ This is a pretty epic game with a lot of varied content. If you have the patience for it, you'll get your money's worth.
And now, a long list of cons. Most of these are individually minor and forgiveable, but they add up to a lot of aggravation:
- The biggest single issue I have is just that the second half of the game gets extremely grindy, and it wore me out. Every dungeon during this part of the game required me to take time out to grind multiple levels. The total runtime is probably 10+ hours too long from grinding alone.
- Combat is on the slow side due to the RPG Maker MZ engine's sluggish turn resolution.
- Some rather dated creep service (aren't these characters teenagers?), though not as frequently as the trailer suggests. However, there are also some very gross scenes of non-consent that are played for laughs. This all leaves an otherwise very charming game feeling a bit slimy.
- High miss rate for much of the game. Accuracy only improves with certain class promotions and starts out on par with 1st-level D&D, if not worse. It's not uncommon for your party to miss as many as five attacks in a row.
- Casters typically die in 2-3 hits. This would be fine, but there's no row or positioning mechanic to protect them, no meaningful equipment options to improve their defenses, and not even a Defend command. Thus, weaker characters need constant healing to keep them alive, and if targeted, can easily die before you can react. This is particularly aggravating earlier in the game, when raising a dead character is difficult.
- Save points in dungeons start reducing your max HP permanently if you use too many over the entire game, which you are not warned about until it's too late to fix it. The cost is small, but it shouldn't be there at all.
- Extremely high encounter rate - generally about every six to twelve steps. Using consumables to reduce or eliminate encounters in dungeons is practically required to conserve both your resources and your patience. In some areas of the game, enemies are so dangerous that fighting them at all is irrational. This creates a backwards incentive structure where you are encouraged to grind near rest points while skipping as many "intended" encounters as possible. At the same time, some areas cannot be revisited once you leave and may even trap you inside, so you can either burn through resources (and risk a wipe and loss of progress) fully exploring them, or you can make a beeline for the goal and miss out on some items permanently.
- The cost of equipment skyrockets as the game continues, while gold dropped by enemies barely increases for most of the game. A single mid-game item can easily cost 100+ fights worth of gold, making it infeasible to grind for while it's still useful. This is not even considering the cost of consumables, of which you'll need many. I appreciate having to pick and choose which upgrades to prioritize, but they took it way too far. The fact that characters take their expensive equipment (even unique accessories!) with them when they suddenly and permanently leave the party doesn't help. Even at the very end of the game, there are some outrageously expensive accessories that you're expected to buy. The most expensive one looks tempting, but it's a trap to waste your money. You don't need it. You do need the others.
- Very restrictive party management. Once you have party members on standby, it's a long walk back to be able to swap them out. Standby characters also don't earn XP, and they do NOT catch up once they fall behind, even many hours later. These mechanics, combined with the option to choose different classes for some characters, clash severely with the fact that the available characters vary throughout the game. There are multiple sections that forcibly replace or remove a specific party member, but do not allow you to return to the swap location to reconfigure. This can easily leave you stuck with an unbalanced or underpowered party. Elione and Myria in particular are repeatedly kidnapped or otherwise separated from the group, which was especially frustrating because they were generally my most useful party members. Zetzel even faces a mandatory solo boss fight in such a circumstance. I was cut off from his class promotion, meaning that he was capped at level 10 and unable to use his best equipment, making the fight far harder than it needed to be. During the last third or so of the game, you'll be down to four full-time members - so I hope you specced those four to synergize with each other.
- Excessive final dungeon. Before you can even enter the dungeon, you'll need to fly around the world solving a series of sliding block puzzles to get the key. Once inside, there are two back-to-back bosses waiting for you at the halfway point. This is your last opportunity to save the game. Now you just need to stealth down to the final boss, ignore those four out-of-the-way treasure chests, and finish the game, right? Nope! Without the accessories contained in those chests, you have essentially no chance against the boss. You have to traverse the maze to each chest and defeat the pain-in-the-ass minibosses guarding them. That would actually be fine if you could at least save the game or leave the dungeon during this process, but you can't. You have to find all four accessories, defeat the minibosses (and additional fixed encounters), watch the LONG pre-final-boss cutscene, and then defeat the boss, all in one go, all while jumping back to the menu every minute or so to use another smoke item to keep the brutal random encounters out of your hair. Once I realized that this was what the game wanted from me, I decided I'd had enough. I wasn't going to do all of that only to die on the boss and have to do it over again. The game had honestly worn out its welcome well before then, but this marked the end of my patience.
I may go back after a little while and finish it up, but seeing the ending won't change my opinion. I do not expect that I'll ever replay this game to try out the alternate class paths, simply because the sheer grind involved is more than I can endure a second time.
I will also never see the true final boss, because I only found about 75 of the 100 scavenger hunt items required. The rest are either permanently lost or far too much hassle to comb back over the entire game to find. Besides, knowing this game, I would have to grind my party to its absolute limit to actually win.
