This title is a tad better than the second part of the series but not my much. At least graphics are indeed improved even if the versatility of object is still pitiful. The abysmally bad controls are still firmly there so, there you are. You are in the world of pain and miss clicks. You must have some leaning towards sado maso to get through it. Off to the game. Again you can freely hop between systems (at least to these that are not made to mass murder you as soon as you jump in). You also have quick travel events to cut your pain of manual travel. Yes, I think you already sense it. The game is heavily scripted. Attacking bases will summon out nothing hordes of enemies. Special events will force you to loose fighters, diverting from the plot path will often explode your ship and so on. Just save often. The story is unfortunately again very much uninspired, and I got stuck several times due to the way how tasks are communicated to you. This time around we start as some free trader and the whole game pretend to not be a mercenary (even if you actuality do the mercenary job). You start with some crapy base ship and over time we get better and better and better base ships. Great at least not all the time the same. Some words to the skills and base ship. Ehhhh... . Your pilots have again diverse skill trees , but.. . now you actually cannot just drop your pilots to the best ship you have. The pilot must level a certain skill to do so and the price for it is very high... . Effectively most of the game you grind to get pilots to fly better ships... . Your goal should be to to get the best ships with the best equipment (lasers & anti missile). Skills matter somewhat less. Anyway, pilots are scarce though out the half of the game so grinding is unfortunately needed to pull latecomers to some decent levels. Further on, you cannot change weapons and components of your base ship in space and now you need to dock at some station, incredibly annoying.
The game concept is basically a copy paste from the first game. This includes very clunky controls, abhorrent navigation path-finding and revolting way how ships take turns ( I mean really, it cannot be done worse than this). This all is placed in a terrible, uninspired story line. Developers did close to bare bones minimum effort to add new features. Well this is unfair, brace yourself. The "real new" feature is that the player get a star map and possibility to freely travel from system to system. Whow, I know. Revolution;). However, the reality is that all systems are similar to each other, empty with some junk floating around and featureless to great extent. After some 10h one just begs to finish the game before falling asleep... . On top of that there is the voice acting for characters that is so utterly bad that it became at some point funny.
For some reason this title has escaped my attention for a long time but after good 40h of very decent entertainment I do not regret this purchase. What was so fun you ask? First of all, the game implements a very nice mix of turn based combat, skill card mechanics, buffs and very decent background story. Enemy selection and diversity is also surprisingly good. As the player you operate a small team of heroes that utilizing various skills needs to achieve primary and secondary goals. And what is really really nice, the range of goals is very, very diverse. Sometimes you need to level up and gain additional skills to get all the goals so don’t be frustrated if you need more that one tries. Battles are basically a chain of mini puzzles. Highly enjoyable. Interestingly, in mission’s enemy will frequently get reinforcements that will make your life more difficult and sometime make reaching some secondary goals just impossibly hard. It might look as the are infinite but, not they are all finite, just be patient or fast 😉. The only negative that I have on this game is the very last battle that is just RND heavy and puts you on a timer. Each round you delay the main goal you get drained of useful skills and burst damage and eventually you get overrun. I don’t like such concepts. Regardless, it is really great game 😊
You know, there are games that age really well. This is not one of these. The graphics is not vintage, it is just bad, more akin to a school project in arts for toddlers. You think it is all? Nope, the controls are just incredibly slow and crude. You move slowly and oh boy you need to wonder around a lot. I had literally enough after about 20min. Interacting with objects is no better.. . If you are patient then go a head and enjoy. Finally the XXX content is ... I will tell you this way. If I were 12 years old virgin with a bad case of skin condition and thick glasses the rated content might have been vaguely interesting. Otherwise just save money for something better. Literally anything will be better.
The game is similar in the concept to "Banner saga" so if you played these no tutoral is necesary. Graphicaly it is "Banner saga" clone. Very pleasant to watch. The lore of the game initialy looks impressive, with very detailed map but as you go on the story is just getting odd and confusing. At least for me, it was just barely enaging. Moreover, the game looses a lot for not having voiced dialogs. At least there is some randomness in the travel map (what, Baner saga again? ;) ) The combat system is simple to learn with nice abilities and cards (although some trade offs in cards are just nonsense). Leveling system is simple but the experience gain is rather obscure. The battle grid is divided on squares that makes the use of range units somewhat tricky. Yet, the combat ist strongly flawed for another reason. A totoaly brainless initiative mechanics. Essentialy the battle flow is: your turn-enemy's turn. As a consequence you rotate though members of the big team slower than in a tiny group. That means, when you beat all but one enemy, the one enemy becomes basicaly Rambo with multiple atacks... how stupid is that? Finally, I must complain about hiden timers. Yes, the game has dick-move hiden timers that without you knwing it, affect the outcome of the playthough. I personlly hate that. I have neither time nor intention of playing most of the games more than once. This title is no exeption.
The game is in a way very simplified, light jrpg with some adult content if you install the patch. The story is close to non existent but it does change due to the hidden timer for certain occurrences that produce branching options, in particularly for the unrated content. The game mechanics are very simple with actions, walking/running, maps layout and battles being very similar to other jrpg-games. In the whole game I found actually only one really entertaining part where in a deeper placed dungeon one needs to solve a puzzle to create light bridges. Now, if you wonder about the adult content I can tell you it looks massive if you access it from the main screen but in reality is limited in the variety of animations with swapped heads and skin colors. A bit disappointing. In some small part the content is also very disturbing. Yet, if you ever played other games by Kagura you may be familiar with some really dark motives that this company seems to allow in games.
