Frontier Hunter: Erza’s Wheel of Fortune

This game was certainly an experience of good and bad. I think the good outweighs the bad here so the overall experience is solid. I'll do my best to briefly go over the things that work well and do not. Pros: 1) There is a lot of gears to turn here in adjusting your characters if you feel like it. You get a choice of weapons to use on your characters, armors, accessories and magic spells. The first 3 options also have "magic cores" which are basically augments to stats or sometimes unique effects. All of this adds up to a ton of customization. You can build a tanky character, a glass cannon, a magic user, you can choose to use close ranged rapiers or long ranged whips, slow bazooka like cannons or rapid fire gatling guns. There is just a ton of stuff where you play a game like Hollow Knight and you're stuck with your toothpick the whole time and there isn't really much there to make your character your own. 2) The enemy variety is huge, the drops are plentiful. I never felt like I had to grind an area for experience, and I never had to grind mobs for long for drops if I wanted to see what magic cores they dropped. 3) Customizable difficulty. Partially because of how powerful your weapon enhancements can be but also how far you want to get in the game w/o killing everything in sight. You can also choose to go back and refight bosses at escalating difficulties. If you come back with complete end game equipment this will be a breeze, but if you do this when you first can, these are legitimate challenges. 4) The environments, zones, backgrounds, overall look of the game is great most of the time (more on this in the cons). Cons: 1) I think there is some kind of story... attempted. The english translation is god awful and things you see make no sense. Maybe if I knew Japanese it would fare a bit better but at the moment it is just bad. I get the vague idea of what is supposed to be going on but there is an immense barrier here. Outside of that, I hope you like Japanese tropes because they come hot and heavy. If you're not into Japanese anime shlock then this is not the game for you. 2) Fan service. It feels like the game takes the least effort possible in hurdling the lowest bars to give you a bit of jiggle boobs on the characters. The 2nd main character is a literal creep for the first one with not a lot of reason given as to why. The game could use less of all this but maybe I am not the target. 3) Characters and humanoid story NPCs are animated/drawn very poorly. It's a shame because the backgrounds, visuals and enemies look great. I think this game looks overall better than Bloodstained in the 3D drawn 2D game genre. It doesn't help the strange cutscene transitions and frequent dialog pop ups keep bringing the cell shaded abominations to the fore of your screen all the time. They're also delivering the previously mentioned abysmal diaglog. These are the low points of the game. The meh: 1) I feel bad putting the music in this category but I think it belongs here. The music is good, it feels right for the areas, it doesn't lower the quality of the game. But I'm also not going to be remembering or humming any of these tunes after the game has been uninstalled. 2) The size of the game. This is a weird one to put here as I like a large metroidvania like Afterimage. Sometimes a metroidvania can feel too small like Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight, or Time Spinner. After a while the zones here start to drag and you do want to be done with the game. Maybe this is due to the awful story not making me want to care about the end. Maybe they could've spiced up the platforming/movement abilities. Or maybe the backtracking was just a smidge too much. Maybe I locked in too fast on what I wanted the characters to be so I didn't spend enough time changing up their moves. Unclear to me but not worth listing as a total down for the game. Overall a decent metroidvania with some flaws but still worth a play. Get it on sale and give it a go. It's not the greatest game by any stretch, but I've also definitely played worse.