This Way Madness Lies

Odd saving system Dialogues are trash and longwinded No map Abilities are cryptic Bad humour Repeating battles This game is trash, worst buy

"This Way Madness Lies" is a turn-borne revelry, a role-play most wondrous, wrought in the likeness of yon ancient Nipponese pixelated entertainments of eld. Verily, it pleaseth mine heart right heartily. Forsooth, 'tis a chronicle most strange, wherein maidens of mystic vocation, clad in raiments of starry glamour, do sally forth to safeguard the myriad realms wherein Master Shakespeare’s own quill hath woven breath and wit, lest foul legions of infernal brood usurp the stage entire. Though the tale be steeped in folly most extravagant, yet 'tis devised with cunning craft, bearing a wit as sharp as Puck’s own tongue. And lo, the melody of its spheres and the depth of its jousting strategems exceedeth far the modest coffer whence this miracle sprang, outshining expectation mine. Seriously though, it's good. It's hard to talk about it because it's not a novel releationary take on the genre. Zeboyd's combat system is unique take on JRPG formula, but this is the third game with the same system so it didn't blew my mind. It's relatively short for the genre, you can play it in "just" 7 hours and there's no side content to speak of (though there's a high difficulty mode and party build variation, so considering how good the combat is I can see one replaying this on the highest difficulty level to get the most out of this system). More importantly, those 7 hours have zero filler in them, there are no trash fights, you will never just click through an encounter. It might even be too stressful and make you realize how much downtime there's usually in roleplaying games, allowing your brain to turn off! The writing is good, it's a barrage of dad jokes that never felt too dumb to me. The visuals are nothing to write home about but the music has no right to be this good, just listen to, say, Boldness Be My Friend track. A relatively small and unambitious game like this deserves your time and money.

RESUMO: Um jogo RUIM. Mas não é que ele é ruim, ele é MUITO RUIM DEMAIS MESMO. Sério, não perca seu tempo. A ideia do jogo, de fato, é muito original ao misturar shakspeare com garotas mágicas, o que poderia dar errado? O problema desse jogo e de todos os jogos da Zeboyd games é um só: eles focam em um ou outro aspecto e esquecem o resto. No caso, o sistema de batalha importado do brilhante (no aspecto batalha, frisa-se) Cosmic Star Heroine, não segura o jogo até o final sozinho, diferente da sua contraparte. Com inumeras (leia-se, todas!?) as batalhas forçadas, com um cast de personagens medíocres, batalhas maçantes e uma história chata, não tem como dar positivo para esse jogo é nunca.Não recomendo. ANALISE DETALHADA *POSITIVO: A música e a ideia original de misturar magical girls e Shakespeare. No papel, o combo mencionado seria suficiente para positivar o jogo, porém os negativos influenciam demais o jogo a ponto dessa lógica não se sustentar. A premissa do jogo é muito bacana, principalmente para quem leu Shakespeare ou conhece um pouco de sua obra. O humor característico da Zeboyd volta, mas aqui em um patamar muito menor e mais sutil, quase imperceptível e tênue, para não dizer sem graça. A lógica da mistura mencionada não consegue suplantar as inúmeras falhas do jogo. *NEGATI|VO: O resto. -Batalha: Em tese, o ponto forte de todo jogo, o aclamado sistema de batalha do seu predecessor: Cosmic Star Heroine (CSH de hora em diante). Porém, por que o sistema não dá os méritos e salva o jogo? Porque esta tudo errado com This way madness lies (TWML)! Simples assim. Se em CSH você podia desviar das batalhas, TWML o jogo praticamente torna impossível você desviar das batalhas! E são muitas, muitas mesmo! Eu que gosto de batalhar estava enjoado na metade do jogo e não suportava mais. Além do que não há, friso, NÃO HÁ QUE EU SAIBA um botão de 'correr', o que torna o jogo insustentável. A imensa quantidade de batalhas foi colocada para dar um 'estofo' de jogo indie razoável (umas 9-12 horas). Porém, dessa parte a história não deve dar nem 1 horinha. Ou seja, foi proposital a escolha, quase como os devs cuspindo na cara. Tudo que CSH tem de bom TWML tem de ruim. A outra parte agora, o 'aclamado sistema de batalha'. Em CSH o combate é muito técnico. Não raras vezes você pensa, imagina, bola um cenário o qual consegue criar um combo perfeito e causar muito dano. As batalhas tem poucos inimigos e a utilização de um status effect precisa é a diferença entre a vitória e derrota, especialmente nos níveis mais altos do jogo, mas mesmo no modo normal isso tem um impacto. Isto é, as batalhas com poucos inimigos são realmente um teste de habilidade. Já em TWML a enorme quantidade de batalhas que por sua vez possuem quase sempre 5 inimigos em todas (!!!!) tornam o combate excessivamente longo e maçante! Perde-se o desejo de querer aprender novas habilidades ou mesmo de lutar. As boss battles são ridículas (salvo a batalha final que dá um pouquinho de dificuldade). No geral a batalha em TWML importa um sistema vencedor de CSH, porém, joga esse sistema a esmo, focando na utilização de itens e efeitos de status em praticamente toda luta, sem nenhuma técnica ou tática. -Ausencia de história: Considerando que a batalha ocupa uns 90% do jogo, sobra pouco para o desenvolvimento da história tosca e das personagens sem graça. Desenvolver personagens nunca pareceu um problema para Zeboyd, haja vista que mesmo no consagrado CSH os personagens são insonsos (embora tenham um pouco de charme). Portanto, se num rpg a história deve ser prevalente, ou pelo menos o seu combate divertido, aqui nenhum dos dois casos deu certo. Não há como recomendar. -Mapas: claramente reutilizaram paletas de CSH sem graça. Mapas repetitivos, sem puzzles, sem outras interações, simplesmente um andar a esmo com 20 batalhas longas e obrigatórias em todos os mapas... Não há como falar nada de bom sobre algo sem criatividade. -Gráficos: horríveis. a reutilização de paletas e esquemas de cores tornam o jogo quase um clone muito horrivelmente mal feito de CSH. Nada há de novo aqui a não ser reaproveitamento ruim. VEREDITO TWML começa de maneira empolgante e divertida, mas logo a musica do jogo se torna insonsa já que ela é, apesar de ser um ponto forte, também repetitiva como o resto do jogo. Aliás, se pudesse definir TWML eu usaria essa palavra: repetição. Desde os cenários, musicas, batalhas, habilidades, enfim, tudo é uma repetição mal formulada e sem graça, calcada no sucesso de CSH. Esse jogo foi CLARAMENTE feito a moda caralha e não merece as avaliações 'muito positivas' que tem na steam não. No mundo ideal esse jogo deveria ter avaliações muito negativas, isso sim. Após ter jogado uma centena de rpgs ao longo da vida toda (alguns deles bem medíocres), posso dizer claramente que TWML NÃO vale seu tempo e nem seu dinheiro. Se você não tiver nada o que fazer e estiver pensando 'vou pegar um rpg legal dessa empresa que fez o sucesso CSH e vai ser divertido' não se engane, esse jogo é pífio, mal feito e sem graça. Não vale um tostão.

Freaky frog

I haven't completed it but this is such a fun and hilarious game! Every time I boot it up in grinning from ear to ear like the Cheshire Cat! The combat is fun, the animations are nice, the music is good and the characters are a blast. What more could you want? Highly recommend.

I liked it, though not without its faults. TWML is another Zeboyd game in the Cthulhu Saves Christmas vein. Same style of progression and format for the most part, though a bit longer and I enjoyed it more. You know what you're getting with Zeboyd at this point: good combat system and solid pixel graphics and music. I really like the Shining Force style battle layouts and wish you saw this type of thing more often but alas. Also as an aside, I think this is their best use of comedy so far and I've come around on their humor more and more over the years. It's still referencey and meta-humorish but I have fully accepted that years ago and can appreciate the sincerity of it. Like there's a snowman enemy with a cloak and sword called Jon Snowman with an enemy description of "winter is here" or something and they thought this was funny and did it wholeheartedly. There doesn't seem to be any worry that players will it find it cringey or whatever term people use for self-embarrassment; they thought things like this are funny and just did it with no remorse. To give this type of comedic writing a soundtrack, it would be Devo's "Through Being Cool". There's also legit things I thought were funny as well. On the downside, there are a number of UI elements that annoy me, primarily how in-battle you don't have complete descriptions of exactly what skills do. Also, hard to tell what buffs/debuffs you currently have on your party and whether certain skills stack things or not. This is a combat focused game so not knowing what the exact math is annoying. I wish the out of battle UI let you save different layouts for characters. It's a hassle to change to skills for different party set-ups because you get so many skills and traits and they really cry out for min-maxing synergies on the harder difficulties but I stopped experimenting once I got the ability to freely change party members because it was too time-consuming to individually swap out skills depending on the party make-up. The whole skill layout screen feels a bit cluttered and I'd prefer to be laid out vertically than how it is. Final two negative points: traits shouldn't have come with stats, just a bad idea and it feels unnecessarily limiting and there should've been a way to run away or restart battles. All in all, a nice little JRPG-styled game with good combat mechanics and humor. Probably around 8-10 hours long for most players, depending on the difficulty level.

[h1]Another short but sweet RPG from Zeboyd Games[/h1] I was initially skeptical of the Shakespearean setting / focus but the game won me over within 15 minutes. The dialogue is full of funny and clean humor. The music is really good with a few surprise vocals thrown in. The RPG mechanics are similar to other games by this studio.

TL;DR: Very mixed game, but ultimately I have no problem recommending it. If you're more gameplay-minded than story-focused, and if you like at least two of the major themes involved (magical girls, lovecraftian horror, Shakespeare), I absolutely think it's worth playing. Now to go on waaay longer. The best thing about the game is the battles, so I'm gonna speak about them. They're very streamlined, and they all revolve around resource-management, but in a way where you don't have to re-grind resources every time. Items that would be consumables are forever with you, but you are just limited to using one of each per battle. Likewise, skills and dual skills ("unites") are also spent for the battle once you use them. All characters have a rest action to recover use of their skills... however, if you take too long, the enemies have a natural ramp of damage the longer the fight takes. Even outside of battle, there's plenty to consider for it. You can only bring a certain number of skills to be used per battle, and up to 3 traits, which are passive effects for your characters. You can trigger a battle at any time with a button on the menu (you encounter them on the field too, but they don't respawn), and you heal up to full after every battle, which is convenient and helps there to be less downtime. Despite all of this, it's not a cakewalk, and what keeps me the most engaged is when the battles are hard anyway. I beat it on Challenging at first (second highest difficulty), and once past the first stage and up to the end of the game, there was no battle where I felt I could be careless. More than once I did one mistake, like use the wrong skill on Miranda thinking I'm out of hyper, or lack a character's disarm (usually Beatrice) before a particularly AoE attack, and that was enough to get me wiped and have to reset- which, when it happens, it just takes you to the start of the fight again, so even that's streamlined. But out of the times where I wiped, 9 times out of 10 it felt like my fault, with the odd one out being an ally getting randomly focused down by multiple enemies and messing up the whole action economy. But that's one of the few ways RNG can screw you up in this game, since dodging doesn't exist and ailments are not random either. Overall, I think the fights were great. That's not even touching how I like that different characters have specific gimmicks, like Miranda's completely changing her skill effects while hyper, or with Viola being able to be built as a skill combo master like no other. The other point I was going to make before getting to the cons is about the music: it's really good, in my opinion. All the battle tracks were remarkable, there's a couple of different voiced tracks through the game, and there's a brief song for magical girl transformations with different variations and instrumentations fitting the personality of each one. It's nothing particularly incredible, but I'll definitely remember some of these. Now, I do have a list of cons, and it's not short: - The game sacrifices atmosphere, plot, story and characters greatly in order to make the pace very quick, and focuses on making individual scenes fun or funny at the expense of... way too much, in my opinion. You can definitely care for these to some degree, I personally found some characters fun, but don't go in for the story. A lot of things are left unexplained, what is explained is done so way too quickly, stuff seems to happen sporadically for the memes, the 4th wall legitimately does not exist, and so on. This is probably the biggest 'con' this game has for what I imagine would be most potential players. - The game's critical path is basically all the content it has. No sidequests, no minigames, no super hard secret bosses, no lore-related journal entries, no dating sim element, etc. The closest it has to those is the occasional trivia questions about Shakespeare's works. - After playing the battles a good bit, I feel like the Traits system would be improved if they were only passives instead of stat blocks as well. Occasionally I see a combination of passives I'd love to use, but because they come attached to a specific array of stats and the ones you unlock later have bigger stats, sometimes I am forced to choose a passive I don't want for the numbers instead of the combination of passives I think will work well. There are even points where you can unlock a trait with the exact same passive as a previous one, but higher stats, rendering the old one completely useless, and that just felt bad to see. - You vastly don't have control of the party you can use except towards the end. Once you do get a feel for characters, it's a bit annoying that you can't use your favorites together for a long time. - Now to the realm of nitpicking, I'm not sure about the audio on the voices during battle... I found it endearing (got a lot of enjoyment out of Imogen's "Let's go!", and annoyed a friend to hell and back with Beatrice's "Shocking, I know" one-liner), but for some reason it doesn't sound clear. It's not crunched, I don't think, but it feels like it could have been normalized a bit better. Like, the way Miranda's voice peaks with her "Oh, what's this!?" line was jarring the first time I heard it. ... And that's about it. Despite having more con points than pro points, I'd still recommend it, because it was worth its price 3 times over for me, for how fun, even if very vanilla, the battles are, It's the type of game I'd probably want to speedrun if I was inclined to do that sort of thing.

Fun oldschool rpg with funny dialogue and a fun hyper system in the battle mode.

Not the sailor moon game we deserve but the sailor moon game we need. I loved it.