Soul Saga

This is a project I've been following with interest for many years now, and whilst I appreciate this is an early access iteration of the game, it doesn't bode well for the final release. I exclusively use an Xbox One controller for my PC gaming experience and found Soul Saga to be clunky, and cumbersome in terms of exploration. The town exploration is limited to point and click interactions, and the battle system offers nothing beyond a mediocre rehashing of ideas that have been done better before. Soul Saga is not without its merits, boasting an excellent score and colourful art, but these do not do enough to offset the game's shortcomings. I feel bad ragging on the game - as I know the developer has poured heart and soul (no pun intended) into his work - but I have to be honest and say that in its current form the game is not worth the investment, and it would take a colossal upgrade to get me interested again.

So first of lets explain my 2 star rating: 1 star for the great art, 1 star for the great music, 0 for everything else. I had 2 minor bugs: a minor resolution issue with the 2560x1080 setting and renaming the ship does not change its name on the ship upgrade page, so that is not a factor in the rating. 10-15hr play time, 4th ally. If you like JRPG (eg FF#) or Rogue-like (eg Shiren the Wanderer), this is not the game for you. The graphics are deceiving, this game appeals more to Dungeon Crawler fans and Masochists. The game has no real difficulty level changing, the 2 setting system that is being advertised does not exist, instead a slider system exists. Even if you set the sliders to easiest settings, you will still die, quite often. Every feature in this game with the exception of the discount feature, only serves to make the game harder. Oh wait what about your allies? Don't they make combat easier? No. They make it harder, because every single one of them causes friendly-fire damage if you don't position them properly. So imagine having to position all 3 party members 4-5 times a mission at the start of every battle while your much stronger enemy is getting ready to hit you for half your HP. No defense items btw, just skills and the wheel of misfortune. Anyways, keeping your team's gear up-to-date cost most of your money, the rest will be spent on potions. (you can try the reverse as well, won't make a difference, you'll die just as much). Then we come to the Cloudking, a pointless but not painless nuisance whose only job is to make sure you can't enjoy the scenery or take shortcuts within the archipelagoes. What a douche. You'll have to retake islands you already beat, wasting valuable time until your B-team is good enough to take care of it for you. Oh and the senate won't be paying you for retaking the island, that's pro-bono work, ~yay. Fight against time and dwindling HP to gather enough JUNK to keep your guild alive. In the end, you will lose. OTL

I didn't try this game for long, but here are my initial impressions: This game was designed to be played by controller. If you're a controller fan, great, if not, it's a bit more awkward to play. Since it's designed for exploration to be a large part of the game, and I don't use a controller, this kills it for me. You get to name things in game, and you are forced to manually click out the names instead of typing them. The "intro" isn't skippable from what I can tell, nor is there a way to adjust the speed of displayed text so it's a lot of button mashing to make text appear and then force it to the next bit to get thru scenes faster. The flying doesn't have much in the way of a tutorial. Some sky monsters randomly approach you and you have to try to dodge them, which I found pretty impossible w/ a mouse. You don't die if u get hit, or hit things but I"m not sure what does happen. You have a sonar ability that displays hidden things on the map. I like hidden things in games, but it feels more like a button I have to spam while flying, as very little is displayed on the map normally. I got into three fights with monsters. The first one I died instantly, I"m not sure if my HP were low or if the monster just hit me that hard, combat started, I got hit, splat dead. The other 2 times, the fighting was very reminiscent of FF7, however you only start off with one character and usually encounters are multiple monsters so it seemed rather unfair, ESP since the "bonus" on the active turn isn't well explained, so I was guessing to know what the symbols meant and if it was better to wait to take action or not. The game is still under development, so it's possible some of these issues will be fixed at a future date. For now, unless u want to try to puzzle out the systems for yourself and enjoy playing games w/ a controller, I'd wait for a few more updates before trying it.

So, I purchased this game because I was specifically looking for a "recruit" type game, and it seemed just what I wanted. I love the old Legend of Mana style graphics, and the music is great, but the game simply didn't work. Every time I was in the airship, and completed my first objective, like killing the spider, the airship would freeze in place and no amount of button smashing would move it. I thought perhaps it was just a glitch, but I reloaded it 3 times with the same results. I truly wish I could give a better review, but I didn't even really get to play the game! An optimistic 3 stars for the art and music.