I don't really want to give this a negative cause Imo, it was more of a mixed bag, but given how many reviews for it are just 'yay, fox girls' I kinda feel like my feelings about the game are fairly negative by comparison so it oughta balance out in the end regardless
so most of my feelings on this game are related to the story, but I guess that it'd be better to talk about the gameplay first since my feelings on that will be a little less agitating and politically charged for the poor folks reading this
I play a fair few rpgs like this each year and understand that people's preferences for them can vary a lot, but personally I think it is mostly true that for the majority of players to enjoy your turn based rpg, you need to strike a good balance between sections of the game where you walk around and talk to folks, and sections where you do combat (and ideally, you should maybe aim to have a balance that slightly favours walking around and talking, but that's just my preference)
if you do too much of one or the other, things get extremely fatiguing, and that was very much the case with my playthrough of this.
it's not super bad at the start of the game, but as you go through it, the amount of combat that you need to grind through to get to the next morsel of character interaction is quite absurd at times, especially once ship combat becomes a thing, because for some reason the developer decided that following up the long exhausting on the ground sections with long exhausting ship battle sections was a good way to pace the game.
I don't know why they thought that was a good idea, as it just renders a lot of the more serious moments of the story incredibly painful to deal with, especially given that the ship combat doesn't have any compelling rpg elements, you more or less just repeat the same battle strategy over and over with no gear or stats for you to hone over time
whilst we're talking about stats, it's worth pointing out how strange it is that the game thinks that it not having character levels is a selling point, cause where that can be good in some games, it's implemented in a truly atrocious way here.
where in a normal rpg, you can overlevel and then start breezing through the basic enemies easy peasy and reduce your battle fatigue, here, every enemy is a bullet sponge that takes forever to kill that you will never get better at killing, and whilst you can walk around some of them, you will be fighting most of them, not that you should be avoiding them anyway cause 'whoops' whilst you don't get xp from fights, you do get resources, the majority of your resources in fact, which is kinda of important since without resources, you just won't win most fights in the game, so I guess you'll be fighting everything anyway and will be feeling really really tired of it by the end, cause it never gets any quicker and never gives you a break when you damn well need it.
There WAS some positive stuff I could have talked about in the early game, but my fatigue got so great here that I can barely even remember what that stuff even was, prolly just something trite about being allowed to bring a knife to a gunfight
now for the story
there are two themes/aesthetics that are immediately apparent in this game before you buy it
fox girls and militant fascism
and you better like those themes a lot, cause they're largely all you're gonna get with this game.
speaking on the fox girls, as a fox girl, these fox girls ain't schist.
if you're of that objective mindset where you don't give a damn about personality, I think you can do better; I see cuter fox girls every day in my dms, and I'm sure you can find plenty better elsewhere.
If you're not a detached internet creep and care about characterisation, they're just plain uninteresting; I won't say that there's nothing to them, but if you asked me to list more than one trait to describe any of the characters in this game, I find it damn hard, cause there just isn't enough writing in the game for them to really be all that fleshed out; I could not tell you anything substantial about who Kimi is as a person, much less anyone else.
I guess I'm also just not used to fox girls asking me to genocide folks
so yeah politics time; if this pisses you off, just know that I'm not making you read this, you can just keep scrolling and only consider everything else I brought up.
so anyway, militant fascism is one of those age old themes that scifi nerds have thoughtlessly glommed onto since time immemorial, it's also coincidentally the thing that tends to make a lot of pulp sci-fi (and fantasy, lets be real) unimaginably boring, so like, I'm rarely happy to see it
I normally wouldn't talk about this, but cause the fox girls are so boring, and devoid of interesting character plots, this IS most of what the game is about, so like, I kinda have to this time, and I'm very annoyed about it
now despite what people may think about lefty losers like me, I don't get triggered by the idea of story telling done from the perspective of fascists, but like I do have standards, and those standards are generally just that ya have to *do* something with that perspective, preferably something interesting, which is something a lot of writers tend to suck at.
To give a few examples of things you could do, you could be introspective about it and try to deconstruct it, explore the psychology of it basically, explain how it works.
alternatively you can try and be ridiculous and take it to an absurd extreme ala warhammer, lean into it and just go full evil bastard and fully plumb the depths of human cruelty for cruelty's sake.
you can also just parody it or something, you know, achieve a laugh that way
or just do something subversive like actually having the foxgirls play into a more girly pop take on it; that's what I'd have done
this game doesn't really do any of that though; your heroes are militant fascists from start to finish.
You can go turncoat in the last few chapters as a bunch of your followers suddenly decide, 'oh, I'm not on board with genocide anymore for some reason, despite loving it a chapter or two ago' but that feels more like a matter of coincidence with characters drawing more motivation from the contrived stakes set up to appeal to their current motives rather than the story forcing them to think and feel things about their ideology and the fact that they're just as guilty of the genocidal schist that they're angry about as anyone else is in this setting
basically I'm saying that the theme is just very static here and that makes it as boring as it is unpleasant.
and like, that sucks cause like, if I wrote a game that starts off with child soldiers gunning down 'primitives' for target practice, I'd damn well make sure that it'd have some good pay off instead of not going anywhere with it
anywho, them's my thoughts on the game; I liked bits of it, but a lot of it was just plain frustrating for different reasons, some of which were just my own tastes not jiving with it, others were just it not being a great game to begin with, but hey, if you still wanna play, go for it I guess, I'm not your mum, I don't see why my opinion should matter to you
