Frontier Hunter: Erza’s Wheel of Fortune

So, here's the thing: gameplay-wise this is an Igavania knock-off (no attempt to be a souls-like or make a caricature of a NES title) and it's rather fun if one doesn't mind some jank. The art style of the environments isn't super readable (a few times I couldn't tell if an element of the scenery was a platform or not) the interface for the upgrades is also not the best and in general has a lot of little issues that nevertheless never detracted from the enjoyment. However unlike its roguelike predecessor Tower Hunter this game has a lot more story with cutscenes animated in-engine. And that's bad because... Well, the game engine is pretty basic and they are not well animated or directed but that's not the worst part, at least for me. No, the worst part is that half are boring exposition (which really would have been much better with the classic dialogue boxes) and half are bottom-of-the-barrel anime cringe (I know the devs are Chinese but they should really look at media other than animes for their humor) mostly sex jokes involving the lesbian sidekick trying to grope the protagonist and similar stuff (and given how the engine looks I doubt those that appreciate would be particularly thrilled about them). And said sex jokes aren't limited to the animated cutscenes as some of the dialogues you can hear while playing between the characters are also basically sex jokes when they aren't exposition, of course. They are spaced out enough that I did finish the game as I enjoyed the gameplay enough but frankly they should have put the effort for the in-engine cutscenes into improving other aspects of the game. PS: there are a couple of shooter sequences during the first half but the game abandons these attempts at gameplay variation quite swiftly thankfully. PPS: the English localization from Chinese is better compared to the first game but not by much, being Italian I gave a look at that localization and it was quite abysmal which doesn't bode well for the rest.

Nice little game, fun and addictive. Not very intuitive many times, runs less smooth than Bloodstained (another metroidvania based on UE 4 engine).

Pro: animated cutscenes Con: unsatisfying English localization