Celestian Tales: Old North

More relaxing than action-heavy most of the time. Its strength lies in its dialogue primarily, its artwork secondarily, and its soundtrack tertiarily. The dialogue has a realistic feel to it with the way the characters interact and discuss politics, strategy, and their own lives. It's consistently interesting enough for me to wantingly talk to every NPC twice in order to see what else they'd reveal about the game world, their lives, and other characters. Speaking of which, the conflicts between the main characters and certain NPC's were always thrill to witness. The best parts of the dialogue are the intriguing political and tactical discussions. The Big Three's discussion of how best to proceed with the upcoming battle caught me off guard. The artwork is so appreciable. It accomplishes two things: 1) Impresses with its lovely intricacy and 2) Maintains interest by being distinctly different from most RPG's of similar style. It's got such a look of something that was carefully crafted that I often gazed upon it in appreciation. I'd like to see how it holds up in ten years' time, especially in contrast to others. The soundtrack caught me off guard a bit. Didn't expect it to fully take me in like that from time to time, and later bought it on Bandcamp. Do yourself a favor, do not listen to it before defeating the Enders. You'll ruin atleast one hell of a moment for yourself if you do. As for the rest of the game... Its Easy mode feels unchallenging until the Enders, as intended. Hard mode was ridiculous at first, but I eventually realized it was designed to force players to think. It took quite some time for me to settle on character builds. The ending was definitely something to think about, but I felt somewhat deflated by the way the game stops. While the developers clearly put some work into it, I'm gonna suspect spreading that very-ending across 6 different characters had a lot to do with the lack of... well, what the game does best. Still worth it, though.

The story of this game is detailed and really fun when you're playing through it but every time you finish a story it feels like they just decided arbitrarily to end the episode because there's still 2 more episodes to go. It is hard to judge if they are actually going to bring out a second game as they've had over 2 years since the last release with a date of "Winter 2018" on Steam. In summary, it's a fun short ride for people who like RPGs, maybe 8-10 hours of play time, good for a $5-10 purchase.

A fun game with a nice story and multiple characters and story lines.

The game expects you to aimlessly wander about until you figure out the right place to go. Spamming the talk button and going into every door you see hasn't been fun since Final Fantasy 1. The characters all feel really off and are all mostly just really annoying, and the portraits don't really look that good. The kind of pixel arty sprite art style clashes with the smooth art style of everything else, and everything looks kind of smudgy. At times the dialogues are fine, but then all of a sudden the little elf girl comes in and talks like a really stupid 8 year old and ruins everything. I guess she's supposed to be a cute waifu or something but she's just not. The combat is what I have come to expect of JRPGs. You go into battle, smash X for like 2 turns and then you get exp. Completely mind numbing and meaningless. This combined with what I assume means having to replay the game 6 times to get the full story makes me just not want to continue after I got lost in the first town almost right from the start.