Mythos: The Beginning - Director's Cut

Oldschool RPG, topdown view, battlescenes, and one hell of a great story. Recommend using 'guard' often in battle. And dont forget to save now and then.

This was an easy thumbs up. It does what it set out to do and created a genuinely decent Lovecraftian JRPG. It's just held back by a few design decisions and a massive lack of overall polish. Starting with the good. It has a decent lovecraftian feel and the overall design rewards investigating as much as combat making both fairly viable options. On that note, I was able to complete over half the game without engaging in combat and nearing the endgame I'm under 10 battles that I either chose to fight or screwed up in my stealth play. So Non-Combat is actually an option. But the opening of the game showcases one of the coolest features in the game, freedom. All 3 classes will have a different opening experience because of different skillsets and talents. The Detectives "Investigate" ability allows him to get clues on how to solve puzzles. The journalist can literally skip puzzles to to a high intelligence stat and has a Single use key to unlock ANY single door. The priest has a single use holy water to defeat ANY enemy (Including a boss). Having died several times before the first same point, I got to explore the opening and got a good sense of the sequence breaking that was possible and loved it. But as you gain experience, all four classes can learn the skills from the other class and you lose the feeling of individuality. Skills will still allow you to sequence break, but it won't matter which character you created just that you bought the right skills. Interesting enough, sequence breaking extends to bosses. If you found the right items, discovered the right clues, and learned the correct skills... bosses will be automatically defeated due to your investigators quick thinking. This means that even a low combat strength investigator can beat the game without combat! Every skill and stat is meaningful both in combat and out and this is really cool. Combat itself is a mixed bag. You gain very little of your EXP through combat and the monsters are powerful enough that you may die in a single battle (At least early on). But the game allows you to spend EXP on ATT and DEF skill points that allow you to quickly turn into an invicible tank. It feels like an exploit, but I see nothing that even suggests its not the intended strategy. Enemies are visible on the map and you can navigate around them to avoid combat. This is key to an investigator run and for a combat character it allows you to "Clear" the map so you can explore in your own time. While the feature generally works great, there are some scenes where invisible walls exist or enemies that move way too fast for you to dodge without luck. Those moments are frustrating because of how important sneaking past enemies is to the game. The story is decent enough. It's stereotypical and you'll see most of the plot twists coming, but it was enough to keep me reading the memos and exploring the asylum. In the end I recommend that you try to balance the experience yourself because its far from perfect. Don't be afraid to turn down the difficulty early on and pick off enemies that are especially annoying to dodge. As you get a party and develop your stats you can shift the difficulty back towards the higher intended levels. Doing this helped me minimize the frustration involved, maintain some level of challenge and allowed me to enjoy the game despite flaws. I enjoy the game quite a bit and I'm even considering a second run when I finish. It has a number of unique ideas that weren't perectly executed. But the base here is enough that I'd definately pick up a sequel that hopefully better balances everything.