Recent reviews by MikesJam

This review contains multiple spoilers throughout it. Please avoid reading if you want to avoid being spoiled!



I'm not terribly great at writing down my thoughts, but I felt compelled enough here to try.

This is incredibly heartbreaking for me to recommend against. I am an absolute sucker for "quirky more-than-meets-the-eye RPG" experiences and I'm a longtime WarioWare fan, so this game seemed like it would really appeal to me. Unfortunately, the game seems to have faceplanted the landing that it was anticipated to stick with ease.

Starting with what I appreciated, I absolutely adore the game's visual presentation and soundtrack. Seriously, the game is an absolute treat to look at and listen to. The game's tracks are nothing but back-to-back hits, all whilst accompanying a comfy, contemporary aesthetic rooted simultaneously in the familiar and foreign. I think the game really shines in those aspects, which adds to the pain of my mixed feelings about it. This is just about where my praise for the game ends.

The first major plot hook is pretty well done. By the time that the game namedrops itself, I found myself excited to see what the rest of the game had in store. However, it really feels like the game immediately forgot what it wanted to be and opted for an over-the-top "haha lol so random" and "you have no idea what's going on, huh?" approach to the rest of its story, cast, and locations. This isn't an inherently bad thing at all, but for multiple reasons it really detracts from the overall experience in this case. I can't overstate how much of a personal disappointment it was to be yanked away from the first couple of chapters' developments in favor of purely contrived meandering where the game is practically constantly jumping the shark in favor of another, funnier-looking shark soon after.

There were multiple moments that had me legitimately laughing to myself in the absurdity of it all, or admiring genuinely clever bits of writing. However, more often than not, the gags and the "omg so silly right?" moments really overstayed their welcome. Abruptly meeting strange new characters and enduring their shenanigans is only amusing for a short while, but the majority of the story is littered with these moments. I found myself fatigued and not looking forward to progressing things because of it all.

The moment-to-moment battles are close to being great, but they almost always feel tedious and obtuse. The enemies' attacks and minigames themselves are pretty fun despite a couple of stinkers. The actual gameplay problems arise with the RPG side of things. Your stats feel like they rarely have any meaning at all, despite being introduced early on and explained. I was constantly questioning if leveling up had any meaningful changes in combat outside of HP, EP, and the occasional new skill. I was constantly fearing that I was underleveled, so without any clear scale of power I would take on every fight I could find for XP. Basic attacks feel incredibly weak, usually hitting for 1-3 damage per instance. That's despite the addictive skill-based timings and theoretically-infinite scaling if you're good enough. Then, out of the blue, you'll land a skill that hits for hundreds if not thousands of damage for seemingly no reason at all. Assuming that the game encourages you to use skills, it's very easy to burn all of your EP. Defending restores 1 EP per turn, which is incredibly slow given the pace of each turn. Even if you're loaded up on EP and breezing through enemies, you still usually have to wait for their turn before you can attack, which brings me to the next portion of this criticism.

Enemies tend to go first in combat no matter how high your speed is, resulting in almost every battle forcing you to endure 2 waves of attacks before getting to do anything. This would normally be fine if every encounter was limited to a single enemy, but in encounters with 2+ enemies, the pace is brought to a crawl. Next comes the common-as-of-now complaint of enemy density. Screens are frequently littered with enemies with no real rhyme or reason. I'm by no means a combat-skipper at all, but I couldn't help but feel like the game could do with a few less of them in each area to avoid getting stale. This is compounded by the fact that you never really get to the point where you go first in combat and are able to clean up encounters quickly after over-leveling a bit.

Starting with the chapter taking place on a cruise, the boss fights or "significant enemy" encounters take a turn for the worse. Nearly every major fight clocked in at 10+ minutes for me. I don't know if I was doing something wrong, but I don't think I was underleveled since I took on every encounter I feasibly could. What's even worse, is that most of these fights are seemingly scripted to be as such. The initial fight with Brightside takes an extraordinary amount of time. The novelty of his character and the situation itself almost immediately grew old and annoying. Then came the fight against the purple-haired Brightfang (I forgot their name, sorry!). Their second phase took an enormous amount of turns to complete. Thirdly, the boxing-arena-match thing lasts for a minimum of 12 rounds of combat, which felt awful despite how much fun the gimmick initially was. The frequent dialogue from the reporters in that fight didn't help the pacing either.

My last major area of critique comes from the game's item and inventory system. You're limited to a handful of inventory slots per character in your party. Usually, you have 2 characters to work with, but often times you're stuck with only the main character's slots. This wouldn't be much of an issue if it wasn't for the fact that equipped items still take up space in your inventory. With 2 slots for weapons, and 1 slot for an accessory, I found myself constantly hurting for space. The game is pretty generous with item capsules found around each map. They usually contain restoratives or debuff cleansers. This, however, further drags the issue into the spotlight since you'll be forced to juggle your existing items and the new one. What's even worse,is that the game treats certain key items the same as regular ones. Important key items will be vying for your inventory space all the same. This combination resulted in me feeling borderline-stressed out over what to keep, what to toss, and what to store in the PCs, assuming I would even remember they're there later on. New weapons found in the overworld give no indication as to whether or not they're worth keeping until you actually get them into your inventory. At that point, you've probably tossed something in favor of the new item, frequently resulting in bad trades or wasted items. This doesn't even begin to include the dozens of "flavor text items" that may or may not have any purpose later on. I eventually gave up and tossed anything that wasn't obviously useful to keep, but I kept wondering if I was going to regret doing so. It's a seemingly-easy place to tune the game up a bit, but I can't help but feel like this was strictly intentional somehow.

I haven't played more since finishing the lost forest + cave area, as I've started to grow tired of the game's shortcomings and over-indulgence of nonsense. Again, to reiterate, I don't think 'nonsense' or non sequitur humor is inherently a bad thing, I just don't feel like it was executed very well here. I know that my review doesn't truly matter since I haven't completed the game, but frankly I don't think I can put up with the game enough anymore to do so. What could've potentially been a massive sleeper hit and unique diamond in the rough unfortunately suffers from a slightly-overly-ambitious scope and haphazard sense of direction. For a solo dev's efforts, I think respect and slack must be given. The game is by no means "bad" by any sense of the word, but I just can't bring myself to call it "good" either.

This game did for me in 5 minutes what antidepressants failed to do in 15+ months.