When I read in the description that this was a "mystery dungeon game" I became excited. I played the Pokemon mystery dungeon games to death back in the day and I was hoping on reliving that nostalgia. And thankfully this game delivered.
When playing this game the player has a lot of balls they have to juggle. There's three meters to keep track of, cooldowns, and decisions about what to equip and what encounters to get yourself into. And the game is just difficult enough that I felt that my choices mattered. I was fully engaged. And the game gave me a constant stream of new equips and items to keep me wanting more.
Decisions like if I should get myself into an encounter was something I didn't have a blanket solution for. I had to weigh the risk reward of whether the resources I was going to consume was going to give me an adequate payout. Though I wish there were more shops to spend your money on. There was quite a bit of strategy to taking down the first boss. But I think the boss should have been easier considering it was the first one. I had to save all my resources for it and even then it was a close fight and I'm sure I got lucky.
I think a missed opportunity was destructible objects. In the first dungeon my fire spell would hit the cans and I was hoping they would explode causing damage to all nearby entities. I think something like this would add to the strategy of the game and make dungeons feel more unique. I also wish that there where more objects you could interact with during the hub world portions and even goodies to find if you went out exploring.
The art is cute and nice to look at. The UI is intuitive and made my play feel smooth. Albeit I think it could have benefitted from being higher res. I take issue in that the enemy and dungeon art look pretty uninspired. I think it would have helped if the terrorist group had a logo and the base had some decorations. The enemies look like enemies you've seen plenty of times. They didn't make the world feel distinct. I wish there were character portraits during the dialog scenes. I also wish the equips change Lottie's appearance but perhaps I'm asking for too much here. I like the magical girl theming and want to see the game lean more into the imagery and archetypes of magical girls.
I really enjoyed myself with this game. So far I've only played through the first dungeon. I plan on playing through the second but I got others demos to play and give feedback on.