TL,DR: Dungeoncrawler in the style of pokemon mystery dungeon with solid build variety. Pro: Skilltrees are well designed and varied Items can be modified after the second boss and grant cross class skills (two are equipable and each have base stats and up to six effects based on nodes from all skill trees.) The dungeon layout are semi randomized with the room shapes and paths having only a limited pool the contents of each room with chests and damging floor tiles seem to be fully randomized. Con: The difficulty setting exists but the difficulty curve is not linear with the start being harder when you have limited tools and random loot and the final bosses being just a big step up from the middle of the game. The adult content is optional but it removes very unpleasant enviromental hazards from the zones. It is also mostly a progression of events that have to be visited in the exact order as intended. There are some optional scenes that can be done at any time but the progression through the zones is very much gated by a number of scenes that need to be watched to move on. The unlockable classes need you to progress the adult story as well to be unlocked and past the first three classes their progression is tied entiely to random drops making their availablility based entirely on chance. Class locked skill points being possible loot as well makes the powerlevel of the classes inconsistent. Every playthrough being different is nice but I cannot say much about the class balance because my mage had twice the points everything else had. The later class trees never unlocked their ultimate abilities while I had most of their abilities on items.
TL,DR: The game contains a character creator for the female characters. While there is little game to play there are a lot of animations you can send the created characters into. Pros: All female characters are randomly generated. There are about twenty sliders with 5 to 150 different choices. The dialogue will repeat itself because there are only five personalities and they are based on the area you find them in meaning the first few characters will have the same lines but in the gallery you can put any character into any scene and the galery can be unlocked from the very beginning. The character creator is unlocked at the end of the "campaign" and gets some extras in the post game. The game requires little disk space considering it is actually quite massive. It pays for that with pretty long loads before each scene and every time it loads a female character. I personally appreciate that the pregnancies are on the right timescale and babies are not magiced in and out of women. Cons: The game is quite minimal. Coming from "the dead end" where the maps competed with Zelda here it is ten points of interest and five identical npcs you can interact with per map. In total there are five areas with a day and a night variant. The combat exists but is minimal. While I can forgive the ladies who are randomly generated for being generic only few of the dudes have any meaningful personality what is not excused by that. The plot in general is pushed by one character giving you the tutorials for the stuff you have unlocked and plot hooks for what to do next. Some of the animations do not work perfectly with all character models. Some shoulders and chests do not connect in all scenes. Clothes sometimes hover over the skin.
TL,DR: It is a short runner/platformer with minor puzzle and well designed maps. Cons: It is not running very well. There are performance options but the RPG maker was just not made for quick precise inputs with lots of stuff on the screen. With all the performance options turned on it ran on my potato but it makes the game a lot harder if it is not running smooth. It is not a long game. There are 5-ish dungeons and 10-ish enemy tpyes. All of them are different and not just reskins but it is not a lot. It has some customization but there is no fighting or leveling up. You have 20 odd equipment choices and 10 different consumables but calling it an JRPG is a stretch. The story is no master piece by any means but it ties it together and explains why you have tutorial area, final area and the three dungeons where you pick up the mcguffins. It does not get in the way at least. No dialogue is overly long and it gets back to you dodging things pretty quickly. Pros: The maps are well designed and the enemies are introduced in a fair fashion. There are hidden areas. Even after four hours looking I did not 100% the game. On the lowest difficulty. There are five difficulties too, and even on the second avoiding everything made me reload fairly often. The items are actually well designed, too. There are not many of them but you do change your equipment for different situations and every choice comes with a drawback. The art is well made. It is mostly just the protagonist doing her thing but there is no clipping of sprites and the animations are smooth and seamless. The state of the character is reflected in all animations as well what is nice. Was definitly worth the five Euros I paid but if you go in expecting a RPG you will be dissapointed. It is way more similar to a metroidveinia but it is lacking any combat what makes it just a lot simpler by default.
TL,DR: This game is excessivly violent and I would recommend to new players to play any other game from the developer instead. On the other hand if the other games were to tame for your taste this is a more extreme one. Comparing the game to the later releases like Ideology in Fricition or Samurai Vandalism it feels like not even half a game. It is very short and very linear making it easily beatable in three hours. The music is not activly bad but the later games have some serious bangers and this one just has very generic tracks. The animations are surprisingly solid and the combat system and customization is not terrible either. There is quite a variety of monsters and bosses and it is not as repeatetive as some of its successors. Fights are somewhat challanging and the turn-based combat is pretty competent. It could have been a lighthearted comedy but turned into an excessivly sombre and violent drama. What usually is reserved for the worst of endings gets all checked of in the first half of the game with the protagonist begging for death and getting tortured and revived for eternity in the second of four chapters. Character diversity is also non existent with the heroine being literally the only woman in the game and all male characters being reduced to siluettes in all interactions. Character development is non existent as well with most characters being introduced for one dialogue and killed of in the next ten minutes if they are even lucky enough to be one of the ten named characters. Most npcs are nameless, featureless and unimportant. The literal definition of background characters. The H-Stuff was not to my taste and the game being short also resulted in the scene collection only having 20-ish entries. The disclaimer saying all characters are 18 years old also confuses me every time it is used in games with childbirth. Assuming all characters are born age 18 in this fantasy world no fictional children were harmed.
If you know Ideology in Friction you know what this game is about. After having finished one and a half chapters of five my first impressions. On the not so bright side: The english translation is a bit rougher than the prequel. The monster types oni and demon are very questionable. There is a description what these tribes are supposed to be but that one is off, too. Trial and error concluded the oni are monstrous humans and demons are all non- humanoids that are not in the beast family. A 5 gig patch from the kagura server is a bit tough as well. The GoG servers are smooth as ever but the secondary site struggles on some days. Controls with an analog stick are very floaty On the plus side: The other charcaters look better developed compared to the prequel where the second main character had barebones functionality and got the short end of the stick in most endings. While the prequel had only 1vs1 fights throughout the game now you can bring more characters along and have 2vs2s in many scenarios. In general the number of options for equipment is huge. If they are all valid choices is beyond me at this point but having filled in menues is great. The interface has all the buttons needed and looks very neat. Functioning UI is something I came to appreciate recently. Had zero crashes so far and looks pretty stable. Closing thoughts neither here nor there. The non-martial combat UI looks different but at this point I had no chance to try it so I cannot comment on that. From the flowchart it looks to be very similar in scope to the prequel. I liked the music in Ideology better but that is just personal taste and the new music is not bad by any means.
I personally appreciate the short but well designed dungeons and the simple but competent combat system. They do not overstay their welcome in the sense that they make up about 1% of the playtime. Similarly the story exists and functions but is only there to introduce characters and mechanics. The managment mechanics and dialogue take up more of the game but work well guiding the player and connecting the scenes. The graphic style is consistent with the splash art and of high quality throughout the game. The animations are well done with a lot of momvement and good coordination of the moving parts. Sound is competent, too. Music adds a background and the voice acting fits the graphics. The characters are very simple but all are distinct and consistent. The game does everything it does right. For its price I do not even mind it being quite short.
Nice things: 1. Having two actions per turn makes fighting groups substantially less of a chore. The first dungeon looked pretty nice, too. 2. Having started the first boyfriend questline in the second dungeon it is refreshing to have some wholesome relationship for a protagonist. The writing in general seems to be more like Rebecca and Garo from Colette and less Colette and whatever the main dudes name was. 3. There are options to turn of content that might be too much. Even with the patch there is still a middle ground if you want that. 4. In general there are a lot of options. The movement speed can be increased to a degree that is unplayable if you want to. There are a lot of meta equipments that change core mechanics. Multiple difficulties. Second highest has bosses take ten turns what is totally fine for me. Not so great things: 1. The interface has some issues. You cannot load the game without going to the title and the title is missing a quit the game button. The button for fast travel was not mapped to any button on a controller. 2. The questlog does not tell you how far the quest has progressed. In the first quest one of the five items you are supposed to collect gets stolen from you and it does not tell you if you need to find another one or somehow figure out how to get the stolen one back. 3. The tutorial has weird pacing. I got the introduction to the romancing thing when talking to a npc who I guess will be one of the options later. It was not the first one though who I met two hours later. The combat tutorial dumps all possible icons on you at the start and you wont see half of them for a while. You can miss picking up the spells before the first fight and you get a five minute explanation what the spells you do not have would do. I am off to the second dungeon. Game is still new. Hoping for some bugfixes.
I was wondering what the "prequel" to Brave Alchemist Colette would be like. One of the postgame stories involves this games characters. While the crafting got substantially better and having your party members as the active character are definite improvements there are some things I liked better about this game that I did not expect. While the customization of the party members is better in Colette the customization of the main character has a few more axis you can tune. The animation of the sprites feels better with an idle animation as well. It might be personal preference, but I liked the interface of Claire better, too. In Colette the MP skills do not mention what their damage is based off while in Claire there is one that is not based on magic and it tells you that. The quest log being an item in your inventory is not ideal but it does function better than expected. In general the two games are very similar and if you expect them to be different you will be dissappointed. Colette has a bunch more animations for all the party members and every party memember has twice the armor pieces to choose from, On top of that it is not just the final armor that changes stats. The namesake alchemy in Colette is a substantially more intresting way of aquiring gear instead of buying it at the shop. But while nice it is not a gamebreaker for Claire. Of note is that in Claire there is no dump for extra fights you won by MP damage while in Colette you could craft consumables with the extra resources. From that we come to another huge thing, that is that both the games are not very hard. If you lose a fight you get extra stats that let you put on better gear. In essence you will struggle only if you never want to lose a fight or make the game artificially harder by setting yourself extra challanges. So to sum it all up. It is a fine game. Sound is good, animation is competent and the story exists. If you want more of this get Colette or if you wanted more Colette here you go.
