Towards The Pantheon

走路速度有点慢，没有中文有点小难受

☀️

An enjoyable JRPG experience that had great music, memorable characters, and an interesting plot. It was 10 hours in length, which I don't think was long enough for all of the story or character development that the game contains, especially with how deep the party member friendships are shown to be after meeting early in-game. Additionally, I felt the dark tone change, reminiscent of the prologue/demo chapter, was a jarring switch into horror that would have benefited from having some time built up to it. All of this said, I still enjoyed it, and am glad that I played it! 3/5.

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Having played this game for a quarter of its estimated playtime I just can't stop being disappointed by it. It's a title with a lot of ambition and a promising premise, but it just falls short in execution. With some polish, this would've been a GREAT game, but it lacks that so it's only an OK game, and despite being curious about some aspects of the world, "OK" is not enough to get me to finish it. Gamefeel is the primary issue here, above any other complaints I may have about the lack of color depth on the map and area sprites, or the really thin narrative... if the game felt satisfying to complete tasks in, I would still be playing it. Monsters don't die in a satisfying fashion. Completing puzzles doesn't have the kind of graphical or sound feedback that would make me feel really good about pushing a block into place or figuring out the correct path to a secret. Even talking to a character in town doesn't quite have enough feedback to uphold the very simple dialogue. A really concrete way to get this across are the collectible cards that reveal the background lore of the game and let you pull off special combo attacks. It would be really cool if when we selected these cards in the inventory we saw a picture of the card. Something to make us want to know "who is this person" more than a collection of syllables and a brief description. This game could possibly benefit from a sequel that tries to improve on the core formula. The foundation is there and it's solid, there just isn't much built on top of it.

interesting game