This game takes everything great about platformers, Metroidvanias and turn-based JRPGs and melds them into this wonderfully diverse world that is stunning and so fun to explore you don't mind getting lost or stuck. The combat is fluid and rewards strategy and team synergy but also demands precise button presses which reward you even further so mashing and calculated taps alike are vaild strategies. The characters feel unique and culturally rich and make you want to get to know them or do quests after just meeting them so you can get them on your team as soon as possible. The game's beautiful soundtrack captures tone, emotion and beauty perfectly using different instruments for the ever changing landscapes and settlements you go to on your adventure. I would definitely pick this up if you are a fan of ambitious titles that do all kinds of cool new stuff.
So, aside for visuals the game is kind of bad. The combat is a mess. Enemies have too much health, in addition if you attack when they attack, game decides you want to defend instead and it drains your combo meter. Since this is the best way to heal, you can find your team mates dead and no way to heal them.
Worst of all, at least one boss has a platforming sequence in a middle of a fight. And if you mess up - start again.
A lot of high quality animations and nice backgrounds with absolutely no sense for design, storytelling or fun. Game systems are essentially at war with each other: an RPG with no resource management or progression, a Metroid wannabe with no shortcuts or fun power-up interactions, a narrative-driven experience that has no idea what it wants to say or do.
I hate giving games bad reviews, but this game has nothing to offer you when you play it. Absolutely no thought was given to the player in the creation of this game. You will end up less satisfied than if you simply imagined a game based on the art. Only giving it a 2 instead of a 1 because bugs are infrequent and minor.
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.
The game is pretty interesting. Combat mechanics are easy to catch and give this plateformer a specific taste. Music is cool all the way. Level design is basic and well done as nothing is too hard to catch, movements to go to special areas are not hard to master. Story is childish and basic but it is fine, it's still fun.
As an old timer, I'd say that's a perfect game for young players as it is pretty well blended with an okay story that does the job.
Maybe it's too short to experience all characters. Because, in your quest, you'll find a lot of companions. And the game is finishable in less than 20 hours. Too bad as almost none of them really have a good story to back them as the game is not long enough to give them more space.
I had fun, as much fun as with the Ori serie or Hollow Knight. And that's already a lot for a genre I don't play that much anymore.
