Recent reviews by 『　』

Note: This review was originally Not Recommended but is now switched to Recommended.
It seems like Game Science spent their budget on Chapters 3 to 6. Right up to Chapter 2 the story was stale and the characters were extremely forgettable. This made the jank the main focus of the game with very few redeeming qualities. From Chapter 3 onwards, each Chapter starts to have compelling mini stories embedded within the over-arching storyline with characters that you can come to appreciate by the end of the chapter. The bad points mentioned in the original review still persist but they become bearable.

By this point you should have enough spells, spirits and sparks unlocked to experiment with a variety of attack patterns and that is where things get really fun. You also start to get a hang for the perfect dodging - even though the dodge timings are still very inconsistent.

What truly impelled me to switch my review from Not Recommended to Recommended were the final boss fights of both endings. In particular, the secret one was really impressive and I'll just say it - you'll have to experience it for yourself firsthand. Buy the game.


-- Before 2024/09/01; Originally: Not Recommended
The good:
- I think the combat is very interesting, with the idea of perfect dodging it does invoke some of the same excitement as Sekiro where perfect parries and staying on the enemy are greatly rewarded. It gets really fast paced once you have some upgrades in stamina, you can chain attack combos into dodges and move back into combos again. The upgrades available make it seem like the devs intend the game to be played this way, rewarding you for long attack combos, perfect dodging and allowing you to resume the attack chain from where you left off after dodging. The combat is pretty satisfying once you get the hang of it.
- It is very beautiful, the cut scenes are nice and one can tell a lot of effort has been put into making it so. The interfaces look very clean, I really like the meditation spots where they slow down the game a little bit for you to appreciate some of the landscape around you. The painting you see after completing Chapter 1 allows you to zoom in and let the narrator explain the piece of art. I think that's pretty cool.
- The enemies are interesting both in design and attack patterns and as someone who grew up watching Journey to the West, seeing some of them does bring back some of that nostalgia.

The bad:
- You can feel the lack of experience of the studio even as you navigate across the map. I'm talking about little things like jumping over obstacles or walking up the stairs or walking across rocks or even just walking across the floor, all of those animations feel very unpolished. The way you suddenly get stopped in your tracks or stutter across the map due to random artifacts adds to this unpolished feeling.
- Hitting enemies feel very lackluster. Some enemies look like you shouldn't be tickling them with the staff but you do. The heavy attacks sometimes don't feel very heavy.
- In a game that rewards perfect dodging I need to trust that the hitbox follows the attack animation but there are times where the hitbox is unclear either because they are oddly placed or because the attack animations just aren't big enough and you can see yourself being hit from somewhere that does not appear to have any reason why you should be hit from that direction.
- The boss animations are still very janky, movements are stiff and some of those with bigger movements sometimes zip around the boss arena in unnatural ways. There is sometimes an obvious disconnect between the attack animation, the way you are hit, and the way your character's body responds to the hit. The slow-mo effect is kind of cool, but I can't tell if it actually affects the timing between attacks or if it preserves it. Some bosses feel like the next attack after doing a perfect dodge (and triggering the slow-mo effect) flies out too fast as if it's trying to catch up to a specific timing.
- Some of the english translations are hard to read as if multiple different translation teams worked on it and one of them is just that much worse compared to the rest.

The worst:
This portion is going to be centered around the Last Boss Fight of the 2nd chapter. This boss fight highlights the worst portions of the game design.
- The walk to the boss is full of the afore-mentioned unpolished movements, you find yourself unable to jump over rocks that are lower than your shin, you jitter up and down as you walk over some rocky portions. The devs should know that players will be walking down this road a few times before beating the boss but this walk highlights the worst parts of the in-game movement. There is also an invisible line where the lighting and shadows cast completely change before and after crossing it.
- This boss moves a lot around the map and boy are the animations clowny. The boss' jump attack animations are stiff, so you don't get a nice smooth downward slash that you can anticipate. You get a flying sprite of a boss in a specific pose and then the attack itself happens very quickly. This forces you to dodge based on timing instead of looking at when the slash will happen.
- This boss arena design has issues. The boundaries of the arena shrink a little bit in the "second phase". But when you go up against what the boundaries are now made of you don't get any indication that you are going up against the material of the boundary in question. Also, the boss can attack from outside of this boundary, and the visibility of the boss beyond this boundary is difficult (but not impossible) to see. I feel like it should only be one of these things. Either I can attack the boss throughout the whole arena or I should be able to see the boss as he starts attacking but in this case, I both cannot see (clearly) and cannot touch the boss
- The boss is very mobile but it sometimes slides across the floor as if the boss needed to be in a certain position at a certain time but the animations weren't properly done to show how the boss could have gotten to that position.
- There is a grab attack that has some of the least obvious grab animations I have seen in any video game. You will get used to it eventually once you know to look out for it but I just feel dissatisfied every time I do get caught by it
- The boss intermittently calls on something to pounce on you. The animation of this thing is choppy and rigid in the most painfully obvious way
- Weird hitboxes persist here


Reason for rating:
It's a decent game and for a new developer it's a pretty remarkable feat. But, I'll probably put it aside for awhile for the devs to polish it a bit further. There are parts of the game which make it clear that more effort was put into making it look good than making it perform good. Because of that, I can't say it's worth the price in its current state however.