S E V E R A N C E

Avoid this. Enemies level with your characters, My second character was quite under leveled, and my third one was immensely under leveled. Had to fight a 4 man boss fight, killed the third guy quick, second one went down without me able to do much, even after their special, and they stun locked the first one. I thought that maybe this is intentional. No, no way for me to grind and even if I did they level with me. Garbage design, and you should feel bad, this game is disrespectful to jRPGs.

After some decent mapping and the start of some kind of story, I was intrigued enough at first. But then, the battles came into play. I actually liked how you could just grind via crystals in each area. I was hoping that my party would at least be strong enough to take on the enemies in future areas as I don't mind grinding. The enemies scale with your party. Which completely negates grinding, because you can't grind enough to get over that level curve with the enemies. I don't know why the dev made this decision, but it honestly took pushed the positives of the game's experience out the window for me. And honestly, this game had some promise when I first started it up, which is frustrating as there might've been something decent here. I wish I had refunded it when I had the chance, but I had went onto better pastures.

This was not playtested. The game sometimes crashes, especially when interacting with the quest log but it's very rare. The biggest issue is the part when the first three characters reunite. You play as one character for the 1st time and he has the same encounters as a group of three. Playing as that sole character is a slog. Overall, the encounters are a slog. I turned them off wanting to rush to the part where I get more characters. However, not all crystals allow you to turn the encounters on/off. So what happened is I turned off encounters with the main character and then when I went to play with another one, I could no longer turn them back on. There is a boss fight where the group reunites and it's quite hard when you have a character you've not levelled and have no option to go back and level. TLDR: You can turn off exp and get softlock.

[code]For other game reviews, please [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/40640212/]follow us at What The Game?[/url][/code] Severance is ambitious, particularly for an RPG Maker game. That being said, there's definitely some drawbacks here that make it impossible for me to give it an unqualified thumbs up. One of the biggest issues here is that you've got this very original world, but the players are given very little information about it. It's not a kiss of death, but it makes getting into the game a bit difficult. Because the random NPC's like to speak in the jargon of the world, and there's no context for the terms they're using or the events they're referencing, they may as well be speaking gibberish in many cases. There's also an issue in knowing where to go on any given map or mission. I'm not sure if it's a limitation in the RPG Maker engine, or if this was a design choice on the dev's part, but it led to a large amount of aimless wandering. There's lots of buildings and rooms you can enter that have NOTHING to do with your goal, and trying to find a specific person in a building with 30 NPC's is..not fun, when you have no idea what that person looks like, and the game gives you zero hints. It feels very much like this is a world that the developer is exceedingly familiar with, but they don't necessarily know how to tell you about it. There's also times where you have the ability to clear an obstacle blocking your path, with no clue this is the case, which is problematic when you normally cannot. The controls are thankfully very intuitive, and they're exactly what you'd expect from a JRPG by default. The music is actually very skillfully done, particularly for an RPG Maker game. Weirdly enough, though, I found that the portraits of characters and NPC's were generally less attractive than the sprites in most cases, which is a first for me. The combat is again, very competent, and intuitive, even with some unnecessary terminology differences being put in place (presumably to better fit with the dev's vision of the world). Outfitting your characters, however, is exactly the tedious chore that you'd probably expect, but wish had been done better. All or most of your gear has a skill (both passive and active) that unlocks after you've used it enough in battles, which is interesting, and encourages both grinding and experimentation, and every major map section can have random battles turned on or off, which is nice when you're stumbling around trying to figure out how to escape an area. For $2 USD, this is worth your time, if you're able to accept some significant flaws in the game's design. It's ambitious, but definitely crosses the line into frustration at points.

It's a nice change from the traditional setup these sorts of games tend to have. It also seems in ways a bit like what's going on in our time so it has a bit of a real world feel.

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