hipster_scumbag

What a delight! What a game! The battle system is unlike any other JRPG and creates interesting and varied encounters. You are given a lot of great tools to build and experiment with different parties to overcome those combat encounters. The dungeon is fun to explore, and you get to see something new every session. The story is effective and touching. I can't recommend this one enough.

I thought that the stripped-down presentation would belie a novel and interesting combat system or some satisfyingly old-school exploration. I was wrong. This feels decidedly Square-Enix in that way where they will do something different and weird but forget to make it interesting or good. The combat is very simple and mostly consists of whomping each other with one of two item/weapon slots until everybody runs out of either physical or magical HP. These weapon slots are generally distinguished by having either stable or variable damage (deal 900 dmg or 150-1500 dmg), targeting one or all enemies, and dealing physical or magical damage. After more than a dozen hours of play, I think I found only one or two items that did anything other than that. The dungeon is represented by simple graph paper with hexadecimal numbers indicating the shops, treasures, rest stops, and enemy encounters. That's a cute idea, but there's no substance to replace the reduced graphical presentation. The dungeons are sprawling and tedious to navigate -- possibly by design, because the player is awarded Adventure Points for exploring every single tile of a floor, which is not difficult to do so much as time-consuming and boring. I do not know who this game is for. I think I am exactly the kind of RPG sicko that should have liked this game, and I found it very boring and disappointing. If you're looking for a good dungeon to explore, try Potato Flowers in Full Bloom instead.

It's a shame that a bunch of nerds are only going to talk about this game based on its narration or its art style, because the actual gameplay is very solid. The weapons each have their unique style, and your choice of any two weapons lets you play with making some good combinations. There are plenty of upgrades to spend money on, which are simple but effective and varied. The adaptive difficulty "gods" system is especially nice, letting players make enemies tougher in particular ways in order to gain more exp and money. The game is a little on the short side, sadly. The narration thing is just window-dressing - the actual game is one of the more satisfying action-rpgs I've played in years.