Unlike most of the reviews, I will put down my anime goggles and leave a review from both storytelling and gameplay point of view:
Summary of my review:
A lot of decisions in the game feel like they were made just to keep you IN the game itself, so you do not realise that you are better off doing anything else besides playing it. You need to get gear and lvl up for yourself and your “support” team, just so you can progress.
You spend most of your time doing additional fights and checking what you need for gear, claiming stuff from challenges and achievements, than you do playing the main mission.
If you enjoy just fighting games with grind, with maybe a bit of solo levelling elements, then this is fine. If you expect a solo levelling game… this is not it.
You are better off just skipping the story panels, as they are confusing and do not match what is actually happening.
This feels more like a mobile game that was ported to PC, than a PC game.
I will play a bit more, just because I am past the refund window, but I should have just went out for dinner with my wife for this money.
Story:
- The game starts with “look at where the character gets to”, but then the actual game stops very early, so… you do not get to the same point that you were at the intro of the game. You just get some spoilers for the end part of the anime. This for me is horrible storytelling.
- XP is based on how you did in the fight, not that you finished the fight. is the fight badly designed? you will have to do it multiple times to level up. A game based on levelling up as you defeat enemies, does the levelling based on how much damage you take and all that. super badly designed.
- cannot level up or change gear during main mission
- "recommended level" does not mean anything. everyone (including myself) easily can say you cannot fight a lvl 18 main mission boss when you are lvl 30, with all gear you can get at your level and upgraded weapons
- The story in the game is changed to the anime/novel
- example chapter 2: “I was just thinking of a lizard for some reason”, and that is all
- example chapter 4: goblins that eat each other? ha? this is never there!!! ha? this guy is alive and YOU send him to the boss? this never happened in the story….. Also, there is no explanation as to why Song Chiyul is a swordsman, he just is
- The story is told via panels, which is fine, but sometimes the panels do not match what is happening: you are in a dungeon that is NOT a cavern, while the panels try to replicate the original story a bit, and they show you as in a cavern.
- The voice acting is not always saying what the panels say, or just partially do
- you need to watch the anime in parallel and be a few episodes IN ADVANCE of the game or you do not understand anything. A lot of story bits are left out and I and my wife (we both watched the anime and read the novel) were confused as to what was happening (“these bodies are ripped apart” yeah… we just killed stuff…. oh no, he means they were already there, what?)
Gameplay:
- there is some weird performance thing, where I click for example to set my gear, but then have to wait a few seconds to be able to see what I have in my inventory. I have at this point reached the conclusion you are better off always just using the recommended gear, as it is faster. Same happens when I start a mission: there is like a loading thing after the mission start animation ends, where things are loaded up. I do not understand how that can be an issue where my PC cannot keep up or something and have that performance spike of a few seconds.
- grindy: “redo the same fight over and over to level up/get better gear so you can progress the main story”
- some bosses are horribly designed: you have some fights where you need to be able to block/parry or you are screwed:
- enemies can do knock back/stagger, while you cannot
- quite a few bosses keep doing the same move over and over again, which do stagger, without break in between. if you do not manage to block at the start, or get lucky…. good luck to you
- chapter 4 boss is a good example of this: he is invisible/whatever, and you just get hit randomly, and those hits do stagger. I was lvl 17 and with good gear, and the boss lvl 11 (I think). I barely managed to win, because I was almost permanently staggered
- another example: volcanic rock golem. don't you like it when you are stuck in a boss attack, where he just spins around, and you cannot do anything for 5 seconds? you are having fun, right, player??!?!
- advice for devs: if you have only 1 way of winning a fight (parry), then the fight is horrible. Fix it. you have dodge but is useless because you cannot use it when staggered. if even when being over the required level you barely can finish the fight, it is a bad fight design.
- back to enemies can do knock back/stagger: some moves you do are channelling, so if you get knocked back, they get interrupted. Same is if you decide to dodge (which is fine when you decide to move, maybe). the same can be said about healing: if you use the potion and immediately move, then it stops the healing
- you have a team of people that come and help you, but only on triggers, for example the healers when you get <50% health. you cannot summon them when you want/need them, they are there to just…. whatever, so again: bad design. why can you not use the healer to heal in between fights? because someone at the company decided against it. so you have a team, but not a team. BAD design.
- some fights are you with the “support” in the background, some are team fight, and some are just the support team itself. why? because someone at the company decided it was a good idea: either they are useless by not helping you, or you are forced to use them only, so you have to get more gear, so you can gear and lvl them up as well
- Main mission is sometimes blocked in “you need to do some other missions before”, just to not make you feel like you finish the game in 1h of actual gameplay
- After every dungeon stage you get a big “Dungeon Boss defeated” but is here only 1 “dungeon boss”? the one that you defeat and the gate closes down? not every fight is THE dungeon boss. I do not know why they decided to do this, after every fight I am “so this was the end of the dungeon? the boss is done? oh, no, it was just a stronger enemy and they decided to designate dungeon boss to it, so you can be confused as to what is happening”
- A lot of things are not actually explained, you have to figure out by yourself, like the triggers for your support group, what to do for them to actually help you
- when you craft, you get an animation, that gets old basically the second time you see. you can skip it, but by the time the skip finishes, the animation is 80% done
- Some fight moves are big animations, designed to feel OP, but most of the time they are not, unless you are overlevel. Plus they take away from the actual gameplay. they get annoying, just like the crafting animation, the second time you see them.
- You spend most of your fight in cutscenes, instead of playing, and from the playing, you spend it looking at the bottom right, to see when you move is ready to be used again, so you do some damage
- The design of the dungeons are horrible: they are straight, you can see different parts that are open, but… invisible wall. I thought this was 2025….
