Fate of Fire: Kyvedy Guardiah

What a great game! There are a lot of things I want to say about this game but I will try to keep it relatively short. First I will start with saying that I heavily recommend this game to any indie rpg fan. It is super unique and is perfect for people who like to branch out and play hidden gems. Now moving on to the positives: - Very cute artstyle. The pixel art is great. Awesome usage of colours and contrast. Gives a lot of life to the characters and environments. The lighting was cool too. Dynamic and it adds a lot to the vibes of the locales. - Unique and interesting gameplay. This game has a very cool mix of action and turn based rpg. The game is for a majority an action rpg where you shoot stuff to stun them, and then walk over them to eliminate them. The turn based battles are kind of a "punishment" for if you fail to do this stun tactic. The turn based battles themselves are cool too, very fast paced and fun. Because there is no traditional leveling system, you have to be way more tactical about your battling. You can not just grind and overpower the enemies like in most rpgs - The soundtrack is just full of bangers. Lovely soundtrack. I especially love the battle themes. Some of them actually get stuck in my head. Now I am not excited to type these but there are some negatives too. I will try to be as respectful and understanding as possible in my feedback. - I did not really understand the story that well. I do not think the story is bad necessarily. I think a lot of the things being told just flew over my head. My main issue was probably with the amount of names and terms unique to the game that were used. There were a very large amount of them and it was hard to keep track of what means what and who is who. I think a way to solve this would maybe be to have some database with all the story characters and a short summary who they are and what they've done so far? - Too many stealth sections. This one is a bit more personal to just me. Stealth sections in games are not a bad thing. I just personally do not like them a lot and this game had a ton of them. Honestly unsure if this can be solved and it's probably more of a personal issue for me than with the game. - The UI and tutorials could be more clear. So I am someone who has played a ton of games, many of them rpg's. Despite that I felt like I was not understanding the mechanics that easily. Eventually the game became really fun once I understood the mechanics but it took a couple levels to get there. My advice would be to more clearly mark things like spells and effects in battle. One way to do this is with sounds! I feel like when you go from the normal attack menu to the kyvedy fire/spell menu, a certain sound should play. At the moment there is no sound when you menu through the battle menu and it feels kind of awkward to navigate it. Some text or abbrevations on the spells would be appreciated too. Overal this game was a very positive experience. I enjoyed myself a ton and I am glad I gave it a go. There are some levels I think could use a bit of changes but the majority of the levels were well designed.

-New review for the 1.9 update - The new turn based combat is super addicting, sending your party to fight is fun and the effects you can trigger when you win a battle are very interesting like burning your enemies on the field when you go back. With the new combat system some levels just become a must replay like the "The siege of Osha" with Noke, Rhoa or Xavier. The story is as cool as it was before, good characterization, mind blowing plot twits and I think they added some new scenes and "alternative scenes". I love the new graphic style, the characters really feel like they come out of a painting to fight. The game now is completely different form when I played it back then and I am very impressed for how the dev kept caring and constantly updating. I had more fun replaying this with the new updates than with many first playthrough of other "better" known jrpgs.

I've recently revisited a previously-reviewed title, Fate of Fire: Kyvedy Guardiah. While the review was negative at release, it has since experienced a number of hefty updates and is much improved. Still needs a bit more love to reach potential but it's fun now. Kyvedy Guardiah is an ARPG full of lore and a simple gameplay loop but a range of different classes and mission types to play with as you explore the tower. Combat's simplistic but can be challenging. For more niche curation, follow me at: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/27440015-CSH-Picone/