The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time

I really wanted to like this game. I pushed through because I'd already started playing, got all the achievements, but still felt like the game really never paid off. Firstly: Way too much of the game design went into what appears to be an extended post-game ARG, centered around plot points that frankly aren't compelling enough to deserve that level of attention. The actual game experience gets heavily side-tracked by puzzle elements that turn out to have absolutely nothing to do with the game itself, which end up just obscuring the game's actual puzzles. The actual game itself has its own issues. There are a lot of genuine bugs with the game (crashes, input errors where commands are registered by multiple UI elements at the same time) that are obscured by the "fake" bugs, making them twice as irritating and so much harder to correctly identify. The game is, to be blunt, sloppily made. The proposed aesthetic covers for some of it, but not nearly enough. The concepts behind the combat, which ends up more a puzzle game than anything else, are conceptually clever. Unfortunately, this concept runs out of ingenuity about 25% of the way into the game: the rest of the game's combat becomes "find answer, input answer in combat via a really clunky UI". For a game to be so openly inspired by games like Tunic and Inscryption, it hurts that Remake doesn't live up to the promise that implies at all. It heavily borrows from some of those games' greater successes, then combines them in a buggier, less compelling package. I didn't need this game to literally rival its inspirations, but I did at least hope it could be placed somewhere alongside them.

shows its hand early but becomes interesting remarkably late. for a game about exploring and pushing its boundaries, you get stuck or glitched too much. many of the puzzles are resolved the same way. it does not require note taking; you are almost never expected to maintain information for multiple minutes.

A sort of very cautious recommendation. It is not BAD - a lot of ambition has gone into the game in a lot of ways - but it very quickly sort of throws away any real pretence of being about the game and gets very enamored with a layered meta-narrative on game design that, frankly, isn't as brain-♥♥♥♥♥ as the developers probably hoped it was. I was thoroughly unimpressed with the long, long ending sequences. If they had stuck with a Tunic-inspired game of slowly developing your strategy based on the manual, combined with a stronger meta-story and better characterization of the two developers and their relationship, I could have seen this as a strong 8/9 out of 10. As it stands, it is a 6/10, enjoyable but get on sale.

It's a pretty neat premise, but over time it becomes bogged down by its own structure. The gimmick fights are fun at first, but in the end of the game they've begun to feel tedious - the combat isn't really fun in a JRPG sense of having a lot of variety in moves (since enemies have 1 weakness each and only that will hit them) nor in the Puzzle sense (the amount of animations that have to play per round just so you can test a combo is a bit too much and there is no way to speed it up) Storywise, it feels somewhat like it's not sure what it wants to say. The Greatest JRPG itself has a very thread-thin plot and characterisation, and while I get this is an indie project and it's supposed to be largely out of context, I still never really got invested. Spoilers for mid and late game [spoiler] the search itself for what the game was and finding secret codes was really fun, but then it got spun into a "Redittor tries to break the game open to prove his superiority" and honestly the search stopped having any appeal to me. And the ending itself felt like such a rehash of what had already happened, with the game's combat being the same thing again and with the story of Noah just... ending without much of a point? What was this game trying to say about nostalgia or remakes?[/spoiler] Overall it feels like this game is trying to be meta but it hasn't really a direction it wishes to utilise it. Feels somewhat meta for meta's sake.

I think I'd narrowly recommend this. There are a number of interesting ideas at play, and it's always interesting to see a game take inspiration from Tunic (the dev is actually wearing a Tunic shirt in the first live action video in the game). It also reminded me a lot of The Magic Circle, though I don't think the game necessarily drew inspiration from that. If you like meta puzzles and things that poke at the 4th wall re:game development, I think this is an interesting example in that space. That said, I do have a host of critiques. The puzzles in the game, while interesting, are very direct - often the information you need to solve a puzzle is given to you right before you encounter the puzzle, and there's very little space made for inductive reasoning. Often you just have the info, or you don't. Also I found a number of bug/implementation errors in the game that were definitely not intentional, which in a game where a large part of the experience is playing an intentionally buggy game led to me running into a lot of frustrating unintentional red herrings. I almost got progression blocked a few times, but fortunately there were often some very roundabout workarounds that could get me back on track. I'd also agree with the critique of animation length that others have mentioned. At some point you realize that all combat encounters are just puzzles where you try to implement the right combination of actions to pass them. However, since it's still framed as an RPG battle, it also means every wrong solution takes 20s or so to fully animate, and even correct solutions can take awhile to resolve. It started to get tiring towards the end of the experience. Still, all told, interesting title. If you think you'd like the game and have played a bunch of meta puzzle games before, then I think you're likely to enjoy this.

I was ready to give this game a negative review until I reached the third act. Look, if you compare yourself to Inscryption, if you try to be Tunic, if you follow in Blue Prince's footsteps, you're always, *always* gonna fall short. The nods to the game's inspirations were cute but they just reminded me how legendary those games were in comparison. And where this game shines the most is when it *doesn't* try to be those other games. The combat system that's in reality a puzzle, the glitching out of bounds, the meta-narrative. The FMVs. The actors almost cracking up after their purposefully-cringy lines. Noah's whole character. The story of two friends. That's where the game's at its best, when it does its own thing. If you're having doubts about this game, please stick with it until the end. It's worth it.♥

Excellent game! If you like games line Tunic or the Hex or meta-narratives in general you are in for a good time. Also if your in game dev at all you will find this extra funny. Try to go in blind!

Definitivamente no lleva la cantidad de horas que me figuran como jugadas, solo lo dejé prendido un día de trabajo y volví a las tantas horas. Lo cierto es que de las 11 horas me habrá llevado unas 3 y algo, no creo haber llegado a las cuatro. Yendo al juego específicamente, podemos decir que por momentos es un tanto enredado con lo que debemos hacer, pero está bien, es la propuesta que tiene, recordarnos a los juegos de antes, con los que en ocasiones debíamos usar los manuales que venían con ellos para pasarlos o saber cómo seguir. Esa desde luego no fue mi experiencias pues tercer mundo y todo trucho, pero sí puedo decir que tuve la costumbre de anotar pistas o códigos en hojas sobre todo en la época de los juegos de PS1. Por fuera de lo anterior, hay un enorme componente nostálgico en el juego que se termina resignificando hacia el final y que termina por darle el nombre al juego. El remake de la parte final del mejor JRPG de todos los tiempos. Desde ya, que no es un remake porque no hay un juego original ni mucho menos un tramo final al cual hacer referencia que exista. Y es con eso mismo con lo que juega la narración: hacerse la pregunta sobre la existencia de este juego original. Será Noah principalmente quien la lleve a cabo, una de las personas involucradas en el desarrollo que parece haber perdido un par de tornillos por el camino. También veremos a los otros dos desarrolladores, siempre a partir de videos de desarrollo que iremos encontrando, como suelen tener algunas ediciones del director, y comentarios que se extienden sobre el proceso que se desarrolla detrás de bambalinas. A todo esto hay que sumarle que realmente esta parte final del "remake" no es tampoco un RPG, sino que lo simula. Es más parecido a una aventura gráfica, en la que tendremos que deducir constantemente lo que haremos a continuación o como "combatir" enemigos, que consistirá en introducir la combinación adecuada para cada situación, en función de las pistas del manual virtual del juego, que iremos completando a medida que encontremos las páginas que faltan mientras juguemos. Retomando algo planteado por un juego maravilloso como Tunic (un juego que aparece, además, en la remera de uno de los desarrolladores, convirtiéndose indiscutiblemente en un guiño hacia su propuesta). Como ya se ha dicho, es un juego muy meta, que reflexiona no solo sobre el desarrollo de un videojuego, sino sobre qué significa que uno determinado sea el mejor de su género de todos los tiempos, si es algo que realmente existe o si es algo que creamos con nuestra imaginación a partir de la nostalgia: todo tiempo pasado fue mejor. Y claro, sobre este asunto arroja varias luces esta propuesta narrativa y videojueguil. Se agradece que hoy existan (tampoco es nuevo) cada vez más juegos que reflexionen sobre los géneros, sobre las posibilidades narrativas y que, en función de ello, experimenten con todos los modos de contar que puede habilitar un medio tan complejo y lleno de aristas como el de los videojuegos.

If you've ever spent hours arguing online about whether it's Aeris or Aerith, if you remember when fan translations were passed around like forbidden texts, if you accidentally discovered Something Awful twenty years before you were emotionally prepared for it, then this game is speaking directly to you.

While the combat can be at times infuriating, the story they present is worth the trip. https://youtu.be/2u7hcuWV77o This is al ost more of a puzzle game than an actual RPG with a ton of documentary footage that tags along. I wish the RPG playing was more fun. The story is great and captivating, but I hated checking the manual nonstop to see what THE EXACT combo I needed for damn near every fight. Overall a fun ride. But so much potential to be an absolute classic in the genre. You almost get mad that the game was so close to being awesome.