Those Who Rule

This game is made up of three parts 1) static screens where you follow the dialogue, 2) menu where you equip your troops, 3) battles. once you finish one, you get automatically shuffled to the next. 1) The story and dialogue are not great. There are so many characters, and everyone seems to have a say. Most of the dialogue is akin to "Why do we have to kill these people", "Oh it's what we do", "Oh yeah, I guess that's right". There is a story which is finy but sifting through the dialogue is a chore if you want to know what's going on 2) The menu is suprisingly atrocious. When you hover over a piece of equipment it will show you it's skills. What if the item is far down on the screen? Well, then pop-up description will stretch outside the screen so you can't read. There is no option to compare weapons to what you already have equipped. There is no way to get an overview of your party's levels, skills, items etc. you have to go through them one by one. it is a shame, because you do have a list of all your party members which covers about ~15% of the screen. There is enough space to tell horizontally to add any information you could want. 3) The battles are the main selling point of this game I guess. I think I play it on the second hardest setting with perma-death, which was standard. Since the characters all seem to have a story, I would rather not lose them, so I always try to keep them alive. The difficulty is quite low but you have to essentially look at all nearby enemies, calculate how much dmg they have and how much HP you have before you place a character. one rash move in a looong battle will perma kill your character and you need to start over. honestly this type of detailed keeping score & meticulous planning takes the fun out of the game for me. Ngl, I will feel pretty good about the game but then I realize I put a character with only 21 HP too close to the enemies and bonk he's dead. Up to you if you think this if fun, but honestly if they trimmed the dialogue, improved the menus it would be so much better due to that being 2/3 of the game. the combat I think you either like it or you don't. there are other pet peeves of mine, such as if you save & later reload, they don't put you where you were, you get sent back to the dialogue again. just small stuff here and there that makes the game seem really unpolished.

The depth of combat and compelling storyline wrapped into a eye pleasing aesthetic make this one of my favorite games recently. Variety in equipment to make characters play how you want them to makes the gameplay loop worth sticking around to see what you're going to find next. I really recommend this game and think this developer deserves every bit of praise for every bit of effort and attention put into this game.

It’s a great game—it even has a much better story than I expected from a solo developer. Since I enjoyed most aspects of it, I figure I might as well point out a few things I didn't like as much. Class and weapon balance aren't in a particularly good state, in my opinion. Maybe that's partly because I started blind on brutal difficulty before doing any research, but some weapons are simply far superior to others. The same goes for the classes. The reset-on-kill mechanic is absurdly strong. While I really love the zone of control and flanking systems—they're awesome—they make the Enlightened class feel almost mandatory on at least two characters. It’s crazy how much easier the game becomes once you run two Enlightened characters equipped with the Dove accessory. I also wish the SS-ranked named weapons were straight upgrades over their S-ranked counterparts. In the end, I only used the Maul as a secondary on one character; for everything else, the Crucible versions were just plain better. That felt like a disappointment, especially given that SS weapons cost almost double to max out. Despite these flaws, the gameplay is incredibly engaging and addictive. I had a blast playing through it, even with the early struggles of figuring out what works. I'll definitely buy the sequel on release day this time, and hopefully, the class and weapon balance will be in a better spot.

Solid mechanics. Paying attention to positioning really pays off without being overly complex. It’s a game that makes you care about improving your strategy even before it makes you care about how to really master the mechanics. I’ve used ChatGPT for a few questions at the start, and that was it, the game was all I needed to play and improve. Really well-drawn backgrounds and characters. I think the Story is pretty underwhelming. It’s not complex per se, but it’s boring, so paying attention feels like a chore. The characters are also pretty shallow. A few themes seem a bit ham-fisted. In any case, the good far outweighs the bad. I do recommend this game!

Do you like being poor? Because you're gonna be poor in this game for the first half of the game. And when you could get some money? Your first chance to make some? Yeah, you're gonna get that meta knowledge of how hard the guy you have to kill to get it worked for it and how its for his daughter and all lmao. It's good, even if the developer has something against you being able to buy equipment