I got this game on gog , but it ran badly on my computer, so I refunded and bought it on the switch instead. Where I played to about the mid game before I couldn't take anymore. The animation and sprite work is beautiful , truly excellent world class stuff. Some of the character designs aren't as strong as others , but all show some serious talent. Everything else is a mix of feeling unfinished, amateur or mismanaged. The first thing , and one that is quite telling, is the size of main character vs the environment. Seemingly so combat can transition into the exact same space, without having to conjure more in the matter of Chronotrigger. However this is a poorly thought out gimmick , because when the environment is more complicated than a level plane, the game shits itself , with the pathfinding and attack tracking becoming an unpredictable mess. And possibly because of this decision to have Ajna this big, the levels themselves are also scaled awkwardly , being big enough that you can see the results of 1 or 2 jumps , but not more . So a simple platforming sequence fills up the screen, and yet most platforming sequences feel repetitively and placed with little thought or meaning. There's some good moments, but too much empty space, or repeated sequences , resulting in levels feeling aimless and bloated. Even worse this sloppy level design carries on to the populated areas, entire cities are artlessly cluttered with monster areas, platforming areas, tableaus, and npc quest givers. Oh and the majority of the unique npcs you'll see in a city (as opposed to the 4-5 you'll see repeatedly placed ad nauseam) are designed by backers. These look awful, garish, and horribly out of place. They'll spurt dialogue at you like you've wandered into the roleplaying section of a fansite forum, and unfortunately the npcs that have the quest trigger are sometimes hidden amongst them (and yeah paradoxically still look out of place). The story is just a string of events , the characters just zing at each other, some of the lines got a smile from me , but it wasn't engaging enough to make me push through any of the uncooked stodge. The combat has enough flash , noise and weight to it that it feels engaging , but it's frequently too busy to be suitable for much measured tactics, though there were a few times where changing my party make up let to a satisfying victory. Most of the time however the combat feels mangled between trying to be a fast , almost beat em up style , a turn based system, and something like the mario rpg. There are also the metroidvania aspects to it, i.e new movement abilities with the promise of rewarding backtracking, but these are just thrown at you, clutter up the control scheme , and continue the theme here of being under done. There are some puzzles that are surprisingly coherent applications of the physics on display. Odd bits and pieces like that , and the slickness of the character animation give one a sense of the game this could of been. It's that kind of bad game , that makes one keep playing it , hoping it will get its shit together , because the game it could of been is always dancing in and out of view, but eventually one just gets sick of the cheap hits, the bloated levels, the alternating under explained and over explained mechanics, and gives up on it.
