Good game. Lots of room for improvement, but for $2 there are a lot of great elements.
The humor is what carries it, and the battle mechanics are solid. The plot, while not exactly deep, serves its purpose. Fully healing/restocking between battles means each battle can be approached as a puzzle, rather than needing to grind out value to preserve resources. The characters are diverse and the character customization tends to provide simple but potentially meaningful choices.
I do need to talk about the unfortunate staticness that permeates the entire game. There are no dialogue choices or decisions of that nature, ever. There is a single lever in the game to open a closed path and a single key to open a locked door (in the same, early dungeon) -- other than that, there are no locked doors, no puzzles, nothing to interact with besides monsters to clear from your path. There are very, very few examinable objects, which makes towns feel generic and can make dungeons feel lifeless. NPC dialogue never changes, even in cases where what they're saying no longer makes any sense. No town serves any greater significance than "place you pass through to read some funny dialogue and buy new items from the same three vendors on the way to the next dungeon." There are no side-quests beyond straying off the main path to find an extra treasure or an optional battle. Aside from a few locations becoming impossible to visit later, nothing ever changes.
It's not just that nothing changes. It's because nothing CAN change that a lot of the writing, while charming and witty, ends up feeling assertively meaningless. No NPC can have meaningful dialogue because what they say CAN'T have anything to do with the context of your characters or their journey. No NPC can have a problem for you to solve, or an insight about what to do next, or a choice for you that will affect something later. So what you get from everything outside of plot moments is a constant, aggressive silliness (like a town where everyone talks about Strangling like it's a local custom) devoid of any deep significance.
This is true of battles, too. No boss has so much as a second phase or a change in their fighting style. If there were boss with learnable patterns that could be responded to, I never noticed those patterns. No enemy has an interesting gimmick that forces you to approach them differently, aside from some end-game enemies that could drain your MP. A lot of battles end up playing out basically identically.
It was a game I had to play in short bursts, because despite the whimsical enemy designs, the fighting was so samey in many places. Especially in the early game, when fighting mostly revolves around setting up a lot of damage-over-time effects and then winning through attrition. Mercifully, the further you go into the game, the better your multi-target abilities become. On the plus side, this makes random encounters go much faster; on the down side, it makes fights play out literally identically, as you apply the same buffs in the same order and then use your big multi-target spells to win in a few attacks. Random encounters become solved problems, no longer requiring you to balance offense and defense.
It's a shame, but the fundamentals ARE there. The writing is effective and funny, the basic mechanisms of battle (gaining 1 MP a turn, interrupts to push back enemy turns, items recharging between battle, etc.) are extremely thoughtful and enticing, and the plot works despite the limitations of the static world. I found myself drawn back to the game again and again, even the samey battles and the certainty that there could be no real surprises outside of plot twists. It's a weak recommend for me, but if you're a fan of RPGs, hey, it's only $2.
