While the game play is obviously a Vampire Survivors like, the systems are more Path of Exile: skills have tags, and passives reference those tags. Increase Physical damage, Swing skills have a chance to trigger a Slam skill, and so on. Then the aesthetic strongly reminds me of Torchlight 2, and the metaprogression goes on forever... The game seems just as much built for fans of Diablo-style clicker RPGs as fans of Vampire Survivors, without any of that grinding to endgame business that clicker RPG players like to complain about. Arguably the biggest difference is that you aren't grinding for that ultra-rare drop, you're grinding for metaprogression. The pros and cons of a steady treadmill versus a slot machine is a question for the video game psychologists out there, but personally, this game has almost completely displaced Last Epoch from my (admittedly limited) gaming time.
One day, I threw my smartphone on the ground and shattered the screen. I still need to put it in our hydraulic press to make sure it knows who's boss. If only you could do the same in this game. It's funny, since GTA4 showed us that forcing the player to own a smartphone is the ultimate killjoy. I'm more reminded of Saints Row 4, where the galactic conqueror plausibly argues that the player character is just as bad, since how many times have you driven on the sidewalk to avoid traffic? But then you get into a cutscene, and NPCs go on and on and on and on and on and don't say much. Then you go out and have your allotment of fun lighting other NPCs on fire with your mind. Then you try to go out and find the fun, and your smartphone never shuts up. I wish this game had the "show don't tell" sensibilities of Blade Runner, where so much is shown with a story about a tortoise in the desert. You know what a turtle is? Same thing. Cousin Nico! Let's go bowling! They call it "ludonarrative dissonance," when the gameplay and the story are in separate rooms on opposite sides of Night City with shark-infested waters and razor wire fences in between. Why is V the only person who can identify criminals with ocular implants? Why are there known criminals just milling about in an alley while police mill about twenty feet away? Why doesn't an omnipresent surveillance state hammer down on V? Cousin Nico! Why don't you ever call? There are cyberpsychos at the gates! I'm convinced that no game developer has ever driven a car. But this is one of the rare fun things, playing Oversteering 2077, smashing into bollards and doing donuts on the freeway. Ring ring, you haven't met me, but I'm very important and maybe there are quests somewhere. Oh you were trying to have fun? Well listen, I'll just send you a hundred text messages.
The danger in deconstructing JRPG genre tropes is that it's hard to have anything to hold onto when you mix The Quest with a lot of moral ambiguity. Xenogears will probably always be the king of keeping the player's interest in a world where the villains are monstrous but have clear motivations, the heroes are just as messed up as the world around them, and the wrongs are too big to be righted by giant robots alone. Beloved Rapture kept me interested almost entirely because of the character of Johan. I mean, maybe I missed something about why these villains are more the Main Villain those those villains, especially when the world itself is a crucible that burns away everyone's ideals and rewards corruption and complacency, except—Johan's rage keeps the story focused and grounded. Villains murdering villains, and the systemic issues that led to there being so many villains, all take a backseat to a more psychologically realist take on the Hero. Which mostly brought my mind back to Wild Arms 2, and I love Wild Arms 2. Two critiques: First, the combat is kinda clumsy. The enemy animations are too long, especially since most enemy actions cause some sort of UI lock, so you can't queue up your attacks while a crab is slowly waddling across the screen to pinch someone. It could also be more obvious which character you're controlling. And there are some crashes-to-desktop, so I ended up saving constantly. Second, the ending is a bit rushed. With very few exceptions, JRPGs never quite figured out the denouement. The pieces for a great ending are all there, they just needed to be given more time to breathe. If only every JRPG could have Omori's Memory Lane. These issues aren't enough for me to go down from five stars. It's just, if I replay it, it'll be on easy combat mode: the combat isn't hard, it's just kinda tedious. Or maybe I'm just getting old.
At the moment I'll put this at three stars. I'm mostly writing this in hopes that the developers watch GOG reviews, but I'll talk about my initial impressions overall first. Right now I've beaten the game at 0 anomaly with five of six heroes. You should get a decent idea of the basic mechanics from YouTube or what have you. You pick dice, you draw dice on your turn, you have to play "harmful" dice and you have discretion over "helpful"dice. There's a crazy number of buffs and debuffs, which lead to crazy interactions. It follows the basic schema laid out by Slay the Spire: build your dice pool to keep pace with the escalating threats, balancing consistency and power. I don't know how long I'll keep playing it, but I've been generally mostly enjoying playing it so far, at 0 anomaly. Except... The hero Austra is an absolute nightmare. I beat the game once with her out of necessity, and I would rather die than play her again. The game is already about managing long-term variability, but this is a character where everything is random all the time. Alternatively, long-term and short-term variance collide, as cards let you control short-term variance, but only if you draft enough of them. As far as I can tell, the only sane way to approach her is to ignore all her signature mechanics. Whoever thought "this randomly generated game needs more randomness" is wrong. On the other hand, Sothis could be great if the UI were updated for him. You increment a number for dealing damage to enemies and healing your guys, and a bunch of his effects are keyed off whether that number is odd or even. Bizarrely, the effects keyed off the evenness of this number don't change based on whether it's even. For a game with a crazy number of buff-driven interactions, I dunno, I hope they'll throw us a bone on this one. Moonie, Cellarius, and Hevelius are cool. And I wanted to get this down before trying out Orion.
