Fake Happy End

Since the only review so far seems to be from an anime hating curator, lets try to write a review from someone, who likes anime. Though i might not be the best reviewer, since I normally dont make them, i read them. xD My progress at the point of the review is, i have beaten the main game and are trying to find the hidden secrets, still left within the tower. So, the gameplay itself if quite interesting, if one takes into account, this is an RPG Maker VX Ace game. Its a dungeon crawling type game, where one could skip enemies, if one has learned their moving patterns. You can expect to grind a bit though. The fighting itself is really nice, though it does have some flaws. There are some enemies and mini bosses, who cant do anything, after they have less than 0.5 AP, making the fight impossible to lose. This luckily doesnt happen to the main and secret bosses, since they can replenish their AP, even if their AP-regeneration has been debuffed. The story itself is quite good, though, since i played other games by Neok, i know, he could have done better. Its just about, you and your teammates Karin, Mishika and Aeri, trying to find the secrets of the towers, wont spoil much more about this, since it does have some nice plots. The music is nice, though some tracks can get a bit repetitive after a while. And the art style, is well drawn, though here is the point, its somewhat anime oriented and might not suit everyone. [b] Last Words [/b] Well, I do recommend that game to others, though it has it flaws and might not suit everyone with its gameplay and art style. For me personally, I think the 8,49€ have been well spend. Its main game is long enough, to not get to repetitive, while actually staying fun. For those, who are still unsure about this game, maybe check the playtrough of Hadriex, it might help to decided, if it worth it for you, or wait for a discount.

Fake Happy End is an odd variant of dungeon RPG with the exploration all being done on what would be the minimap in a more typical entry in the genre. Nonetheless, it manages to be a fairly solid indie RPG with charming characters and a fairly interesting combat system. To get my major nitpicks out of the way first: It's a fairly short game (by the in-game timer, my first playthrough took 5:37:22, my second playthrough took 2:49:54, my third playthrough took 1:34:11, and the postgame content took 47:46, for a total of around 11 hours for a 100% clear) by RPG standards, but not one that overstays its welcome. There's also a few puzzles with non-obvious fake hints, which I feel are somewhat unfair and likely to frustrate players, even if they find out the real solution. Thankfully, none of them are required to proceed through the main game. The combat system is interesting, but ultimately felt a bit limited. Characters and enemies start each fight with 5 energy and regenerate 1 point per turn by default, up to a maximum of 10, with abilities costing 1-7 points. This is interesting insofar as it makes managing your energy an important part of combat and allows you to predict what enemies will do (and guard if necessary, for instance) by watching their energy bars, but ends up feeling a bit limiting by the end since abilities which cost over 5 energy will only get used on rare occasions. I don't think it really lived up to "no boring spamming of a basic attack," because there's a few formulaic answers to 95% of fights that players will quickly arrive at, but it worked well enough. The characters are fairly charming, though the choice of making the main character faceless unless you import a custom picture is a bit dubious - getting one in an appropriate size and style seemed like it would be more effort than it would be worth, so I didn't bother. Still, the three girls inspired me to go through the game 3 times to see all of their personal storylines and endings. (I'm also probably thankful I picked Aeri first, since in retrospect she was the least interesting.) The dungeon maps are actually pretty interesting. As someone who plays more than their share of dungeon RPGs, I found them to be fairly well-designed, with the exception of the two fake-hint puzzles I mentioned earlier and the last area requiring an inordinate amount of backtracking even on NG+ with the full map revealed. Not implementing the normal 3D view was an unusual choice - on one hand, it's normally nice, but on the other hand, you often end up just navigating by minimap in those anyway - and I think it paid off for Neo Kuriyo by letting him make a dungeon RPG by himself. All in all, I would recommend Fake Happy End to anyone who would be interested in either of a "lite" dungeon RPG or a "lite" waifu RPG, since it has some serious appeal in both of those ways but doesn't dive too deeply into either of those. Whether that means it won't put you off or it won't satisfy you is up to you, but I ended up happy with the time I spent with Fake Happy End.

I find it difficult to describe this game. It's sort of a jrpg take on a dungeon crawler, and on the side it's... Not exactly a dating sim, but has dating sim elements. I enjoyed the game a good deal, but I've been known to enjoy all sorts of strange and quirky things.

Fake Happy End is a surprising gem of a game, one which I thoroughly enjoyed playing through every step of the way. Though it has some flaws, they're relatively few compared to all the strengths this game has. It's a fairly rudamentary dungeon crawler, one that, as the description states, is heavily inspired by Etrian Odyssey. The tower is split up into several areas, akin to EO's stratums, each with their own gimmicks and puzzles to solve. The puzzles are pretty simple, but slowly grow more complex as the game continues on. That said, never do they feel overwhelmingly difficult, so exploring the tower never slows to a crawl. The lack of random encounters only serves to make these puzzles more complex, akin to Etrian Odyssey's FOEs which served as tile movement puzzles. The battle system is where the game truly shines. Fake Happy End removes a lot of the drudgery that many RPGs fall into out of tradition, such as dwindling resources that you solve by either having an infinite number of recovery items, or by halting your progress and backtracking out to restart everything all over again. Instead, all actions in battle cost action points, which constantly regenerate throughout battle and reset to half-full at the end of every fight. This creates far more interesting battle scenarios, as having a pseudo-infinite amount of resources at all times allows for battles to be far more difficult and require more strategy than many RPGs, which tend to only have regular encounters as a sort of long-term battle of attrition designed to exhaust you for the inevitable boss at the end of dungeons. With your resources starting from default at every fight, it lets you fight each battle with all you've got, and you'll need to in order to survive. Enemies operate under the same rules, making the battle system feel fair in that respect as well. Aside from skills naturally gained through level ups, skills are primarily gained by equipping elemental souls. Although the game categorizes its attacks according to elements, nowhere is there an elemental weakness/resist system, so there's not even the suffering of random guessing to find a weakness. Instead, the importance of elements comes from their secondary effects, such as stat debuffs or ailments. Indeed, buffing and debuffing are very important, and picking the right sets of skills for each party member to make sure you can power yourself up and weaken enemies in the right way is the key to victory, as only defeat awaits you otherwise. The basic description of this game's story is written in the store page, so I'll save you the trouble of repeating it here. Overall, the story is fairly decent, though it can be pretty hit and miss at times. The overall mystery of the tower and main plot of the game are solidly written, keeping you going until the end, but it preserves a light-hearted tone with plenty of amusing interactions between the main four characters. More on the miss side are the lewd scenes, which feel thrown in for needless fanservice at the expense of derailing the pace the quick exploration of dungeons set. The characters themselves also don't manage to quite feel that distinct, other than Aeri simply for being the voice of reason in the group. The dating sim aspects of the game are also fairly rudimentary, with basic choices deciding which character you'll favor and ultimately end up dating towards the end of the game. In some ways it's nice to have choices not be obtuse; helping out Karin gives you Karin points, while agreeing with Mishika gives you Mishika points, and so on. On the other hand, it makes most choices lack subtlety and nuance, which could've gone a long way in making characters feel more distinct. The characters do grow a decent amount as the game goes on, though I can't help but feel like there wasn't a good balance to their development, with one character feeling far more central to the plot than the others, making them feel underdeveloped as a result. Overall, despite the sort of hit and miss nature of the story and its characters, there's enough to make you want to really sink your teeth into where the game shines, and that's the core gameplay. Defying a lot of RPG conventions only makes you wish more of them had the uniqueness this game shows, and the fun I had searching out every last secret of the tower is something that'll stick with me for a while, if nothing else.

I actually kind of enjoyed my time with this game. It has an interesting overworld system not usually seen in RPGs that allows for some alright puzzles, and the RPG elements, though very standard, are still fun. That said, I can't recommend it. I liked it a bit because I like RPGs, but the average player probably will not. The first thing of note is that the gameplay is sort of eclipsed by everything else. The story is okay, if a little confusing and cliche, but a lot of players will probably be put off by the cringeworthy dialogue, terrible art, stolen monster designs, and wholly unnecessary sexual themes. I mean, I get it if you want to play a porn game, but this isn't even a porn game. There's no sex, there's just a developer who inserts his own sexual desires and fantasies into a video game. If you're embarrassed by that one socially awkward weeb kid in high school, this game will make you cringe. A lot of players will be made uncomfortable enough by all of that they won't be able to enjoy the gameplay, which is why I consider it secondary. If the above doesn't bother you, though, then you'll find a game with alright gameplay. There was clearly not much effort put into design. There are only a few monsters you can fight in each level, but there's no distinction in the way you approach them. You will fight them all the exact same way. The difference is that some are radically easier than others, so once you've learned their patterns, the game basically becomes learning how to only encounter the right enemies so you can repeat the exact same process enough to grind for the boss. The bosses are usually challenging enough that fighting them is actually exciting and pretty fun, but the rest of the gameplay is very samey. Unless you're a hardcore RPG fan, I wouldn't recommend this one.

It's good.

Story: The player character is an ordinary citizen who is suddenly able to see a strange tower that looks like a lopsided jenga stack, but nobody else can see it. Upon entering, they fall into a trap door and get attacked by an OP monster, only to be saved by Karin, a human who can also interact with the tower. The two eventually recruit two more people who can see the tower so they can traverse the increasingly dangerous stratums and solve its mysteries. Since the party often returns to the outside during the journey, there will be some slice-of-life scenes and relationship/dating events. The dating scenes and relationship scenes add a lot of replayability due to how they show another side of the party members, and one of them will have a ton of references to Alter A.I.L.A. Genesis. I'll admit I was caught off guard by Mishika's date, where some of the choices are actually there to fake out people obsessed with making perfect sim dating choices. Gameplay: The dungeon crawling mechanics are a nice twist on the usual Etrian formula that I'm used to. There are no random encounter and only symbol encounters, which means careful observation of enemy movement patterns will allow the player to conserve their strength as they explore the tower. This also adds an incentive to fully explore each floor, since mapping the floor makes more enemies visible and therefore makes them easier to predict. Additionally, the player can sacrifice half their funds to recover from a game-over and keep their progress. To balance these helpful mechanics, there's no way to teleport to a safe-zone like in Etrian, so the player will need to be very careful in outmaneuvering enemies. In battle, skills are cast from AP, which are restored to 5 at the end of each battle, making it easier to splurge on skills even against normal enemies. That said, if you use AP outside of battle to heal, you'll start with less AP for the next battle, making it so that consecutive battles are still dangerous. Of course, it's still possible to make it through weaker mobs unscathed by spamming wind skills, which have high priority. Comparaed to Alter A.I.L.A., I feel like it's easier to stack debuffs on enemies, due to how you can hit them with the same element attacks to increase the duration of their debuffs. I felt this made it so that most boss fights boil down to spamming water skills in order to make it harder for them to use their own devastating moves. Unlike most game-breaking strategies in other games, this one felt almost mandatory in the end game, especially when Mishika keeps getting one-shotted. The only enemy that really punishes water spamming is the floor 7 secret boss, which might not be able to desync everyone's doom counter unless it has enough AP to spend. Graphics: Unlike Etrian Odyssey, which has a combination of cute and creepy enemies, this game has some rather disturbing enemy designs. Some of them are also weirdly hot, like the Beautiful Stegosaurus and Red (don't judge me!). Although this game isn't on the DS/3DS, it still would have been nice to have a first person view to enhance the suspense of crawling through a tower full of various horrors. Final rating: 3.5/5

It honestly baffles me that a game this fun is flying under the radar of so many steam players. Short version, buy this game. If you like Persona 3 mystery fighting, Etrian Odyssey dungeon style mapping, and typical Visual Novel goodness, this game is a perfect blend of all three and then some. Now the reason why; Fake Happy End is about a group of four random teens that are exploring a tower suddenly appearing in the middle of their town, that no one believes is there, much less try to go anywhere near it. The teens face monsters as they climb through the tower levels, but are strangely and suddenly adept in casting magic to defend themselves. Mysteries about the tower and its purpose become clearer the further they climb. The story has a visual novel feel to it. Text reads out through dialogue exchange and the MC's internal thoughts, but sometimes it mixes things up by shifting character focus to one of the heroines when the team splits up. You also get to make choices that can affect the relationship between your teammates. By the way, they're all girls who can have the option to date. Art is a bit of mixed bag. One of my main complaints is that the MC, who you can rename early in the game, has no face or portrait. The only ones that do are the main three heroines and the enemies/shopkeepers(?) you see in the tower dungeon. You see CG background art for the city and dungeon and whenever you fight in battles, but you'll more often then not see a rather simple top-down tile map for all the dungeon floors. Like in Etrian Odyssey and other old style dungeon crawlers, the map is simple with a white dot showing your position, and symbols representing certain landmarks, like arrows on the floor forcing you to move that way, or a small hole forcing you down the lower floor. On the plus side, you don't have to map these out manually as everything is automated when you pass over the tile. You just need to explore to fill it up. The combat is where it really shines, to a level of simple to pick up, hard to master. Again, each main character has an element of magic at their disposal. The piercing Force of the blunt MC, the healing Light of tomboy leader Karin, the strong Fire of shy/scared Mishika, and the fast Wind of aloof and honest Aeri. Unlike other dungeon crawlers though, you ONLY have magic. You use an energy bar at the bottom of your HP to use attacks, so if you run out, then you have to guard and/or restore that energy. You can learn more spells as you level up, and equip different sets of items to better your characters. There are gems that can teach your character different magic elements, or gems that can boost your stats, or even gems that provide instant buffs for a limited time. No weapons or armor per say, but customization is the key here. For example, you can give your other party members (save Aeri) gems that allow Wind magic, and have everyone spam the Air All attack to strike first and hopefully win the battle unscathed. The gameplay is very much like Persona. Fast and engaging. I assume there are weaknesses of elements for each enemy, but you don't have a scanner or notice to tell you what elements you can or can't use against them. And since magic elements are the main point of battling (and none of the party members can just punch or swing a weapon for neutral damage). All in all, Fake Happy End is a fun game, and worth the investment of $10 (or even picking it up during a discount sale). I can't recommend this game enough. It may look odd, but the same is greater than its parts.

Kind of pissed that this game only has 7 reviews after all these years. It's better than at least 98% of RPGM games on steam. Neok, wherever you are, hope you're doing well.