Oh man, after playing the original game, seeing this is a treat.~ Playing it as soon as I can!
Panazel
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A member registered Jun 13, 2020
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(Final Thoughts on the game! Mostly spoiler-free!)
Phew...! I'm surprised I played this game blind the whole way through! I have 100% achievements now, so I'll go ahead and say my thoughts on the game! Note that I haven't played Runes of Pandemonium or whatnot before this, I only found out about this game because someone posted about it on FA and, well, being very much for TF-ey things myself...
Gameplay Thoughts:
-Overall I had a pretty good time gameplay-wise, though some things feel just a little basic at times. Pre-emptive strikes are pretty simple enough to understand and quite helpful, even later in the game, for taking out enemies pretty quickly. Character movesets are quickly understandable so I had no trouble figuring out what everyone's best at doing! I think HP not being the be-all-end-all stat for whether you're still kicking or not (usually) is pretty cool as well.
-I think my big complaint gameplay-wise is sometimes I wasn't sure if I have a new feature I had unlocked. I got past the third major boss before I figured out how to, like, get some extra protection against being TF'd. Part of me didn't think to check back near the shore at the start of the game, whoops! Maybe I forgot a bit of dialogue telling me to go back there earlier in the game. Also, I wasn't sure when I had actually picked up the particular items needed to get new crafting stuff. A bit of dialogue or other signposting to note that "Hey, this thing looks real important!" might've helped here.
-I'm disappointed that none of the TFs actually confer you like, different abilities or effects from what I saw (besides one specific one). At least, to what I understood, I don't think the characters' elemental affinities (offensive or defensive) changed with what form they had for example. Or maybe you could have a new move based on what TF you currently had (i.e. a move that monster type uses). That'd be neat!
-Balance-wise, Psyche-Up is a little TOO good. By mid/late-game, I was spamming that a lot in tandem with elementally-advantaged AoE moves to sweep most enemies. I found it better to use it for offense most of the time than to use elemental attacks, using the Snowstorm ring for when I need Arcane/Ice damage. Stacking Psyche-Up is probably intentional, though, that's fun to do! But I would've liked if I had more incentive to use it as a self-buff too, that way I'd use the attacking spells more.
-Speaking of skills, I would've liked to have more skills to learn by the end of the game. I learned them all shortly after the third boss and by then I realized I wasn't going to get any new tools to play around with from then on. This or the TF-gives-you-ability idea would've been nice to help keep evolving the gameplay loop further!
Story/Presentation Thoughts:
-I'm kinda amazed that every single TF actually has a few facial expressions to go with each of them...but more importantly some of the TF designs look pretty nice. From an art perspective, pretty neat. I was especially surprised by a couple ideas starting from the chapel onwards. I'd list my favorite TFs but that might be a minor spoiler and I don't think I can spoiler tag in itch.io comments!
-Some of the endings are pretty fun ideas and were worth searching out for one reason or another. I can say I laughed at or was surprised by a few of the ideas, for sure. Again, I'd list my favorites, but I'm keeping it spoiler-free.
-The character cast was pretty fleshed-out and enjoyable, so from a VN-writing standpoint, I'd say it was pretty successful. I'm not sure how to word all my thoughts on the characters, as sometimes I read things a little bit fast, but I feel like there's a pretty good amount of depth to the characters and I didn't notice any plotholes or contradictions. I'd say it's worth reading the game at least, for sure! That's probably what kept me going all the way to the end to 100% the game, even.
I'm not sure how long I played the game, but for the amount of time I put into the game, I'd say the $15 was pretty worth it, so I'm glad I tried it out in the end. It's an okay game with pretty good characters and writing moments that flesh it out enough to make it worth the trip.
Now that I've finished writing all that, it's royalty-free undead boogie time.
Well...I remember this game being talked about sometime last year, and I have to say...I'm very happy to have 100%'d this game. Even if it didn't take too long, like...even just as an art project, wow. The character designs are cute, the dialogue is honestly pretty fun and memorable (Also it really makes me think about you kinda have this "wooOOOWww big energy writing!!" with a lot of ! marks and deliberate grammatical errors you do in your art - something I'd like to do more often when I write, it really shows charm here)...and the game itself is honestly a pretty good short metroidvania. I don't have any real big complaints about the game.
The only thing I couldn't figure out is what the "misfortune" around the top left of the Tear River was. But still, good game, and again I just LOVE a few of the character designs for sure, the veggiefolk as a whole are pretty cool.
Also props for drawing almost everything, including some of the text, adds to the sketchy-looking charm of the artstyle too. I love the feel it gives the Picturebook and the J key Journal especially.
This is SUPER NEAT. It gives me a lot of PS1-era vibes being a puzzle-platformer of sorts with a touch of Q-Bert like "paint the ground to clear the level" mechanics. I like that you don't have to paint all of the ground the correct color to win either, just a percentage of it. The level designs are also quite unusual thus far so a lot of levels don't feel like one another in the demo, and the item and enemy variety so far is decent too.
I'd totally love to see more for this game in the future. What's in the current demo is already promising.
Just one thing I ran into while trying to play the game: I got a Red Bomb powerup of some kind on the sixth stage, which I'm guessing was meant to destroy all enemies on screen on use, but when I used it, the game crashed.