A disappointing RPG despite all its praise. The overdrive system is gimmicky and adds no real depth or strategy. The dialogue is painfully barren and the conveyance of the game is fairly poor. In-combat UI does a piss poor job at showing you buffs, status, effects and general status of a party member. The information is obviously there, but just poorly presented. Like, what rpg doesn´t use icons to denote buffs and status effects. Instead you have to select either the party member or target to see their current status listed out in text... Rookie mistake. No hate on the dev as only one guy worked on this but that does not make me enjoy it more for that fact.
This game lives or dies based on its combat as that´s all it has, and unfortunately it sucks. Attacks are unreactable for the most part so you deal with all attacks the same way. Strafe, then punish. When the attack is too fast to strafe, there is no answer. You merely have to cheese the enemy with magic. THAT´S IT. That´s the gameplay loop. There´s high and low attacks but they are just color coded versions of regular attacks with no differentiating properties aside from what guards they bypass. Not that it matters much, since for the most part guarding is less useful than strafing. The concept for this game is amazing, a punchout style game but with sword combat and multiple opponents rather than a boss rush game but the game underdelivers. I heard that the 2nd game in the series is much better but I doubt it will come to GOG. Do not buy
The idea is great but the execution is severely lacking. The different stance attacks are repurposed versions of the same attack meant to open different stances up leading to a game of simon says where matching stances is the only point of each of the 3 attacks. Grab attacks get input read by opponents on higher difficulties making them feel pretty useless. And counter attacks often get input red by the ai and blocked as a result. Thus the game that should be all about mastering the sword becomes a game where you spam dodge and do the same charge bait maneuver to beat bosses. When you beat an opponent, it feels far too often as though it was a matter of luck and not you having outplayed your opponent, due to the barebones mechanics. I am also not sold on the enemy design. Since most enemies share the exact same moveset as you the fights feel extremely samey, and due to the lack of well fleshed out mechanics, the designer has trouble differentiating them and having the player feel as though they are progressing in terms of encountering more difficult and interesting opponents. This game used to be an itch.io download and yet, in spite of now being a commercial release, it still is not at the commercial quality level, which is quite a shame. I hope the developer takes the failures of this game to improve their next outing.
Imagine putting foregrounds elements on a top down action game to obscure what the player is seeing... yeah that should be a microchosm for the quality of the game. Combat feels quite clunky with lots of redundancy in the control scheme. Like there is a dodge and a block button instead of having a block button that activates a dodge on movement. Sure you have a dedicated button for each cause the block is directional but that doesn´t add much to the game. Speaking about the block, it also feels worthless to use as the block stun you get from using it makes it worthless when trying to follow it up with any sort of attack. Many things in this game are just not well considered. The dodge move is a stab that knocks the enemy away, when the whole point of a move that you use during a dash is to close in the distance, why would I want to knock the enemy away? Also rather than just allowing you to dodge halfway through hitstun like most action games the game forces you to use a mechanic called ghost dodge to cancel hitstun with a dodge. This system is nonsensical because: 1.It has be activated by pressing block and dodge, meaning that you can´t dodge out of a block, making the block feel even worse 2. Requires two buttons for an action that should be instinctual. There is no reason why they couldn´t just have made it so that if you press the dodge button during hitstun you use the ghost dodge and consume the resource. The controls did not need to be cluttered like this 3. Makes the game feel clunkier as a whole, forcing you to rely on a resource to get mildly smooth gameplay. The chain system is also quite restrictive as for the chain window to appear, you have to wait a bit for your attack to finish, making it feel clunky and slow when the game should feel exciting and technical. And the game has actions that require you to hit the Y button while hitting every other face button, which feels awful to do.
