Play game
SRPG Studio Project's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Humor | #3 | 3.354 | 3.750 |
Innovation | #7 | 3.801 | 4.250 |
Theme | #9 | 2.460 | 2.750 |
Graphics | #10 | 2.683 | 3.000 |
Overall | #10 | 2.460 | 2.750 |
Audio | #11 | 2.236 | 2.500 |
Fun | #11 | 2.460 | 2.750 |
Mood | #11 | 2.683 | 3.000 |
Ranked from 4 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Expected duration
~1 hour, but can vary widely depending on RNG and how the player approaches the game.
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
My thoughts:
-Putting a gacha system in an SRPG is a very neat idea, and the summoning is implemented well.
-Switching between characters in the overworld is awkward. Also, trading being unavailable seems kinda pointless, it just leads to more character switching.
-The summonable characters are interesting. I liked the mythical characters like Arthur and Merlin. I honestly wanted to learn more about the generic summons.
-Having your summoning pool be the enemies you fight makes your units feel less special.
-The leveling system is odd, or maybe I just don't get it. I understand that grinding is kind of a necessity in a gacha game, but units seemed to mostly level skill and not much else.
-I was not anticipating the final boss being so hard. It seems nigh-unwinnable unless you grind specifically to beat it, while keeping all your strong units alive.
-The humor's great. I loved the goblinfan dialogue. I also liked that you could summon goblins. I've been saying for years that I wish there was a game that would let me go goblin mode.
So... as someone who has played a lot of mobile games (or mobages) and gacha games, this entry hurt me. Congratulations!
That said, I'm afraid I didn't enjoy this entry. The lack of decent movement soured my ability to strategize and without the ability to counter attack, every map kind of boiled down to 'let someone tank and go to town.' Which wasn't easy due to such a wide variety of reasons.
First... the gacha mechanic. I understand why it's popular, but I didn't particularly enjoy being subject to random chance and getting three Rodneys in a row. Hits a little too close to home if you read my first line. As well, in order for a gacha mechanic to be successful, it needs to have some sort of higher return value or at least the suggestion of something the player wants. Having it be completely opaque meant I never felt like rolling the gacha was really any worth it once I got my team of Rodneys. Sure, I got a magic caster after that, but they didn't have the same range of movement as my cavaliers, who quickly became my most important units because, well... they could actually move.
That's my second misgiving. Two to three movement isn't bad. But you need to design your maps around this gimmick. Maps felt like a slog just waiting for units to approach each other with obstacles that all may as well have been walls for how well one could move through them. Any map with obstacles just felt very 'chokepoint-ey' and not very engaging. It didn't feel like I had an army, more like I had a stationary turret. There was no real option to disengage and rearrange my army. Once I committed, that was it. The lack of free movement meant it was too difficult to restructure my approach and made it very dependent on my initial formation. Which, to be fair, isn't always a bad thing, just not my style.
The third though. Another pitfall of the gacha mechanics. The grind. Oh my lord, the grind. You did level up very fast, that I will admit. Gold was frequently not a problem. So much so that I hesitated to think it mattered. Maybe making the drawing currency much more plentiful and giving the summoning mechanic the ability to give you weapons to distribute would have made the gacha more enticing, and thus allowed you to raise the price of simply purchasing the weapons to skip that facet of the gacha also enticing. Rather than just something you had to menu through because why even think about gold when you have to struggle through leveling up so much to get anything done?
But still, the grind was unfun. I do not like grinding the same thing over and over and over again. At all. I did that enough in my time spent playing awful mobages. You ever played Phantom of the Kill? I was really reminded of that, but this just had more mechanics that I couldn't reconcile with. Between the awful, awful hub town UX, the constant grinding, and the unsatisfactory numbers in every respect, I just couldn't stick through with this game to even half way. I will, at least, note that the idea has merit if executed a lot better, though. The dialogue was also pretty on point as well, if kind of sparse.
Out of curiosity, when you mention you didn't stick through halfway, at which point did you stop playing? Like, what was the last level you beat?
And finally, if you can bother to recall, what level was your highest level character?
Thanks for the feedback.
I had just finished the quarter finals and found the monsters there too much for my team, who I had quickly gotten tired of grinding up after spending about a hundred runs in the goblin cave. My highest level at that point was 15, and my stat growths had been so poor, I couldn't get through the semi finals without losing the entire army I had grinded up and spent so much resources on, which made me have to grind more if I wanted to get any further, prompting me to restart and do the whole process all over again. I'm probably just really unlucky, but that's also my life.
This is another interesting take on the game loop for a tournament, you need to summon your units like any of those popular gatcha games, and then level them up along side your main characters... or at least that is how it would have been if I had understood that I needed to use the bonus points for summoning and not to level up my units. I grinded and got to the finals with only the first summon... just then I found out how to actually summon new units... and then I had to level up the new units up to speed.
Being fair leveling up units is pretty fast once you get some gold, same with buying them better weapons. The downside is that if any of your summons die all your investment goes down the drain.
The hub town is interesting but I wonder if it is actually necesary, I feel most of what is going on there could have been done through the Base menu, probably making it less cumbersome to navigate with the constant refresh to change units.
There some pretty nice art mixed in too, some units have unique portraits made in a pencil style that I really like.
Truth be told I was having a good time, and by the finals I even felt overleveled since my main 3 guys were around level 30 while the extra additions where around 15... but then the final battles appeared, this is the first entry I think I'm gonna leave unbeated... both final bosses are Lv 99 with capped stats, and the units with them are also 99 with capped stats... the jokes were nice and everything, but having to keep grinding my units to have chance to survive those fights seems way to much... even if I just replay the tournament fights for easy money and bonus points is not like lv is gonna be faster... neither can I say that I can beat the bosses by having an army of summons since the deploy limit is pretty low...
Overall, I found the entry innovative, fun to play and the dialogue was funny and made me laugh a couple of times, but the big jump in difficulty for the final bosses that needs me to go into a grind fest lowers the final score.