[h1]Humor[/h1]
So, this game has a very quiet sort of comedy to it, and very few of the jokes ever felt in your face or like the game was trying to say "Look at me! Look at me! Isn't this so funny?" which on the one hand was kind of nice because I feel it's a much graver sin for a joke to try too hard than to not try hard enough, but on the other hand it meant that a lot of jokes just sort of fell flat and just left me thinking "I mean, okay, I get it, I guess" without really laughing. As an example, there's a town overrun with zombies at one point in the game and one of the NPC's hiding out in a building says when you talk to them something like "I just paid off this house. No way am I leaving now", and that's it, that's the whole joke, and, yeah, I get the idea and all and that's a silly reason not to go when your life is at risk and everything, but the joke is still just hardly a gutbuster.
The game has an overwhelming quantity of jokes, and most NPC's you talk to will have some comedic dialogue to say, pretty much every drawer in the game has a short piece of unique joke text when you look inside, all the enemy types in the game have their own comedic description in combat, and honestly thanks to the game's quieter humor tone none of this ever really gets annoying when you encounter yet another joke every two minutes but it's honestly fine the whole way through.
Overall, even though the actual number of times the game made me laugh was kind of low, I'd still give this a passing grade on this aspect, and it was just generally enjoyable enough.
[h1]Gameplay and stuff[/h1]
So, I will say, the game "feels" nice to play, and all the menus are very fast, movement works well when you're going around a dungeon and it's not clunky or anything, and I really really really appreciate how you can tell the devs put thought into the game, and what I mean is, most of the text is fast and easy to mash through BUT when you level up, you're often presented with a choice between two bonuses like "Would you rather have +10 attack or +10 defense?" or whatever, and for these moments specifically the game does not let you just mash through the text but it specifically stops for second to make sure you notice what's coming ahead and don't accidentally pick a perk you didn't want while you were just trying to get through the "You defeated all the enemies and earned such and such EXP" text or whatever, and so because of this, I never once while playing accidentally picked the wrong thing, and it was just nice and I honestly wish more games would just have basic systems like this in place to make them better, and I honestly wonder sometimes how many developers actually take the time to sit down and play their own games.
So, the combat kind of tries to throw in a couple of different systems to make it more interesting, and there's this whole insanity gimmick where certain abilities make enemies insane which gives minor upsides for you at the cost of major downsides and is really more of a self imposed challenge than anything, or there are the duo attacks that don't really add much besides being the same as regular abilities but a little bit stronger because two characters are using them, but one of the big ones is the combo system, and for each hit you do to the enemies your combo goes up by one, and there are these finisher attacks that get stronger the higher your combo is and reset it when they're used, and so the basic idea is that you might spend a fight slowly chipping away at a boss's health and then all at once after you've gotten a big combo finish them off with some huge blow, and more than that there are these other abilities that are not finishers and that don't get stronger based on the combo but that DO reset the combo when used, and the idea is that these are just generally really good abilities (As an example, one of them is a full HP restore + revive + cure spell all in one, while your next best healing ability that doesn't reset your combo might be just some random minor healing spell), and so the game is just asking you "Would you rather have access to a nice ability throughout the fight or would you rather do a ton of damage in 10 turns?" which, I mean, is a real choice, I guess, and neither option is necessarily better than the other, but my problem with it is that whichever you go for, neither one is honestly that interesting for its own sake, and it's just a choice between two different flavors of the same base gameplay, and that's what I'm trying to get at here is that the base gameplay is just not itself that interesting, and this is a VERY basic RPG and at the end of the day the gimmicks just don't add that much and it pretty much comes down to "Just select your best attacks. Heal if you're dying or something. Repeat until the enemies die" without terribly much decision making or strategy in it, and there just isn't quite enough to really make it feel worthwhile.
Except that's not completely true, and for the boss battles specifically it can be helpful if at the start of the fight you cast your spells to make your party stronger, use your spells that deal damage to enemies EVERY TURN for the entire rest of the fight even though you only cast them one time and that honestly are one of the more unusual types of abilities in this game, and just generally prepare yourself for this and THEN default to just alternating between attack and heal, and my point is, is this REALLY all that deep? No, but it gives the ILLUSION of being deep, and that's all I want is the illusion of doing something, and if I play Marvel VS Capcom 3 and get my butt handed to me all game but then just go Dark Phoenix and make a comeback off of that, am I really the greatest of all time? No, I just used a massively gimmicky character in what was already a massively gimmicky game and a chimp could have done the same thing, but in the moment it feels good and I can think "Yeah! Yeah! You see that, loser? Took out 3 of your characters with one of mine!" and that's all I want in a game is to just feel like I'm doing something meaningful here, and the boss battles in this game do kind of deliver and I get to pretend it was some profound thought to think "What if... I used the ability that does damage every turn early in the fight rather than later to maximize the damage it does?" But if that part's actually okay, what's the problem with this game and why is this review thumbs down? Well, because boss battles are infrequent and you spend the majority of your time on random encounters, and honestly I don't actually dislike random encounters in general and I know a lot of people seem to hate them and I sometimes hear them referred to as an outdated mechanic and stuff, but I personally have never really had a problem with them in and of themselves, but in this game in particular, though, the random encounters are such a slog to get through, and I put up with it for a while, but it eventually got to the point where the enemies were JUST hard enough where if I mentally autopiloted the fight I would die, but JUST easy enough where it wasn't fun or interesting having to kill them over, and over, and OVER, and it severely didn't help that the game gives you what feels like ten thousand different abilities for each character and every single fight you're constantly scrolling through the same menus again going past your old abilities you don't use anymore or that were never that good in the first place trying to find the one thing you actually want, and the game just became the endless boring scrolling simulator, and honestly if they had made one little change and allowed you to shortcut abilities for faster access, it would have been ten times better and probably tolerable to just hit Ctrl + X or whatever to get to everyone's best attack immediately, but without that option, my brain was just melting, man, and that's the primary reason I have to give this a thumbs down.
