itch.io

Hello, I have finished playing your game recently, and felt like it was amazing and I wanted to write some things about it. I saw that you had a huge community on Steam, but no posts here, so I would like to leave my own remarks about this absolutely beautiful game.

To start things off, I really liked the way you had put a challenge saying "You will cry a lot" as a cons to the game :D

Since I play a lot of JRPG and consider myself pretty good at it, I had to play this game just because of that, since I'm very confident on my skills. Very good marketing idea XD

I'll try to be brief and write things as they come up, because there was so much to talk about that I would probably spend an entire day writing about it, so lets get to it:

STORY

The story starts in an alternate timeline in the future, where the world is engulfed in a apocalyptic scenario and wars are all over the place. The story then cuts to the main timeline in the past, where the protagonist Xero tells the story of the nations and how they developed new technologies to increase their firepower and wage war, but they lived peacefully very far away from it together with his family and his friend Enda. Then his life gets turned upside down when the soldiers from a terrorist faction decided to bomb his city and kill everyone in it. After surviving the attack, Xero and Enda go forward into a journey to stop the evil madman from destroying other cities and to bring the peace that they so love, back into the world.

The story follows a non-linear gameplay that transitions into a linear storytelling, going from one place to another trying to get stronger completing quests and trying to stop the villain from attacking other cities. It has a very solid plot with TONS of plot twists and things that will definitely catch you off-guard, and some are very dark.

In my opinion, the story is by far the greatest aspect of the game. It makes you feel like you are playing a full pledged SNES JRPG from an AAA developer. This game seems like a hidden gem that could have definitely blown up and became one of the most loved and acclaimed RPG games there is, and I’m not even exaggerating. Every aspect of the story makes you feel like you are on the edge of your seats wondering what is going to happen next, and what you can discover from the many hidden sub-plots going on at the same time from the characters pasts. The cutscenes are outstanding and every bit of detail is extremely polished. From the animation to the original soundtrack, to the characters unique expressions and reactions; the game completely envelops you and makes the immersive gameplay a very strong point in this adventure. This game is the definition of what 13 years of effort, passion and love could create.

I absolutely loved how the dark themed story took form with many tragedies, transitioning from: parts where the characters even question if it’s worth to keep going or not, or what they can even do against the unstoppable force of evil; into heartwarming moments of rising up and overcoming the difficulties.

And then the romance buildup was just perfect. I have seen many romance subplots rise and crash, and I know for a fact that it is VERY hard to make it right, but you managed to do it flawlessly. The romance was the cherry on the top of this marvelous story. It was very natural, well constructed and mature, also the timings were perfect. I could spend an hour talking about each aspect of the many plots and subplots.

The characters pasts were also SO FUCKIN GOOD that I was shocked. Slash’s story in particular was amazing by how tragic it was, and how in those times of war the weak minded will always fall first. So you had to become stone cold in order to be strong and follow through, even though you have to deal with the ghosts of your past every single day. His boss fight was also so symbolic and creepy, even the boss attacks trying to “suffocate” you. Damm that was fuckin epic. I still get chills just by remembering how good it was. For some personal preference, I decided to fight this boss with this song as the theme:

The other stories were also great, principally Burns story, very tragic and dark: the lone wolf misunderstood by an entire city and forced to stay quiet and not say a single word, in order to keep his family and loved ones alive. Daamm that was sick too. And his fight on the terrace in the rain, after all that time and how strong he becomes to just solo their entire mafia, that was epic.

The ending was also fantastic. It was one of the best endings to a game I have ever seen in my life. ABSOLUTELY LOVED IT. Every. Single. Part. Of it.

Characters

Each character has its unique set of feats and do not follow stereotypes. Every character has an amazing background and their personalities and abilities complement eachother to make this game truly a masterpiece. My favorite characters were Enda, Xero and Sandra. I loved the running gag that the game has with Xero not being able to cast fire, only at the end for him to cast his "Skyfire brilliance" and it was the most important thing. Enda always trolling him, but being a sweetheart whenever he truly needs it. Sandra with her spectacular presentations and positive humour. Slash being somewhat of a bigger brother figure and always being stone cold military disciplined towards the objective. Burns being mysterious and quiet. Throg being an attention seeking ghost with comedy gold lines. Asera with his genius and goofy personality, always trying to sound smart and getting into fights with Xero.

The only characters I wished you explored a little bit more were Eidol and Heindrovia, because they kinda feel left behind in the grand scheme of things, principally Heindrovia. She was the only character were I felt like we needed to see a lot more, and thrown together with Barclyss past, leading up to him becoming an nihilistic evil villain. By the way, Barclyss cutscenes and animations were also sick; he made up for a great villain. Overall the characters were amazing and there were a lot of hidden gems in the dialogues, principally Xero lines. For example when he called the beach girls “too old to be good-looking” and how he felt remorse for Morsan getting dumpstered in the cave, even after what he had done. Once again there is so much stuff I want to talk about but if I wrote it all down here, then it would have been an 10k essay of words. Fast forwarding to the end, amazing job here too.

Combat, mechanics and Bosses

The combat system uses a classic ATB bar measured by speed, inspired by FF games, the battles feel very fast paced and fluid, the animations are amazing and the special link abilities are gorgeous. My favorite abilities are definitely Sandra’s “Gatling Gun” and Enda’s “Tatsumaki”. The summons are really cool too, but since they cost so much I rarely even used them, the cost reward did not seem efficient to me, but it looks very cool for a finishing blow. The game also uses a material system with Shards, kinda like the FF games, and I love how you can build your character whatever way you want. This gives a lot of freedom and power to the player. Loved this.

There were also many great aspects in mechanics, how you could interact with the scenario, and the Field Spells adding extra hidden content inside each dungeon. Each time some event happens, the citizen’s change their lines and some new subplots happen, like that creep that eventually got the girl he was spying on; places opening and reforming; many many more hidden gems in mechanics that makes this game so lively. The Wallstock Mountains hypothermia mechanic, Serrison timer mechanic. When you eventurally got your airship and found new areas on the world. The bestiary with every single monster. Even the ambush mechanic and how you could interact with enemies, a lot of great stuff here.

Bosses will always be my favorite topic of discussion, since I know very good boss fights and how you could build up to it. You did an amazing job demonstrating how powerful the enemies truly are, and how each boss had a different set of cirscunstances and abilities to make the battles challenging and entertaining, and always keep them fresh. The rewards to the bosses are also amazing and it makes you feel great after accomplishing the challenges. Not gonna lie, in the beginning 2 or 3 dungeons of the game the bosses seem a bit weird, but later on the scaling and difficulty spikes make them absolutely trilling to fight, principally the unkown bosses in the sidequests, the bosses in arena, and the bosses with different mechanics like the Sea monster boss, and the boss on the Zipline cutting down your cabbles and stuff. Also the last superboss Tenjin was an amazing fight and I got killed 5 or 6 times before finally taking him down at level 62 with Sandra. The last boss was surprisingly not easy too! He was very challening and I almost died to him, even after completing all the quests and being super strong. This shows your talent on scaling and making fights challenging, but fair at the same time. I'm on Newgame+ and looking foward to facing Final Tenjin as the last challenge, hopefully he will be as good as the first one or even better. My favorite bosses will always be the Past sidequest bosses tho, because they are so symbolic and well made that I makes me want to see so much more of this game.

The only problem I have with the mechanics, is that at the end of the game it feels like you are way too powerful and can't die, because everybody will have an Enda shard and can revive and heal the party to full. Enda can use guardian to bypass a lot of instakilling abilities and cast Divinity afterwards to revive the entire party with full hp, then maul at the boss when hes recovering. The party can also spam Brio All with Burns shard to make it impossible to die, because everybody will have 9999 hp, and that is a very cheesy strategy to win every fight, even Tenjin. It still requires some thinking, but definitely seems like you have too many resources to deal with the bosses, even though they deal high damage.

Soundtracks and Puzzles

The game features excellent ORIGINAL soundtracks that are really well crafted and add unique old-school SNES vibes to it, making it seem like a full pledged game. The OSTs are so good, that I'm thinking about buying them when I have the chance, after this COVID situation ceases over here. Wonderful sound to a wonderful game, nothing much to talk about here. 

The puzzles are also charming and clever, making you use the field spells to solve them, and adding unique utility to all the characters involved, so no one gets left behind. I personally loved the Sneak puzzles in the Fort with Enda and Throg, and also the Affliction Dome puzzles that you put in, just to add the last bit of entertainment before facing the final boss.

FINAL SCORE

9.7/10

Total time playing:

51:53:06

Definitely did not "Cry a lot" when playing (just a bit XD), but loved the challenges and would love to see a sequel :D

This game will be at my top 3 all time JRPG games from RPGMaker, together with Last Scenario, and Yggdrasil: a tale of Cyndrivia.

It will also go in my top 10 list of JRPG games of all time.

Oh, I had no idea that there was another version, thats cool, I'll check it out. Right now I already found the ending locations, found the "Hall of Mirrors" that I didn't found before and even the "Catasthrope" superboss that wiped my ass the first time because I was not careful. Still I didn't find the "5 elites" or the enemy that drops the staff that allows you to cast Doomsday. Also another thing I discovered is that you cannot get the hunter achievment after you cleared Aquaria because the enemies that have the skill that you need to steal despawn and you can't fight them. It was a pleasure to play your game, really great experience. Do you have any other JRPG games released that I can check out? I would gladly play them. Cheers!

So I've finally finished your game, I was playing nonstop for 3 days and I have to tell you that it was an amazing experience. Kinda surprised that there are no reviews or comments on this so I'll leave my own because I can see that you have put tremendous amounts of effort in this game. 

Story and Areas

The plot resolves around 4 main heroes that have lost their memories and the struggles to find their path to regaining them and defeating the main villain and the 4 titans that are the cause of the problems. You can choose any route to explore and clear, each city has it's individual story and mechanics, there are massive amounts of content to explore and tons of secrets around the map.

For me, funnily enough I managed to find the Underground Depths as my first dungeon because of my curiosity to crack that wall on the south beach. I got spooked immediately because of the eerie super dark environment, and then someone attacked me from the dark. It was a demon and he casted a doomsday spell on me on the first turn. I was like "what the actual fuck". That thing scared the shit out of me, and later on I found out that you are not suposed to go there until the ends of the game :D

Then I did the wrong thing again and cleared the Deep Forest first while being underfarmed. It was a very tough and challenging boss fight and I had to reset it like 13 times because I thought you couldn't dispell the mana drain and healing mechanics of the boss. But I managed to clear it by spamming bombs until there was only the boss and the rest was easy. The game from there was very chill and entertaining. There are TONS of secret dungeons, secret areas and even secret bosses like that Behemoth creature roaming around that also scared me with its instakilling abilities early on. The game has a very endearing Final Fantasy vibe and I can see that you have drawn a lot of inspirations from it.

Combat, Mechanics and Bosses.

If there is one thing that I love about an JRPG it is the combat system. Your game could be great, but if I'm disliking the combat mechanics, then I'm dropping it right away. In this game, the combat uses an Turn-based SPEED mechanic inspired from FF as you said before, and it is GREAT.  The animations are amazing, the Sprites looks great and the Bosses are really challenging and entertaining.

The only problems I have with this is the scaling. It looks kinda weird because there are no levels and you can only get stronger by gathering items or by finding Lucky Stars or Heart Containers to boost your stats early on. So sometimes I felt like I was wondering around dodging monsters just to enter a new city and buy the new equipments, then I would have a giant boost in strength and everything else would be super easy. There are also some items that are unusable from the Synthesis menu like the Demon Lord Cloak. 

Another thing I forgot to mention that was also very annoying for me, Its the fact that you can't dodge enemies and they will aggro onto you even if you are interacting with an object or moving very far away. This pretty much forces you to be ultra careful every time you see an enemy and you'll have to dodge everything everytime you want to get to another city. And since you have very little space to walk on, this could be very frustrating some times. Imagine you having the best gear and everything to one shot even late game mobs, but you have to run away and dodge some bees in the beginning areas because they chase you from very far away and can delay you a lot since the escape mechanisms are also very hard to pull off (something like 20% chance as far as I can tell) and also you lose like 10% of your gold if you escape. If you had added a way to avoid those enemies it would be great for future experiences.

Another big problem I have involves the "boss" Fear that spawns in the Depths dungeon. The first time I encountered him, he spooked me really hard because I could not run away or avoid him, he was really fast :D, then Alice immediately pops up and warns me that we should run away because that monster was very strong and dangerous. He had his own theme song and it was super eerie and disturbing. This instantly gave me a flashback of the Persona 3 game where the Grim Reaper would roam around if you wandered around long enough, and the Grim Reaper was an INSANELY strong boss. For a second I actually thought about running but I manned up and faced him, even though I was underleved on everybody except Karena, since I went to the Depths again to explore before clearing the main quests, but I went on with it. He started off by draining my mana and then casting life siphon on the next turns. I started to maul at him with my Karena that was hitting for 5k 5 times and even critting for 16k. Then he started casting death here and there, more life siphons, and after a while I started wondering "Is that it? Aren't you going to wipe out the party or something?" then the fight keep going for more 2 Karena turns and I just nuked him down with my DPS, he didn't even scratch my party. Now really? That was very disappointing to say the least; he was by far the easiest fight IN THE ENTIRE GAME. On top of that, he drops the most broken item in the game “Heart of Darkness” that you can farm from him. This item completely breaks the game because it allows you to vastly increase your stats permanently and it can go up to the max, making you invincible even to the final boss of the game. I got 3 of those hearts and my characters were already ridiculously strong, and since the fight is so easy, he is just tanky, then I could have farmed it all and it would have removed all the fun from the game. I get it that you are not supposed to be there so early, but if the boss that holds a gamebreaking item is so weak, then I could honestly have skipped all the other fights, sat there for some minutes and farmed full stats from him since the beginning of the game, since I’m pretty sure you could kill him very early, it only takes patience since he has no aoe abilities and deals no damage. This fight definitely needs to be rescaled or buffed, because right now it is very underwhelming.

Other than that I loved many mechanics like the Karena swords hitting multiple times, later Elric with Power Staff being super broken with Rogue's contract to spam mass haste on the party and such, and of course the Merchant upgrading his store every time you buy some items from him, that was really clever and it does make a lot of sense for the guy that you are spending massive amounts of money to upgrade his store and provide better items, that was a really nice touch. The fact that you get a different exclusive partner for many different dungeons was also a really incredible touch. Also loved that you wrote down a Walkthrough to the game, that was very helpful to find the tools and the Marks, and it shows a massive amount of effort to make this game as pleasant as possible for all sorts of players, well done.

Another thing that I discovered by accident is that there are many endings and a lot of undiscovered content that I passed through. I decided to clear the Depths before the main boss so I could have some challenging fights, and the last fight with Illumia was really amazing. But then the game suddenly stops and I see that the main villain was left without magic because I destroyed the source of his powers, then he got fuckin arrested before I could fight him LMFAO that was one of the most hilarious endings I have ever seen to a game, really good stuff :D

Sadly I didn’t manage to find Elric or Lauriett’s endings, I explored most of the map and it says that you need to go to “West Cliffs” and “Shipwreck” locations, where exactly are they? I will go back and play it again until I find them but I would gladly accept some help. Also where are the “5 elites”? I didn’t find them either and it’s an achievement that I want to complete the game.

Sounds, Ambients and Puzzles

Were all amazing choices, nothing much to say about it here. Personally loved the eerie Depths soundtrack and the Spirit's fight soundtrack. The puzzles were also very charming and relaxing, with tons of hidden treasures around, great stuff once again.

Final score:

9/10

Total time playing 11:22:40

Looks like my review was too big to post here, so I created a account and posted on the forums HERE and it's waiting moderator approval.

As I said in the first comment, this is one of the best RPG games I’ve ever played and the amount of work, dedication, passion and effort will not get past unnoticed by me.

Total playtime: 49:55:24

Difficulty played: Hard mode

Total rating: 9,5/10

Looking foward to the sequel! :D

I understand, this kind of stuff happens but it didn't kill the vibe for me, the fight was still amazing.

Yes I really want to test it out and of course I can provide feedback, I'll contact you soon :D

Just finished the game and It was an wonderful experience. I will post the review after I'm done with the extra chapters since they  are also part of the game. By the way, found a bug that makes the game crash, this was the only time that it happened to me. When fighting Serena right before the final boss: when the other underling(I'm not saying her name so people won't get spoiled) uses her area attack, my party counters it, but when all 4 members of the group counter her attack and one counter overlaps the other; it doesn't show their animations and the game crash. This happened in the middle of the fight and I had to re-do everything from the start... so please fix this whenever you can, since it's the only major bug found in the game. Here is a print with the error message --> https://imgur.com/6BiJxUH

I'll post my review both on the forums (I didn't knew you had a post there), and here to bump you up since you definitely derserve some more popularity because this game is awesome and I loved every single part of it. I'll be also buying it next month to support you, because right now saddly I don't have the money since I'm unemployed and live in other country, so USD is pretty costy for me. But this game is totally worth atleast $10 since it's top quality content. Looking foward for the sequel! :D

I see... now it makes perfect sense, I could be mistaken, but you got wrong some numbers according to the scoresheets found on the internet --> https://imgur.com/2zYfW3m The cyan 20 is on the 2x single line, that makes 2x20 = 40, and the cyan 3 is on the first single part, making it 1x3 = 3, total = 43 for cyan. On the purple, the 4x3 is correct since it is on the 3x single line, but the 9 is also on second part of singles, making it 1x9 = 9, total 12 + 9 = 21 for purple. Finally, for yellow, 8 is on the first single part, and 2 is on the 2x single line, making it 8 + 4 = 12 for purple. As for the logic on the puzzle, I did in fact try to sum in the way you described but since I had the wrong number, there was no way to win this puzzle. Thanks for the help

EDIT: Nevermind this comment, just found out a Hint Paper you left inside the platinum chest that would make this puzzle possible to pass. It was just carelessness of my part to not look around enough.

Hello I'm back again. Currently on Ryan's castle and I don't know how to pass this puzzle --> https://imgur.com/VQFaMUz . The one with darts. Since I don't play darts, I googled the scores to try to get past this. According to the scoresheets the results goes for Purple = 12 + 9 = 21.  Teal = 40 + 3 = 43. Yellow = 4 + 8 = 12. So Purple + Yellow + Teal = 76. And It says It's the wrong password. Am I doing something wrong? I need your help because this part is blocking me from progressing

Thanks for replying. It makes me feel very happy that this game will be getting a sequel and I'll definitely play it as well. Later I'll check your fanpage on facebook for updates, you already had my like. Currently I'm on 27h of gameplay, in Cindalia City. Loved everything so far and also I'm writing down the minor details that in my opinion needed some fixes or changes, but those are only few in comparison to the rest. Ethan is my favorite character so far, and he also kicked my ass the first time we fought :D, I'll come back after finishing the game

One of the best rpg games I've ever played, everything looks and feels excelent, I've played 12h and I will post a complete review of the game, after I'm done playing on the Hard difficulty. Absolutely amazing work!