In Falsus

I'm wholeheartedly stunned by lowiro's stories. Only 2 hours in and already hooked. The controls are a bit off at first, but after playing the demo a bit I already feel like I've improved how to navigate the keys. For anyone interested in a beautiful storytelling, combined with challenging but fun gameplay, InFalsus is just that. Thank you lowiro for making me fall in love with Arcaea and continuing to create masterpieces for me to hyperfixate on ;D

Absolutely love this game so far. Pros: Lots of songs A lot of gameplay (charts & cards) Easy and Difficult songs Amazing art Cons: Long visual novel-like story slow pacing for most of story (so far) Lack of miscellaneous quality of like features Expensive cost (for a rhythm game) As someone who played lowiro's previous game, Arcaea, I had high expectations for the song quality, art and story direction, along with the controls. Overall, very impressed. There are way more songs than I thought, and the pricing is roughly on par with Arcaea's ~$1 per song. The story, while currently not as captivating as Arcaea's was, as it progresses it gets a lot more intersting with its themes and topics, and I can see it getting better as more content is realeased. The story for the first couple of arcs is quite slow, mainly building up the world and exploring the 5 characters. The dialogue is very VN-like, which I'm personally not a fan of, but it is fairly easy to understand. As you get deeper in the story, they flesh out each character more and raise the stakes, which is very appreciated. Now what every review seems to talk about: The difficulty YES! This game is definetly not for someone who has never played rhythm games, or someone who really doesn't want a challenge. Most of the unique charting that lowiro is known for is locked behind the 2 hardest difficulties, and the unique controls to the game make it that much harder. Even for someone who frequently plays rhythm games, this took a lot of getting used to. The deck-builder mechanic is unique and well thought out, but once again, it tends to be quite tricky, and time consuming to find the right solution, and then to get the right pieces to make those cards effective. The story, as I mentioned is quite slow, which is unfortunate considering that majority of content and progression is locked behind said story. This, combined with the other critiques above, make the game a tough reccomend to someone who either doesn't have time, or isn't interested in two of the mechanics (VN, Rhythm Games, Deck-building). All this doesn't mean it's a bad game though. If you like those things, or can at least put up with them, the game is amazing. Note: the game, for some reason, gets a little jittery, even during cutscenes. Might just be my computer...

tl;dr Fantastic rhythm game with a heavy focus on its story with some puzzle elements (that apparently can be skipped if that's not your thing). The game's different genres don't quite mesh together imo but I still enjoyed navigating the different modes. A solid package overall even at base price. This is essentially [b]three genres in one[/b] (rhythm, puzzle, visual novel), so to fully enjoy what the game has to offer, you ideally want to go in with an open mind if you're not used to playing games of those genre. So to evaluate the game, I'll need to look at all three and see how they blend together. [h3]Rhythm part[/h3] Primarily a 6-key game, but all the keys are handled by the left hand, and the right hand uses the mouse to move an arrow left and right (similar to Ongeki if you know of that). Since all buttons are handled by one hand, that means that your enjoyment hinges upon whether you enjoy hitting complex patterns one-handed (potentially using your non-dominant hand which I imagine some people may not be comfortable with) Because the core 4 lanes have to compete with the side lanes, you're often forced to move around your middle 3 fingers to properly hit notes, making it very easy to lose track of where you're fingers are. Consequently, much of this game's difficulty comes from reading the chart and figuring out how to hit certain patterns properly. Overall, it's quite trickier than other games but pretty satisfying when you get a difficult pattern down. Definitely takes getting used to, [h3]Visual novel part[/h3] A long visual novel (roughly [b]30-40 hour range[/b] as of 1.0), this is arguably the biggest part of the game and the main reason people may consider playing. The story for the most part is very character centric, and personally I enjoyed how the group meshed together and seeing them grow throughout the story. One thing that I found interesting has to do with the Binds (the choker) that you can see on characters. Since you can literally see a character's emotions through them, it adds an extra bit of information beyond the text you see, so it often had me looking more into in what people said vs. how they felt. It's quite fun trying to figure out which colors correspond to which emotion, and how that ties into what they're saying (or not saying). Having additional elements like this generally doesn't happen in visual novels, so just on the visual novel aspect alone, it was a fun read all throughout and I look forward to what they have in store for the future. [h3]Puzzle part[/h3] A smaller part of the game is creating a set of cards that act as your "party" used to battle other characters. Somewhat overwhelming at first but ultimately boils down to each card being a literal puzzle where you have to figure out how to fit hexagonal puzzle pieces within a limited space. I'm not too proficient at puzzle games so can't speak much on this, but most if not all the cards can be figured out through simple trial and error and aren't too difficult. Additionally, how each puzzle is completed (like which piece you chose to use to reach a solution) plays into a card's stats, so there are often multiple ways of solving puzzles as you're expected to try different solutions to get different builds and configurations set up. For me, it ended up being an okay experience. Early on as I was learning, it was a bit fun but gradually grew more tedious as there was little variety and things felt samey across most cards (outside of that one card towards the end, that was cool and it's unfortunate they didn't experiment more with stuff like that). [h3]Everything together[/h3] In short, it felt like the three genres served as ways to help you take breaks if you were tired of one of them, rather than something that complements each other. Unfortunately, I think this is just a fundamental issue with trying to mesh genres of drastically different "vibes" together. To bring an example from other games, the Zelda series does this well with weaving puzzles into an adventure game, as both "adventure" and "puzzle" generally involve exploring around and some level of problem solving. Pragmata mixes "puzzle" into a third-person shooter by having second-long puzzles be at the core of combat and not in its own mode. However for this game, you have genres with conflicting gameplay styles. With rhythm games in general, especially with higher difficulty charts, you often need some amount of time to warm-up before you can get into progging the hard stuff. So if you've just finished a long section of reading or puzzling, it's likely you're not warmed up enough to handle a surprise boss song and will have to re-adjust to rhythm gaming again. Conversely, if you've just finished playing a bunch of songs, maybe you got your blood pumping and you're hitting PBs, so you might not be in the mood to read and just want to play. It's switching from high intensity action gameplay to low intensity reading and vice versa. This can work to the game's benefit though if you're the type to take breaks and constantly switch things up. If I'm crashing out playing a stupidly hard chart I should not be playing, I can just go vibe with the gang in story mode or do puzzles and relax, and reset my mental. If the story hits a major plot point and becomes overwhelming, I can go let off some steam by mashing buttons to the beat. I did this every so often, so it helped some of the time, though the genres got in the way of each other at other times. I can see the vision for what they wanted with the three genres, I just personally think there's a limit to how well it works. [h3]Overall[/h3] It's a solid package of different games and the quality is particularly high across the board. While I might have mixed feelings about how the rhythm, visual novel and puzzle aspects work together, this is still one of my favorite rhythm games this year and oddly enough also one of my favorite visual novels this year too. I look forward to seeing more of the game going forward. More importantly, as a die-hard Feryquitous fan I'm super satisfied with all the in-game music and I hope lowiro continues to bother them to make more stuff, the world needs more Fery music.

有男娘

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초반엔 퍼즐이 재밌고 할만하지만 뒤로 갈수록 전투를 하며 죽기 때문에 계속 플레이하면서 나갔다 들어갔다를 반복함. 결국 지쳐서 어시스트 모드 킴. 리듬게임은 기본적으로 요구하는 체급이 너무 높지만 완성도가 매우 높음. 후반부에 뭔가 메시지를 전달하려고 대사량이 폭발하는데 도무지 공감이 안 됨.

jesus what a game