You... and who else?

This is one of those times I wish I could simply leave a review as 'Mixed'. You... And who Else? is a grindy strategy based game with an emphasis on micro managing gear and selecting the right general at the right time in your wave based battles. The story is somewhat in the backdrop, consisting of a hero trying to head north and recruit local talent in nearby kingdoms to fight back against a threat. That said, there's usually little dialogue to be had, as the game's focus is the wave based battles, defined in the game's description as 'places to explore'. _Pros_ + Lots of general to control, each with their specific minions. It can make for some interesting combos. You get these generals by beating them in their kingdoms, usually after a long fight. I found this to be rewarding. + Art. The images used for monsters and generals are pretty good. Not quite anime, but it has a slight style in that direction. _Cons_ - Way too many details to remember and manage. You have to quickly learn which enemy does what and is fazed by what kind of attack. You also have to figure out what your abilities do (the shorthand descriptions aren't always useful) and you use medals to micromanage details in how your generals level up outside of combat, which can result in their minions also leveling or gaining new abilities, but it doesn't tell you unless you access a certain menu combination back at a town. Why? - Excessively difficult. While strategy is highly important, your characters are simply... kinda weak. Certain generals vs certain enemies will win battles quickly, but your resources are pitifully low, leading your generals to run out of gas quickly. Running out of magic points is common, there's few places to grind, xp is extremely minimal... you can't finesse your way through this game, but it doesn't really enable you to get much stronger either. - Fights are monotonous and take far too long. Fighting 22+ waves, consisting of 1-5 enemies apiece is a drag and this is most of the game, to be frank. Fail a single wave and you have to start at the very beginning of the gauntlet. Most people do not like having all their progress dashed on a bad decision or poor RNG. The trial and error nature of things is sloggish. - No personality. Most characters don't talk beyond their defiance to join your side or mutter a generic 'for king and country' type line when chosen for battle. An RPG style game without conversation and personality is not a good design. You never get behind anyone, they're ultimately just meat puppets with stats. - Music. Disable it. It's basically a single short track on endless repeat. - Clunky menus. This was a big sticking point for me. The menu system is a complete convoluted disaster. You can't simply equip/status check your generals. Instead, you have to bring them into your party and then check them, despite they're on your immediate roster. Their minions are completely inaccessible to do anything with until you order a formation at a safe town, something I had no idea was even a thing until I screwed around. Then there's annoying little things like leaving a town breaks up your party back to the roster area again. It's just a headache that badly needs optimizing. Conclusion: I want to like this game, but it gets no updates or support of any kind that I can determine. The UI is a mess, the battles are tiresome, rewards are few, and there's just not a lot to this game. There IS a good concept here, but the execution is rather poor and unwieldly.

Ведьмак от мира не понятных инди-RPG которые непонятно что делают у меня в библиотеке.

There's no shortage of RPG Maker games to be found on Steam, some of which belong to certain RPG Maker teams. Aldorlea is one of them, having made quite a few that have garnered some dedicated fans. Having fully completed this game, allow me to say that if you like the games that come from Aldorlea, or are interested in trying out one of them, you should steer far away from this game. Although this game is certainly nowhere near the standards of Triple A games or even some of the more professionally made independent games, it's nevertheless shocking to me that Aldorlea would release this game in the condition that it was in. When asked if the dev would make another game, the dev responded with a no, as this game wasn't close to being successful (you'll find out why). However, what had bothered me was the developer's response, and I quote : [i]..."but I guess people prefer the usual RPG formula that most of the other games follow"....[/i] This right here? This just screams of deflection. No doubt the dev had some very big ideas for this game, but it clearly showed that this dev had little to no understanding about how to go about doing so. Rather than taking more time to polish and fine tune the product, said dev just decided to ship it out as is, which is very irresponsible. So when you see how bad a job they did, and look at the above response, you cannot help but think to yourself, [u]"the nerve"[/u] to say something like that. === The Bad === 1) The Interface Yes, right off the bat, you'll very quickly find that the game's user interface and just navigating the menu, and other locations to be just flat out awful. The hoops you have to jump through for the clunky and obviously unoptimized menu is just asking way too much from you. 2) Itemization So [i]YOU and who else?[/i] fancies itself as a kind of strategy (?) RPG, and like in all RPGs, as you get stronger, you'll need better equipment as you level up. Unfortunately, the fact that the weapons and items are **limited**, means that the player can't fully outfit their army to prepare for the battles ahead. Instead the player is forced to choose favorites, which limits the players freedom of choice. Also, it makes keeping players decently geared extremely limited, which again, considering how ridiculously unoptimized the difficulty of this game is, even if you just focused on 1 General, they can't carry the entire game alone. Essentially you need items, desperately so, to advance, and the game just doesn't give it to you. Normally you would imagine this was a creative decision to emphasize difficulty or even strategy but I assure you, you'll very quickly find out that this is just yet another example of bad development. Which leads me to the next big issue : income being virtually nonexistent. Fire Emblem, a series not generally known for grinding (at least in the old days), had at least some areas where players could grind some iota of currency to help bolster their forces. And grinding in general, is as much a staple for RPGs as it comes. Instead, there seems to be only two ways to gain currency : taking over locations (the 1st time only), and if you have an item equipped that gives a pathetic 6 GP after every fight. Considering how the further you go, the more expensive things get, this is almost akin to the very poor and ultra grindy RPG designs from the 80's and even early 90's. Once again, this isn't a choice to challenge the player, this is an example of bad development making a decision that ultimately [u]makes the player waste their time[/u]. 4) Bad Combat By far the strangest (and worst) design of [i]YOU and who else?[/i] is the combat. The structure of battles is done by having one of your generals and their small party of unique to them NPCs fighting wave after wave of pre-set enemies in turn based combat until you clear them. Now the game clearly doesn't support this system well, and to make matters worse, the design aspects of this are beyond needlessly frustrating. If at any point in time one of your generals is defeated, rather than give the player the option to switch to another one (which would make sense considering how you are a party), instead, the battle simply ends. Which makes one wonder why you're even in a party to begin with. 5) Unbalanced Difficulty Because of the mountain of problems caused by it's unbalanced gameplay, my god does this mess of a game become unbearingly difficult. So as I stated earlier, the nonexistent income and poor itemization certainly contribute to the difficulty, but in truth the real issue is how EXP is distributed. Experience points are laughably low, so low in fact that you'll be grinding for hours just to make any headway. And to top it off, you don't get EXP for clearing each wave, you [u]ONLY[/u] get it after clearing the entire wave entirely. As you can imagine, you won't be having the slightest ounce of fun while this is happening. 6) Terrible Story And the coup de grace of this game is easily it's forgettable (even as you're playing) story. Of what little there is shown, it embarrassingly appears as though this was the dev's first time at learning how to write a story. The introduction feels lazy (so the protagonist has a boy/girlfriend, who contributes....nothing to the story. Why even mention them to begin with?), there is no tension or sense of urgency in the plot, no proper sense of build up or if there are even any stakes, and literally ZERO world building despite the multitude of different locations, races, characters, etc. So if you're asking, "is this one of the bad RPG Maker games?", the answer is with an outstanding yes, this is one of those.

Игра запускается нормально) И поиграть можно.

This is a game that fills a unique niche I love, but ultimately I can't see myself actually recommending this to anybody. While it's perfectly okay... it falls just short in most categories for me to really enjoy the game. While this is made with RPG Maker, it's not a traditional RPG. It's a grand-strategy game built on the engine of a JRPG with a focus on recruiting generals, training their armies and conquering the land around you. From a pure technical/design standpoint this is achieved in a clever manner that uses the things RPG maker default functionality: - Each location to conquer is a list of 10+ waves of enemies to fight - For each wave, you must select a 1 hero/general to fight - Each general has a unique "party" they bring to the table - Completing all the waves awards new generals, items, and rewards as well as opens up more of the map This loop creates a game of attrition as one party might whittle down a few waves, but can't survive 20 rounds alone. So, you'll pick the correct party to fight each wave in order to minimize the spent resources. Bring out the mage to one-hit the entire squishy group in one magic blast or bring out the tank to plink off the light damage while you regular attack the waves. Basically, I believe the intention behind the design is that each wave is weak to a specific strategy and you'll win by countering them. (I'll get back to this in a bit) But this is the part of the review where I talk you out of this unique and original game. First up, the UI is absolutely godawful and after 2 hours of play I barely can use it. Because its built using default RPG maker functionality, it's not well-suited for this type of game. - Even picking a character is difficult because you have 4 character slots you can fill, but are only expected to swap out the first. - Using an item on a general requires you to move a character into your first character, select the item, select your main character, and then select the general you want - You CANNOT see the stats of any party member other than your generals. Good luck remembering the stats of all 28 soldiers that aren't generals in this game of long term attrition. Second, the intention of countering specific waves just doesn't feel right. It feels like janky imbalance and is absolutely frustrating instead of fun. There's no obvious type advantages to one character or another, or clear demonstration of what the correct counter is... and there's nowhere to read about the enemies or details of the combat system. The black box of information means that the only way to learn is to try things until they work and still not be sure if its "Correct" Related to the Janky Balance, battle's reward jack **** for EXP despite the game explicitly telling me that "Grinding is bad and will hurt your score". Character's don't grow fast enough to continue into the next chapter of the game which means my only choice has been to ignore early game generals and use the new ones I unlock that start at a higher level. It doesn't feel like this is the intended experience but it feels downright bad. The third and final nail in this games coffin is that outside the battle wave attrition, there's little that feels like a grand strategy. You can't spend your gold upgrading your kingdom for passive income or training low Level soldiers, you can't recruit the mooks and customize a generals party, you don't need to worry about enemy counterattacks to steal back the lands and there's no easy way to look at the overall status of the world map. In truth, it's on par with the world map on mobile or flash games... and that's a darn shame. But, it all feels too shallow to hit my strategic buttons, the balance feels somewhere between questionable and awful, and the entire experience just feels underwhelming. I do LIKE this game, but ultimately for RPG maker strategy there's far better options out there.

Done in 30h15 with first try and waves achieved. Real time done in 59hours +::O_o No story but strategy of well using armies. Get the world rid of monsters’ invasion from the South-East, easily located as a king won’t let us in. [b]Manage your armies[/b], use them according to the type of enemies cos you can’t buy a bunch of potions to refill or revive them as you wish! But the old pirate’s cove brings a lot of money. To provide some refill for the next battle, equip the right artifact (warrior for linda). The stronger was Derek for the first part of the game until I got Tristana and her dark knight. Knives hit well unarmored enemies. I liked there’s a skill against each type of enemy: tamed, possessed; one of a member to strengthen the party: blessing, dash, creepers, build up. I was glad when I achieved Monument of the Ravens, those silencing ghosts and imps, what a sore! [b]Humour:[/b] Overall the types of some characters are fun: a pink spider queen with a spider, acrobats with a beast’s mistress, a pink farmer, a big tongue mimic, a cartoon puppet, a cute zombie, Anastacya with an open cleavage but holding a mace.Henrik claims he learnt a lot of spells, he just has blessing and holy burn. Kayser “give me better opponents, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥!” beaten by 3 ogres. It says if you do much grinding it reduces your final result. When I had lv 7-10 enemies I did a little. Think of going back to cities for artifacts and such. I’ve found the secret beach and old pirate’s cove 1298G. [b]Backgrounds[/b]: Marble Castle is in a heaven with flowers on the other side of the river; I’d the funny surprise to see it’s inhabited by succubbuses, another surprise to see the leader is a pink hair girl. Mansion of the damned looks like a cute haunted house offered to kids for Halloween. Romanza Castle has a bad-temper queen. Nevenmore ice touch with zombies on the rocks is funny. Orianne’ small castle seems to be one for fairies to be unnoticed, does the moon reflects secret activity? [b]Characters artwork:[/b] well-drawn coherent: the duelist long red hair and red cape menacing pose, the blond musketeer wearing an armor dress has her legs apart to apply her hit. The witch has sex-appeal with her red hair, red stilettos and purple tight dress. Iris looks self-assured, I love her chibi’s spider legs and peaked butt. Diamond is funny with her goat horns and lovely pink child face; she looks shy with her arms squeezed and dangerously sweetening her preys. Kayzer’s chibi is so cute for a grumpy knight. I noticed on a second look the hand behind the puppet. The beast’s mistress dark scales outfit looks too much. [b]Good music:[/b] I loved the music of managing armies expressing: prepare your armies and did I well prepare?”Battle Theme” for boss has a good melody. It was a relief to hear when I’ve reached Poltergheist. The town one is funny like don’t worry, be happy, knowing your mission. The list of rankings was long for me as it’s not my thing except for the ranking skilled, I got C+ with 16 grinds.

I actually quite like this. This dev is good at useing the RPGmaker engine (I'm assuming that's what they are using) in some fairly unique and interesting ways. This time they have basically turned it into a kind of pseudo 4x game! Simple grindy fun with some nice waifus.

I own plenty of rpg maker games and must say this is likely one of the best. Really innovative battle system. Well done.

♥♥♥♥

《You... and who else?》在宣传时，以独特的叙事方式和互动体验吸引了不少玩家的目光。然而实际游玩后，我发现这款游戏并未达到预期的期待，存在诸多令人失望的问题。 首先游戏的故事情节缺乏吸引力。尽管游戏试图通过玩家与游戏内角色的对话来推动剧情发展，但故事情节本身却显得平淡无奇，缺乏深度和张力。角色之间的对话也显得生硬和刻意，很难让玩家产生情感共鸣。 其次游戏的互动体验并不出色。游戏的核心玩法在于玩家与游戏内角色的互动，但这些互动过程却显得单调且缺乏深度。玩家往往只是简单地选择对话选项，而无法真正影响游戏的发展和结局。这种缺乏参与感和决策感的体验让玩家很快便失去了兴趣。 此外游戏的画面和音效也令人失望。画面风格虽然独特，但整体表现却显得粗糙且缺乏细节。音效方面同样不尽如人意，背景音乐和音效设计都显得单调乏味，无法为游戏营造出恰当的氛围和情感。 在游戏机制方面也存在不少问题。游戏的进程往往过于线性，缺乏足够的分支和选择，导致玩家在游玩过程中缺乏探索和挑战的乐趣。同时游戏的节奏也显得过于缓慢，缺乏紧凑和刺激感，使得整体游戏体验显得沉闷和乏味。 最后游戏的定价和性价比也让人难以接受。考虑到游戏在故事情节、互动体验、画面音效以及游戏机制等方面的问题，其售价显然过高，与游戏品质并不相符。 综上所述，在故事情节、互动体验、画面音效、游戏机制以及性价比等方面都存在令人失望的问题。如果你对独特的叙事方式和互动体验抱有期待，我建议你寻找其他更加出色且性价比更高的作品来满足你的需求。