I bought this on a whim to see if it was good and unfortunately it is not. After completing the campaign there was nothing enjoyable beyond some asthetic things. Equally as unfortunate, it's difficult to rate a racing game without comparing it to every other racing game to have ever existed but I will try:
Largest Flaws (Not Track Related):
- The drifting feels awful it was obvious from track one, but became more apparent towards the latter tracks with harsher requires. It never really feels fight enough yet other times it feels like on specific terrain you can do a 90 degree turn into a wall. This is probably the biggest sin for a racing game to commit.
- The item balance is abysmal. There are what can be liberally defined as three item times, a straight forward attack, a defensive option, and speed boosts The offensive types, including homing attacks miss frequently and even if they hit they do very little, the defensive items do not last long and sometimes can be bypassed, and the speed types are the clear winner because they actually accomplish something. Each race consists of switching to your speed type character and hoping you pull speeds boosts because there's little else you can do to effect your odds of winning.
-The spell card system is neat and theory, especially with double dash item conservation, however, as they are accrued over time for achieving gates and not at specific map based intervals there are a lot of balance issues. Additonally, they are fully random. Attacks can hit you before you've even had the opportunity to have a defense built up, you can gain attacks in first place meaning you have wasted an item slot, you can gain defense items only effective in higher places while last. There are long stretches where there's no opportunity to garner items which means a single speedboost vs an attack can simply win the game in the final stretch. I noticed this particularly on Siersen. Additionally, there are character specific items and they can vary from being entirely useless, annoying, or simply being the best item in the game and they feel less balanced than the normal items.
Minor Flaws (Not Track Related)
-Checkpoints from falling off are really bad, sometimes placing you in unrecoverable scenarios.
- When retrying a campaign mission, you need to watch the cutscene again.
-The opening cutscene plays twice??????
-The placing ui is a little wonky.
-yukari is not unlocked by default and that makes me sad
Track Related Issues (apparently there were more than in the story, but the track select menu doesn't show pictures so I had no idea I had unlocked more because after picking the last one it gave me the 2nd track in the story):
-there are effectively a bunch beginner tracks where there is no skill involved and winning is basically item rng as there's no hard turns, obstacles, or shortcuts.
-Yokai Mountain, Frozen Lake, and Underworld depth have egregious issues with death planes, frequently overlapping with shortcuts or just killing you for getting too close to the track edge. There are some ramps that simply fail to work or ramps that don't launch correctly to continue the track. This issue is generally apparent through all tracks, but I felt like complaining about these three in particular.
-A lot of the shortcut paths either don't work because of death plane issues, extremely narrow windows, or simply requiring a 1 specific item in a batch of dozens. More annoyingly, some of them appear before you even have the chance to obtain items, even on point to point maps.
- Some tracks have misplaced signage or paths that do not feel to have a correct "flow". I felt this the hardest on Seirnsen which has several paths that appear to lead you straight but actually require sharp U-Turns with no signage, or tight turns that come up from over the horizon. This is worsened by the already poor feeling drifting.
PROS:
4 of the tracks looked really cool.
2/12 (half a point for each cool track)
