Fretless - The Wrath of Riffson

Bare in mind this is a recommend vs not recommend, not necessarily if the game is good or not. I don't recommend this game simply because it frustrated me. Other reviewers will surely tell you this game's strengths, so let me instead focus on my complaints. I like the idea of a turn based rpg will realtime input based on rhythm, and with the theme of this game simply being 'music', you'd think it would fit better than it does. Battles have background music, but your attacks (and defends) do not necessarily line up to that rhythm. I'm not a trained musician, so to my casual ear it's as if there are (at least) two tracks. in order to hit your attacks/defends you need to ignore the background music and focus on the few beats of the 'attack' track (whether it be your attack or an enemy's). Though some moves don't have a beat you have to hit, these just succeed, for some reason. You do get a confirmation of a green flash around your character when executed properly, so I found myself just using visual cues instead of auditory, in a music themed game... I had numerous issues playing on my xbox controller. Typically it being the cursor dissapearing in menus (even the main menu!). Typically these dissapearances were rectified by backing out of the menu pressing 'B' and reopening, but the frequency of which this happened was annoying (everytime I opened the game, and maybe a quarter of the time I was using menus in game) The frequency of which I encountered glitches. Typically these were minor graphical things, like hitboxes of terrain background not aligning to sprite, 'ghost' enemies remaining after I had already defeated them in battle were the two ones I noticed a couple times in my playthrough. The particularily egregious one was the game locking up mid-cutscene in I believe the Tunedra area, getting the tennis ball dog. The game broke during the cutscene and everything stopped moving. I skipped cutscene after waiting a minute, and then I found myself unable to move my character, access menus, anything... had to reset the game. This game has been out for 360 days as of writing and the amount of bugs/issues definitely soured my experience On a comparable note to bugs, I locked myself out of a steam achievement because I left an area before grabbing an unlocked item. Upon returning to the area, the item is gone, but the triggers for spawning it are also gone (the game thinking I have it). The game only uses auto-save, so it's not like I can even re-load an earlier one. This particular item is in the final area of the game, and as someone who occasionally will go for 100%ing a game's achievements, this is extremely dissapointing. The final section is a forced stealth section. It's not fun. Enemies have a red grid representing their vision so you know what they can see and what they can't. HOWEVER, they can turn at 90 or 180 degrees instantly. if you get caught, you get sent back to either the beginning or midpoint of the section (the midpoint still being in a restricted area, making it feel like a band-aid solution, no reason for the player to end up there except for not having to do the first half again). How do you counteract the sometimes abrupt guard movements? By sitting and waiting, watching their movements, ensuring that they won't turn and spot you. Combat is non-optional here. Forced stealth sections with poor stealth mechanics are mid at best, having it be the interlude of the final few battles felt entirely out-of-place. It's not particularily difficult, just boring. I wanted to like Fretless - The Wrath of Riffson, and I still do (a little). but it's hard to recommend when there's so many scratches on my rose-tinted glasses.

jogo muito bom, história legalzinha, gameplay suave, batalhas legais, pixel art épica, tudo muito bem feito. encontrei alguns bugs, porem apenas visuais, e nada muito alarmante, só em um lugar q cosegui ver as hitboxes de trocar de fase. recomendo dms!

Really great little RPG, maybe the most slept on release in recent memory.

Play this game! Such a fun world and such fun gameplay. Enough reason to grind battles that you naturally get good at the mechanics and try out a variety of instruments, along with combinations of riffs you can play on them. So glad that all the instruments are unlocked pretty early in the story. A bit buggy at times, but I truly don't really care about that. I care more about polish in the *fun* parts, like vibes and characters and gameplay, than whether the graphics for some stairs stay in the foreground even as you walk in front of them, or if some character speech boxes are partially cut off by the screen with my default display settings. I bring that up because I feel like there are expectations for a lot of novel and ambitious games with commercial, studio releases that drive development to simplify interesting ideas and polish out non-game-breaking bugs at the expense of what I personally find more important as a player. Dredge and Death's Door come to mind. I like them, never encountered an unintended frustration in the UI, visuals, controls, or moment-to-moment gameplay. But by the time the main story is complete all novelty has already worn off, and I don't have much left to feel or think about. I've seen all the dialogue and creatures and strange events in the world already, because these things barely interact with each other. Game dev is already impossibly difficult, and the smallest additional complexity can lead to a hundred situations you need to account for and debug, derailing the deadline for putting out a flawless game. Maybe. I don't actually know anything. But if a game with that kind of polish is a beautiful, perfectly cut amethyst gem, then Fretless is a giant, flavourful, and juicy watermelon which I purchase from a food co-op and immediately tear into with my bare hands as the vendor's bewilderment and fear forces them to watch motionless and unblinking. Anyway this game establishes its vibe immediately as playful, and delivers on that perfectly in the writing and the stakes I felt as the player. UI is usable but tedious on the steam deck. After playing through the whole game a few times and challenging the final boss 10x that number with all sorts of different builds for my character, I find myself wanting more. Maybe some kind of endless battle mode? I wonder if people make mods for Fretless. That said, I got this game on release, and I still keep replaying it! Truly some of the best fun I've had with a video game :D

Short and sweet. Minor backtracking for secrets and upgrades, and nothing overstays its welcome. Solid 8/10 game

Nice game and Rob is a cool character, if only he was real

Amazing game A truly labor of love