Frail Hearts: Versicorae Domlion

I love VN's and games with rich and complex stories, like Xenogears, The House of Fata Morgana, Raging Loop , The Nonary Games and 13 Sentinels. That being said, after finishing my plathrough, i absolutelty HATED my experience with Frail Hearts. Let me be clear: I started out really liking this game. Loved the art style and loved the turn based battles. The little scenarios of each character were easy to follow, but fairly uninteresting, with the exception of Cathrine's, which I kinda liked. That was tolerable, though. The problem is that the true, "behind the scenes" story is incredibly vague and impossible to understand. After almost eight hours, the game slapped me with an ending that answered none of the questions that it presented since the beginning. The story just gets progressively more nonsensical, with characters talking about people and things that were never mentioned before. There's is no emotional payoff in any of the scenarios and it just ended up with a "WTF was that all about?" feeling. Later i found out I got a bad ending - only because of the name of the achievement made that clear. I have no idea what i did wrong or what i could have changed to get a good ending, and the ending i got didn't offer any clues. Thank god someone posted the "good ending" on youtube, because i´m not going through this game again. I would not have left such a bad review if I felt that the bad ending gave me at least some partial answers or some tips, but the way it is, it ruined the entire experience for me. I also feel that most people would have a similiar negative experience as the one I had, since less than 5% of players got the good ending, which is why i DON'T recommend you buy or play this game.

[h1]Be a spectator in the opera of the gray city![/h1] It was May 13, 1983, in Gris, the City of Emptiness, when monsters appeared and several residents died mysteriously. You witnessed a terrifying and perplexing tragedy. But don't worry; you'll soon discover all the secrets hidden beneath the darkness that has engulfed this city. Just sit back and enjoy the opera in [b][i]Frail Hearts![/i][/b] The story of Gris's darkness will be divided into four core parts, each focusing on one of the four heroes here. You can follow [b]Michael[/b], the gangster who is mourning the death of someone he cares about. You can help support [b]Cathrine[/b], the nun who, for some reason, always feels threatened in church. You can read [b]Anne[/b] the Bookworm's story about her stressful life, which blurs the line between reality and her mind. You can also study [b]Arthur[/b], the scholar and sole heir to the Gris archaeological museum, who is still bound by his father's departure. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2957541371 With such disparate backgrounds, they are somehow connected to the event on May 13 and [b]Alexis[/b], a strange man from the Gris Theater who becomes the key to discovering what lies beneath the city. This game provides three game modes to enjoy the opera that you can choose from based on your preferences: story mode (focuses on the plot and has an easy battle difficulty), standard mode (has a balanced portion in both the plot and combat), and challenge mode (for hardcore players). In essence, the path the heroes must take in order to unravel Gris' story will be filled with tales and battles. [h3]I was a spectator who was looking forward to the opera, yet...[/h3] I'll admit that the game's premise piqued my interest in playing something that leaves an impression on the heart. Unfortunately, Frail Hearts did not live up to my expectations. Story-wise, it's so average to the point where you can predict what will happen next, especially if you're used to dark and tragic stories. Not to mention that there are at least five important characters here, but this game appears to make players more familiar with and attached to Michael's story. I didn't feel as strongly attached to other characters as I did to him, which I suspected was because the other characters' stories were less explored. The gameplay consists of classic turn-based combat and puzzles. I had no comments on the combat system per se, but the puzzles irked me. I didn't like how simple and uninteractive they were, making my efforts and excitement to solve them futile. I understand that it's probably a good reason to make the game more enjoyable and faster to beat. It's just a shame the puzzles have so much untapped potential, especially given that this game also has strategy guide DLC. However, because of their variety, I wasn't too bored to "click and see" what I'd get after solving each puzzle along the way. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2957541544 I still have praise for the game, though. The BGM and art are excellent, and the developers appear to have used RPG Maker MV skillfully to make the game feel more polished. I also think that the monster variations are well thought out, both in terms of design and skill. This made them look fantastic and was exciting to look forward to when exploring Gris! So, what's my take? As you can see, I don't recommend picking it up if you used to read stories in similar genres or solve complex and interactive puzzles, because this one is mediocre and lacks difficulty and interactivity. Nonetheless, if you just want to play a well-polished old-school RPG with some cool enemies to fight, I think it's okay to buy it on sale, putting aside the aspects I criticized. [h3][quote]𝐅𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰 [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/33853800/]𝐎𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐒𝐞𝐤𝐚𝐢'𝐬 𝐂𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫 𝐏𝐚𝐠𝐞[/url] 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐕𝐢𝐬𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐍𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐥 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐉𝐑𝐏𝐆 𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐰𝐬[/quote][/h3]

An RPG hybrid visual novel. You have 5 characters (4 with unique endings) and you can control 1 at a time to learn more about their story. Nun, college student, archaeologist, and a gangster. Pros Art is unique Music matches the mystery/horror theme Cons Story makes little sense - fight monsters and supernatural beings, but gives little background on why Too many extra screens- Do you want to save and do you want to enter this location? Its just annoying the player by asking location question each time. Switching characters every 20-30 minutes diminishes the flow of the game Late game bosses are too strong and player has limited ways to upgrade characters to beat them This game is like the saying the sum is not greater than its parts. You can play the game to explore 4 different characters, but the game has boring fights. After reading the text or solving a puzzle, I asked myself what the hell just happened and how does it relate back to killing monsters.

I'm not a marathon player, but Frail hearts kept me up until 4AM and was finished first thing the next morning. If that's not worthy of a Yes recommendation I don't know what is. I've not played anything quite like it. Frail Hearts is a bit hard to sum up in one line. It walks the line between visual novel and JRPG while structuring itself more like a stage play. The style itself has elements of Lovecrafting horror while feeling straight out of traditional italian horror cinema. Five separate stories are being told one act at time with the heroes tied together by forces unknown. While combat is a relatively rare occasion in the game, the system is very well done. I found the hard difficulty to be extremely well balanced as most fights tested me without being endurance slugfests or RNG hopes. You learn how each character works and how to blend their skills for each confrontation and you will win. A number of battles even introduce unique twists and challenges that change up the ruleset based on the story they want to tell. (Even character progression is particularly satisfying if a bit simple) Really, my singular complaint is that the good ending requires you to perform certain sidequests and find hidden items. The stage act structure of the game means that some of these are hidden in rooms you will encounter one single time and if you miss it... it's the bad ending. This was particularly disappointing for me because I worked hard on the side quest only to miss 4 slightly colored pixels in room that I'm only allowed to explore once ever. (I will be running NG+ for the good ending) Overall, this is not a game for everyone. - The plot isn't always explained and even when it is... its often theatrical melodramatics - There are entire chapters that are just visual novel with no explorations, some that are just puzzles, some just battles, and some that are full-on JRPG. The chapters are short enough that the pacing feels fine, but its worth mentioning. - The RPG elements are a secondary system more than the core experience - The font isn't always legible... like... its stylized that some letters are blotted out. I thought it was a bug at first, but I don't think it was. For me? I picked this game up on a whim and I was blown away by it. It's stylish, its engaging, its well-written and it was well worth the time and money I spent on it.

incredibly boring. I really tried to tough it out for a little bit, but I just can't seem to see the appeal of this game. You basically just walk to areas, listen to a cutscene you barely have any control of, and you switch character story every like 10 minutes. Immersion is nonexistant, and everything is so vague I can't even find the interest to actually know whats going on.

Для русскоязычных отзыв, братва. Англ. в игре несложный, с ур. В1 и нескольких глядок в словарь для пары сложных фраз - вот и все. Игруля интересная, стоит своих денег однозначно. У меня заняло часов 17, но я просто слоупок. Саунд и арт тоже приготовьтесь скачать. +: - Игра сочетает в себе виз. новеллу, боевку в стиле первых финалок, сюжетный квест и пиксель-арт. Все вполне удалось. - Запоминающиеся персы, причем даже второстепенные. У всех разный характер и демоны, одну ветку вы найдете по душе точно. Мой любимый - Катрин, скажем так, Михаэль задался бы вопросом, а тру ли гангстер он, если б узнал, через что Катрин прошла. Вангую, после игры пойдете искать арты и фанфикшн с понравившимися вам персами. - Интересная боевка и прокачка. - Арт и саунд. -: - Видно, что у разрабов была идея "вариативности", где ветки четырех персов переплетаются, но... не ждите этого. Да, все ветки интересные, но они линейные и встреч между героями будет немного, это не Детройт в пикселях. А этого очень не хватает. - Ветка Артура. Не знаю, то ли не хватило бюджета, то ли времени, то ли фантазии, но там много недожатых моментов. Которые начали, закрутили, но... не дожали. Напр., с деканом. И конец у этой ветки странный, как обрубленный: герой узнал много о своем прошлом, его лавочку грозят закрыть, но он просто... сами все увидите. Ветку Анны тоже можно было бы продолжить. - Заметила пару багов. Покупала перчатки Артуру, деньги взяли, в инвентаре не появились. Короче, все зашибенно, но ДЛС или сиквел не помешали бы. И на этот раз, где герои реально сталкиваются друг с другом, а не просто пара диалогов. 8 из 10.

Quite good visual novel / RPG hybrid. Battles are quite few, but it tries to make each one a kind of challenging puzzle. Sometimes it succeeds, sometimes it doesn't. Overall quite a decent game.

This game has so much depth that reveals in time. Just give yourself a little time to dive deeper, and you will be amazed by Frail Heart's atmosphere, music, characters. Personally I like Ann mostly, her situation resembles me my own life when I was a student.

不错的旧式RPG，优秀的像素美术和音乐，故事完整有深度，战斗部分角色职能分工明确，技能丰富。

RPG Maker strikes again! Frail Hearts: Versicorae Domlion is one of hundreds of low effort retro-pixel RPG Maker asset/construction kit flips spamming the Steam catalog, made with the RPG Maker video game construction kit... in their own words, "Our easy to use tools are simple enough for a child." While almost all RPG Maker "games" are essentially a bunch of low quality/canned assets from RPG Maker coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club fan fiction, in this case most of the stock assets have been replaced with arguably worse monochrome pixelcrap and some very mediocre illustrations. Gamers rejoice, however, as the high school anime fan club dropout fanfiction writing remains. The "developer" of this RPG Maker shovelware decided to insult both gamers and fans of HP Lovecraft, who is by now surely spinning in his grave, as we drop the traditional generic Japanese anime fantasy theme for an unfaithful butchering of HP Lovecrafts themes, which could only be made up by someone who either never read any of his works, or just didn't understand them at all. As with all RPG Maker games, the poor quality engine displays badly in fullscreen and doesn't have full HD support or any graphics tweaking options, making this unacceptable for any dedicated modern PC gamer. The point can be made that the intention of RPG Maker is to make demos and small games to pass around friends, and shouldn't be used for "professional" game development. Like most RPG Maker shovelware and asset flips, the game features extremely low quality copy + pasted 2D retro pixel art, looks awful, and has even worse gameplay. RPG Maker is an absolutely terrible construction kit, and never results in games of any reasonable quality or value to gamers. This game has been translated from some other language into English... badly. If this was done through Google Translate, Google Translate should feel ashamed of itself. Regardless, the language in this game is broken and will put off a lot of gamers. There's an overwhelming amount of mediocre Visual Novel/E-book style cutscenes in this game. So you'll spend a huge amount of time not playing the game, but clicking through endless lines of poorly written VN text cutscenes because the developers couldn't work out how to relate their narrative through the game mechanics, and decided instead it would be better to compete with reading a book for your time. We're here to play games, not watch hours of garbage intersituals. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. To make matters worse, while lazy, low quality pixel "art" has been used, making the game look bad, many elements of the game aren't done with pixelcrap... which accomplishes a couple of things. First, it shows the developers perhaps could have done better and they knew it, so that's a major screwup. Secondly, it destroys any hopes the developer had of creating a "retro aesthetic" as their excuse for the lazy pixelart compromise... It looks completely inauthentic from a retro gaming perspective. Visually, this is a hamfisted mess, a dogs breakfast of bad visuals, and this kind of laziness and poor quality should never be foisted on gamers. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The game only displays in 4:3 pillarboxed aspect ratio. It's possible they developed this using an old CRT they found in a dumpster, or this game has been specifically designed for people gaming on PC's from 1995... either way, this isn't really acceptable in the modern era of PC gaming. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 15 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. Frail Hearts: Versicorae Domlion has the ridiculous price of $10 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. Gamers who want a good retro JRPG experience would be better off playing the originals, like Final Fantasy, Star Ocean or Chrono Trigger. For comparison, the $10 asking price for this game could get you games like "Mass Effect Trilogy Pack", "Grand Theft Auto V" or "Bioshock Infinite". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this. There's also thousands of free, superior quality games on Steam. Yeah, they really want $10 USD for RPG Maker garbage. That someone thought that pricing for this kind of garbage would be even remotely tolerable is horror the likes of which Lovecraft could only dream of. This game features a number of suspicious, possibly fake positive reviews. The reviews all appear at almost exactly the same time, very shortly after the game launched on Steam, all have a direct Steam purchase of the game, and all have very similar wording and writing style. Immediately after this huge peak of reviews, reviews (and player counts) for the game dropped incredibly sharply. This is highly unusual given the very low quality of the game and poor player counts. There's no specific evidence, but the suspicious number of glowing day #1 reviews for RPG Maker garbage, well, that's not natural. This might have been done to deceive/mislead gamers into paying for a bad product. The "Positive" review score on this game should be taken with a large grain of salt.