Lie of Caelum

This game has the sci-fi mecha charm that I love so I knew I'd like the design from the beginning, but the hook of the combat and exploration kept me playing. The True Mode difficulty can scale from zero to one-hundred depending on what items, characters, and equipment you have at your disposal at a certain point. During a certain battle where you are damaged for half of the damage dealt to an enemy I decided to equip 4 stacks of 12 Alpha Bombs to one character and had them use the bombs the entire fight, I figured I couldn't do it any other way due to the enemy spamming taunt so that I couldn't damage the other damage dealing enemy. This was frustrating in the moment, but looking back on it any reason to force me not to hoard items is a good thing. BURST was entertaining and a nice change of pace when exploring places, the one gripe I have is that I can't grind BP in any way which stings if card-pack opening luck has never been on your side. Overall I'd say that this game is definitely worth a spin if you're looking for a solid RPG experience with solid writing and polish, if you are looking for a challenge choose True Mode because it definitely gave me some trouble at points. P.S. I wish I could finish that Rat Extermination mission.

You can really see the Xenogears influence in the combat system. I greatly appreciate that, Xenogears deserved more love than it got. Also, what the hell are you doing? You removed every possible quality of life feature from Xenogears' combat system for the sake of originality and ended up making every fight triple in time because now you need to waste 2-3 turns setting up enough SG to actually play the game. Meanwhile, enemies get to unload on you with all their stuff. And why in the name of God would you make players LOSE A TURN just to check your non-standard, bespoke combo routes? Terrible design decisions mean I don't have the patience to play any further to see the rest of the story. Hope you fixed it for the sequel.

[h1]Where's the Lie?[/h1] [h2]Story[/h2] You play as a group of 5 students in Class C of Kazuri High, where they learn about Flow abilities and how to use them to maintain the world's order. However, the game page's description states that they'll eventually learn some grim truth about this world, as well as get tied up in political conflicts. We definitely get examples of the latter, and it's surprisingly not a black-and-white conflict once we learn about the terrorists' backgrounds. For the former, we get some vague hints that the world might be a simulation, but there's nothing conclusive in the first episode. We get a decent amount of character development for the main party for the first episode, but [spoiler]Elysion is abruptly killed off with only a short statement about her background and before the player can really get emotionally invested in her. It's implied she might resurface again in later episodes, but it does seem like her character should have been handled better for this episode to make her sacrifice have more impact.[/spoiler] We do get to meet some of the other classmates, but I wonder if the later parts of the game will have enough time to give them proper spotlight too, even as NPCs. For some reason, the game locks behind parts of the story behind the difficulty setting. I played the demo on both difficulties and I found that Astral mode is just True mode with bits and pieces cut off, so I'm not sure Astral mode is worth my time compared to True mode. I ended up playing the main game on True mode only, so I'm not sure if Astral mode will have anything unique to it in the long run. [h2]Gameplay[/h2] This game uses a combo system that requires you to memorize inputs to activate stronger techniques, or you can just write them down on a piece of paper. However, you have to accumulate SG to activate techniques, so the beginning of each fight consists of your character awkwardly spamming their low attacks until they can use proper combos, since low attacks are the most efficient at generating SG while saving FP. Still, it's very satisfying when you do get to enact the techniques and watch the party members turn the enemies into ragdolls. The game features a type advantage system, and you eventually get to control one character of each type. Not only is there a significant difference in damage, a character won't lose stance if they're hit by an attribute they resist. This means when you have the full party, you'll have to tailor the three-person team to match whatever boss you're fighting. Speaking of stances, allies and enemies have a certain number of hits they can take before they enter a break state for two turns. This decreases their defenses drastically, making it so that even tanky characters like Miyu can get completely steamrolled in the break state. This does make it so that multihit-using enemies like the Vile are disproportionately more dangerous than their single-hit brethren, at least in the beginning of the game. For character customization, you get three gear slots, but each piece of gear has a certain number of mod slots you can use to further fine tune the characters' stats. In earlier versions of the game, certain mods were more useful than others, but now the numbers are more carefully balanced so that every choice isn't as one-sided. Unfortunately, before the patch, I used exploits that netted me some late-game mods, making me slightly stronger than I should've been. For the most part, the game starts out very difficult due to you only having 2 characters with fairly weak armor, meaning you'll be at the mercy of the break system. After the first dungeon, you'll be able to buy much better gear and have more people in your party, making it easier to finish off the enemy before getting broken. That said, I didn't see that much of a difference between Astral and True mode in terms of difficulty, at least for the demo. You need to have a decent understanding of the battle system and farm resources if you want to survive the early game of either difficulty. The game's economy is very strict if you're relying solely on enemy drops and mission rewards. If you want to get decent upgrades, you'll have to take advantage of the casino minigames to accumulate wealth quickly. However, the game gives you a wallet limit to keep you from hoarding too much money at once, which is designed to lock you out of the more OP lategame stuff. The mapping in this game mainly consists of narrow corridors, which is fine on their own, but due to how narrow they are and how fast enemies move, it can be very hard to actually avoid encounters. IMO, this defeats the purpose of having touch encounters in the first place if they're going to be as unavoidable as random encounters. This had the unintentional side effect of making my characters hit the soft level cap of every story segment, since I had to fight a lot of unavoidable encounters. As for leveling, the EXP rate is fair, but reserve party members don't seem to get EXP, which is unfortunate because a healer like Miyu is pretty much a staple in the party and it could be hard to make sure everyone is leveled evenly. Make sure you pair one multihit specialist character with a character who deals fewer hits, just to keep some semblance of team balance. Edit: The updated party system shares EXP properly now. Some consumables are only sold in limited quantities, but I noticed that even at the end of the chapter, pretty much nothing restocks unless they were infinite to begin with. Unfortunately, that means more limited items like the Repellant cannot really be farmed. This is balanced by the fact that the party fully heals automatically between fights, meaning the player is unlikely to run out of healing items. I hope the next chapter restocks everything, especially the arcade's utility items. Personally, I think it would have been better to have the stores restock items after a certain number of battles, just to reduce the chances of players using up the entire continent's stock of rare consumables. [h2]Verdict[/h2] 9/10 For the first episode, the game is well-written and has fun gameplay with a neat resource system. It also has a good pixel art aesthetic that surprisingly doesn't clash with the occasional RTP usage. There are a few questionable design decisions though, such as locking bits of the story behind the difficulty setting and having nigh-undodgeable touch encounters. Additionally, the game has a very ambitious cast size that possibly rivals the Trails series, and I hope future episodes can flesh them out to a decent degree.

[h1]Before I played Lie of Caelum, I had a small pp, no friends, no gf, depression, and no life. These things havent changed, but the game is pretty good[/h1]

Well this is a bit of a surprise. I've not played much of this yet but even initial impressions are very good. There's already a lot of love and care that you can see just playing for a short while. The game is a turn based RPG that has a lot of love and style put into things. Things just feel extremely polished and it's insane there's not more attention on this game at the moment. I plan to check it out more when I have some time and you should too.

Wonderful game, good puzzles and combat. It can sometimes be very difficult, but not too bad. I didn't really like the villain that much, and sometimes I was a little lost in trying to find what to do. But the game is free, so you really can't complain too much.

Dev robotlar. Teknoloji büyüyü kötüye kullanıyor. Ülkeler arasındaki çatışma. Bir grup kaderli bireye katılın ve Caelum gezegenini halkının prangalarından kurtarın. Bu Bilimkurgu JRPG'de güçlerinin ardındaki gizemleri keşfedin ve hayatlarının içinde yaşayın.