Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling

This game is most famous for being heavily inspired by the early Paper Mario titles for N64 and GGN. With that being the case, some might assume that it would just be a pale copy with only dancing bear appeal... But fortunately it not only lives up to inspiration, but actually surpasses it. Its orginal setting, characters, and plot are all exquisitely well written. Not being tied to an existing franchise didn't hurt it in the slightest as they used their full creative freedom to its full potential. The biggest difference from its inspiration is that the partner-swapping system was replaced with a more conventional fixed JRPG party with 3 characters. In exchange the party members get much more character development throughout the game and get much broader movesets as well. Even with just 3 characters, the badge system (called "Medals" here) allows lots of flexibility to try out different builds and different strategies, so it works very well in practice. It's superior to paper mario in terms of worldbuilding, story, characterization, and also gameplay. The only place where Thousand Year Door is arguably still better is in terms of graphics, as this game is slightly less detailed art style than the Gamecube game. One thing to note is that this game is very heavy on sidequests, and they are important. A surprising proportion of the game's content is locked behind sidequests, and even ones that look like unimportant fetch quests can hide big surprises. I wouldn't recommend skipping them to blaze through the main story, unless you're specifically doing so as a challenge (since the game will be harder without the boons that sidequests unlock). One last thing, I have to recommend playing on Hard mode. The game is well-balanced that way and still shouldn't be *excessively* difficult unless you're very bad at this type of game. To enable hard mode, you'll need to equip the hard mode Medal, which is available from the pink mantis in the very first room in the game.

The game itself, if you're capable of running it at a stable framerate, is pretty much perfect. The story is solid with some deep lore, good music, and good visuals. The gameplay is very similar to Paper Mario; it's a turn-based RPG, except you get three members in battle instead of two. There's a badge system and a level up bonus system just like Paper Mario. One thing I really liked about this game is that there is a hard mode medal you can equip for no cost which makes the game harder, and defeating bosses with it equipped earns you good badges. The hard mode is well balanced; not too hard, but definitely will challenge you. There's sidequests, a card collecting minigame, and a whole bunch of secrets to find. It's worth a playthrough. If this sounds even vaguely interesting to you, you should probably get this game; it's that good. ...But there are technical imperfections. You see, this game was made using Unity. I can definitely understand why developers would want to turn to an engine like Unity or UE4 to build a 3D game. I don't blame them at all if it's for something like an FPS game. But this 3D game is extremely simple. It never has a lot of objects on screen at once, in fact it usually has very little which are all usually geometrically very simple due to the nature of the game, and the particle effects are all extremely simple. Yet, because this was built in Unity, at the time of writing, it pretty much requires a graphics card to play at a decent framerate. To add insult to injury, The visual settings are very limited. There's much less than you'd expect for something made in Unity. I have joked before that twenty years from now pong will require a top-end graphics card to run. Technical optimization matters. This game should not require a graphics card. If you don't have one, I don't recommend you buy this game.