I can't take it anymore.
[h2]TLDR: Random crashes. Random crashes from everywhere, and there really is no definitive solution to it.[/h2]
For some backstory, I've bought this game during a sale on February 2023 for 80% off. And like most games that the average person has in their library, it was cast aside. Reduced to nothing but a part of the ever-growing backlog that I had.
Within those 3 years, I had looked at it inside my library only a handful of times. Eventually, I caved in and started to play the game for the first time on April 22. Just six days ago of me writing this review.
Right now, I'm on the last floor of the last section of the game, right before I'm supposed to fight the final boss.
And I've lost all motivation to continue.
[b]This wasn't the fault of censorship or grinding that pushed me to the edge.[/b] Censorship is a given when bringing risqué games onto Steam that some people still didn't expect from a mile away. Thankfully, there have been mods and addons that the community created to help mitigate the issue of the removed content. The grinding in this game really isn't [i]that[/i] bad. You should be at around level 40+ so that the final boss would be fairly easy. I was around level 37-38 last time I played. Not a big deal.
No, [b]the problem lies inside the game's optimization.[/b]
For some reason, the game has a sick habit of crashing constantly, and it doesn't matter when or where you are in the game.
A crash in the middle of a grinding session? Bummer...
A crash during a boss battle? Better luck next time!
A crash literally as you were about to save the game? Time to do whatever you just did beforehand all over again!!!
I had to go through the tutorial about three times before I was able to actually save the game for the first time. The last attempt was when Miu was explaining about how the infirmary worked. Just before I got the chance to save my progress. Very fun.
Moving up to a new floor for me was less about exploring and more about making a mad dash to the floor's portal. If it even had one, of course.
I've seen discussions of people finding ways of preventing the crashes from occurring, all of them were either showing no promising results, or that the results were too extreme. For the latter, there was someone who said to reduce the CPU as much as possible, since the game supposedly uses the CPU and the CPU alone (no GPU at all). So I turned on my laptop and went straight to playing the game without opening my web browser (Chrome).
It was bad. Like, [i]reeeally[/i] bad. Like, how the hell did it somehow get even worse?
The game ran at a snail's pace. Everything in the game but the audio was slower. The inputs, animations, movement. All that followed by a very low fps to top it off. It took my less than five minutes for my brain to tell me that this wasn't a hill worth dying on, so I turned off the game. I opened chrome and it's 20+ tabs and played the game again. Everything in the game moved completely normal again. Wonderful. I'm not even sure if the game would crash or anything in that state, nor would I try to test that out. The experience was that bad for me.
People said that the devs were planning on fixing the game but I guess that never happened. So I'm pretty much screwed.
The story so far was interesting enough for me, and the battle gimmick of having to pick your party's best "recommended action" for each turn was a fun take on the average combat style of JRPGs. [b]But it really is just the terrible optimization that made me create this review.[/b]
The game was just under $5 CDN, so it's not much of a loss for me. But I really do hope that the crashing issue gets fixed sometime in the future so I could actually finish the game.
