Weird and Unfortunate Things Are Happening

I picked this up because someone on reddit was commenting that there are "dad games" but no "aunt games" and a wise commenter immediately responded with this game. I know I'm writing the review only an hour in, but I know I'm going to finish it. This is incredible! I love the character writing, and I love when a game clearly uses RPG maker but to really good effect, you know? The different abilities in battle are interesting and seem pretty balanced. The monsters and lore are fascinating. Why is this free?? Let me pay the kind dev a few bucks! This is such a banger and I can't wait to play more.

游戏性比起前一部Luxaren有许多改进，暗雷系统频率固定、可预测，战斗有挑战、有很高的策略性，战斗外物资卡得比较死，尤其是补充Psi的道具比较有限，因此有时需要兼顾杀敌和续航的平衡，隐藏要素、猎奇要素众多，体量也很大，内容可达30小时以上。在主线剧情通关后，还有一个地狱副本，boss战高难度下很不好对付。美中不足在于场景画面略单调、主角团不太美型。 综合来看在rpgmaker游戏中属于上上之作，9.5/10分，比Look outside，Manafinder等都要好。作为免费游戏这反而成为它的扣分项了，因为很多玩家都是倾向于优先游玩付费游戏而非免费游戏。

if you like earthbound, resident evil, and call of cathulhu, this is a great rpg to try!

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Weird and Unfortunate Things are Happening (or WaUTaH) is overall a pretty good game, one that has lots of heart, lots of energy, but at the end of the day is let down a bit by a kind of lack of "weight" or polish- it's one of those titles that feels like it could really benefit from a remaster or "deluxe" version to fine tune certain things and give it a bit of extra window dressing. What is here, however, is a solid base that makes for an enjoyable ride and doesn't overstay its welcome. (As a disclaimer, I am one of the credited artists for this game- I did some tile work for it on commission back in the day. That being said, I'm not really too fond of my work looking back at it, so it's not something that creates any bias for me one way or the other.) WaUTaH relies on very standard JRPG mechanics, nothing here really stands out as gimmicky or especially unique- not a bad thing in the end, as for the most part the game is competently balanced and mostly well paced. Combat is on the easier side but not so mindless as to be boring, and there's a tiny bit of resource management at play with a lack of shops for healing/support items, leaving the player to rely entirely on their skills and what they find rummaging around the game world. Semi-open-ended skill learning allows you to plan effectively around this and use your time in battle to shore up your HP/AP pools if you manage yourself intelligently, adding a nice little extra flair to battles outside of just throwing damage around. Although its not supremely taxing management wise, it does help flesh out the story of an "after the end" location and brings a little extra coherence to the overall feel of things. Perhaps the biggest downside of the combat comes in the form of the somewhat asynchronous elemental rock-paper-scissors system at play- there are a number of damage types available to the player, and also a large number of enemy "types", but I found the way it's set up to be a bit confusing. The enemy types are all marked by symbols, with your skills helpfully denoting which types they're strong or weak against- but even into the endgame I found myself just visually checking symbols against one another- I never really got to a place where I had learned instinctively how the types interplay with one another. This is made more confusing by there being little in the way of visual themes among the specific types (outside of the "robot" type), by the large number of enemy types, and by the fact that each area kind of just has a mishmash of almost every type of enemy instead of going for specific themes. On the whole it made the combat feel a little sloppier than it maybe should or could have- not enough to detract majorly from it, but again, holding it back a little where it could have shone some more. Narrative wise the game is fairly light, relying more on its core characters than on the overarching plot (which, if you play for an hour or two, you'll pretty much be able to infer entirely). WaUTaH plays it safe and smart here by keeping the core cast small but still diverse, there's a good amount of flavour here, a good mix of humour and drama. Alicia, Miriam, Lamar and Dottie aren't the most fantastically written characters in the world, but they make for an enjoyable entourage that's generally more interesting, personable and relatable than the standard JRPG fare manages, with a little help from their "partners" to liven things up. The supporting cast isn't quite as strong, but still manages to have a decent presence by being named, having bespoke character art, unique sprites, etc, instead of relying on generic roles and townspeople. The characters overall are buoyed quite a bit by MakioKuta's fantastically charming and emotive artwork, bringing a lot to the table here, even for small side roles. Likewise, the overall setting and the way it's brought out in the tile art gives a lot of unique personality to the game, especially as you reach its later stages and delve more into the esoteric eldritch locations. There's a good gamut here, lots of flavours of strange, alien dimensions, weird geometries, odd palettes. Even the "normal" areas are full of small flashes of personality- if you know much about the RM community, especially that of RPGMaker(dot)net, you'll constantly find shoutouts and references to its members and culture hidden around the world. Even if a lot of the art isn't terribly polished or "professional" (my own included, fyi) it still manages to be full of personality and pop off a lot more as a result. The same goes for the soundtrack- despite being composed entirely of public use tracks from dozens of different sources, it all manages to click together into a coherent whole. That's really where I get in to this feeling of a missing "weight" that holds the game back a little- that slight lack of polish on many assets, the way certain cutscenes, even the ending of the game, just kind of flash by- the quickness of title cards, of fades, or dialogue pacing. There's a constant, small "cheapness" that sometimes crops up in games (and yeah, especially independent ones, which is sometimes unavoidable) that kind of sells them short in ways. Much like the subtlety I found hard to describe in FFX, this is something I can't fully articulate- it's not a fatal flaw, but its something that could really allow WaUTaH and other games like it to shine were it to be corrected- hence why it sticks out to me so much as a game that would benefit from a "deluxe" treatment. It has the right core to be something really stand out, but it's just not quite getting there sometimes. In that sense it's given me quite a lot to think about. Now, for the chief complaint about a game to be something so esoteric, I'd say that's a positive. There's no fatal flaw here, no major downside that keeps WaUTaH from being an entertaining, snappy, enjoyable ride. This is a game full of potential and crammed with heart and passion, and that's still pretty damn good. It's one I think I'll definitely revisit someday, to go after the optional content and/or the remaining Steam Achievements, and one I'd absolutely recommend to people looking for RM games to try that aren't the go-to superstars of the community.

There are outward-facing aspects of this game that might seem off-putting. For myself, with as many RPGmaker games as I have played, I no longer see such rough edges as rough. Yes, it uses the inherited interface from the SEGA Saturn. Yes, it has the resolution and auto-keybind and the built-in function keys. If those features are disqualifying for you for some reason, then move along. This free game has those features. It also has features of: thoughtful and gripping technical combat, thoughtful and gripping narrative, thoughtful and gripping YOU GET THE IDEA. WaUTAH is a love letter to the dragon quests of the world while also being a modern gothic and tragicomic lesbian romance, and that is a coup. You ought to pay good money for something like this but for some reason you do not have to.

No sé inglés pero si estuvo bueno el juego espero que en el futuro se pueda traducir este juego por qué enserio fue bastante entretenido y primer rpg que jugue