Recent reviews by wooothebadman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtQkYGFF0_4&t=2659s

Didn't get very far as I grabbed this as part of a random RPG Maker gameplay video. The cardinal sins here are an overlong lore dump at the beginning and starting the player in a big maze-like castle, full of unnecessary details for the player to get lost in. I guess people like this approach, but it completely kills pacing and gameflow.

Also very painfully made in an older version of RPG Maker so it doesn't run in a decent resolution or have mouse support, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtQkYGFF0_4&t=1339s

Didn't get very far as I only played this game for a random RPG Maker game stream. The custom art is nice but otherwise goes the usual RPG Maker route of an overlong start just to fight bees. Maybe it gets better later on but why would I trust a game that has such a lame intro?

I apologize for the late review on Steam as I already did a first impressions type review on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Z-j6nCHXTXQ

I want to recommend this game but with a strong caveat: you need to be into JRPG/RPG Maker style combat. I say that because compared to a lot of those types of games out there, this is way more interesting. It still has a lot of the same issues, though.

Comparing this game to all games on Steam, however, is where it falls short. I personally don't see myself playing more of this versus my massive backlog of great games. I just don't have the time!

Anyway, here's a pro's and con's to wrap this up faster:

Pro's:
- Story isn't a generic JRPG where you play as some teen doofus and collect elements and use the power of friendship. You don't fight level 1 slimes and bats for hours, either
- Lots of scripting and use of visual storytelling. It's not just back and forth faces talking!
- Lots of drama and worldbuilding. And not lame JRPG worldbuilding where they're like "Here's the ninja town" or stupid cutesy stuff
- People die! Violence is fun!
- Skill trees and lots of equipment that makes for more system design that a lot of RPG Maker games have none of

Con's:
- Combat is extremely volatile. I'm pretty sure the harder difficulties are only possible with rampant save scumming due to bad rolls vs good rolls dictating your success
- Combat has a lot of STUFF but is ultimately very simple
- Stats are under-explained
- Art is very inconsistent
- Writing overuses ellipses in place of creative use of punctuation to emulate speech patterns

Game is a slog. I stopped playing a long time ago when I fought an insanely annoying boss. Came back and remembered how unfun going around the map is and the fighting, too.

Combos are the worst of all worlds. You move forward when attacking but enemies cause damage on collision. There is a ton of downtime on attacks so you have to be really patient and not over commit. Maybe that's a Dark Souls thing, but Dark Souls has more variety in its options. I bring up Dark Souls because the checkpoints are annoyingly far apart.

Probably the dumbest idea is the health system. It costs so much money to heal. Like you grind enemies to buy upgrades, or you get stuck buying health items and get stuck. It's a rich get richer system. Why.

On the surface it seems good but it just misses the mark. Hard to really explain but it just feels bad.

After some time thinking (and then forgetting to write a review) I've finally decided what to do here. I struggled because of the binary nature of Steam reviews. So I decided to go with a positive review since I had a decent time, however there is a bit of a caveat here. I think how much you enjoy this game will heavily depend on your enjoyment of JRPG's/RPG Maker games.

PRO's:
- Good pacing, not overlong, no forced grinding (for main path)
- Combat has a couple interesting quirks to figure out, and there is some level of building your team effectively
- Crafting system adds meaning to exploration and creates some interesting system design to explore. Isn't inflated by mat requirements
- Story makes sense, player is given direction
- Good price for amount of content

CON's:
- Combat is a bit too casual as you can't control your other party members, although there are skills to issue them commands

I may be forgetting some things but thankfully I made an insanely long review video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzbdlz6U12o

For a long, in-depth review see our gameplay here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eG1FmdohNs

Simply atrocious game design and writing. At no point does either make sense. Playing this game is an exercise in masochism. To summarize, I'll use bullet points:

- Game starts in an overly large city with too many sub-areas and no direction. All of the NPC's you talk to spout "comedic" nonsense and do nothing to ground the player in the basics of the game loop.
- Additional party members are immediately recruited via silly intro and then cease to exist as characters in a story. Their skills are uninteresting and weak.
- Combat is extremely volatile as you have a high miss rate but kill things instantly. You can also be killed extremely fast. This causes repeated trips back to town, and XP grinds are long. I think it takes something like 12 battles to go from level 1 to 2. Considering how garbage your team is at level 1, this is the most severely annoying grind I've seen in a long time.
- The same comedy approach is taken with all the items I found. They all seemed to be some kind of joke and serve no purpose.
- Lots and lots of bugs. A large percentage of the NPC's can potentially softlock you with their pathing.

And that's it because the game has nothing else to offer. The story is non-existent because it never stops trying to make jokes, so there's no sense of story structure I can see.

I'm willing to bet the dev (if he reads this) will make some comments about me being a "noob" or something. I can tell you that I can imagine what I need to do to "get good." I'm sure there's some store in the city somewhere to get better gear. I'm sure there's consumables SOMEWHERE that are actually useful. The point is I don't have the patience to parse SO MUCH garbage to find what I need, nor do I have the faith that if I did put in the effort that it would be worth it. Imagine if my gear was better so that I hit more often, don't die easily, and can revive when I do. I'm still left with unending grinding enemies that I just one-shot with the basic attack.

This person completely misunderstands how to make a game fun and how comedy works. There are classes out there that can dissect this stuff and explain it to you that you should take because you clearly have not been able to discern that knowledge from using observation.

This game lives up to the stigma of RPG Maker trash to the Nth degree.

- Big empty maps with lazy single tile mapping
- Constant grammar/spelling errors
- Fighting the same enemies over and over who all only have 1 basic attack
- Every player character has identical stats and skills (except Radolf who can heal)
- Dungeons are just a winding path where the player goes through a dozen identical rooms before fighting the boss
- Gameplay is 100% about grinding to gain levels enough to be able to beat a boss
- You can acquire skills that can't be used (IE Dual Attack)

I'm no stranger to RPG Maker games. I know there are some bad ones out there, but this one is far worse than anything I've seen. I can't believe how lazy this is, it's insane that it costs $3. You should be paying people to play your game to test it! I simply can't believe that you actually playtested this and thought it was good.

I understand this is your first game, but you shouldn't charge money for your tutorial project.

The dev will probably delete this review because he refuses to accept the reality of what a scam this is. Although that assumes he still cares enough to check on his game.

It's gonna be a no from me, dog. The game is cheap so I won't bother to ding its bizarre aesthetic or small scope. But that doesn't excuse the game design choices here.

It seems like people are kinda saying this is more of a "time management" or an idler. Which I wish I knew going in, but it's irrelevant ultimately. I still wish it wasn't like that, though. The "Animation Studio" theme is too thin. You hire people and they have jobs and they fill a meter. They have job titles like "writer", "editor", and "animator"... sure. But I'm not being given decisions like... what's the title of the animation I'm making, what's the genre, what's the rating... literally all of the creative components that would make me feel like I'm actually running something like an animation studio.

You just make a product like a TV short or an internet short by clicking that button. Then your workers fill the meter and it's done. No other steps. There's side mini-games that earn you perks or money or whatever. But those also lack any narrative connection to running a studio. You do stuff like play a slot machine or catch crap falling out of the air.

Do I need to play longer for these kinds of options to open up? I got through the tutorial but it didn't seem like those kinds of functions existed.

A lot of these choices are just weird, man. The mom character that's your nemesis and your mentor, the mini-game randomness, the purity choice, I think you can sell parts of your soul to get some quick cash? I guess you could call this unique flavor but it's kinda offputting.

I haven't played this game in a few months now. So I suppose I should move on and leave a review as a post mortem.
Up front I'll say that I stopped playing because I'm just done with the game. There was no shocking change that made me quit. I've just had enough.

I'm not sure what makes a good idler and a bad one, to be honest. Reading other people's reviews it's hard to grasp what other people want out of these things. So I'll just have to detail what the game does and you'll have to decide if that's good or bad.

So the first thing I think should be covered is "is this an idler or a clicker?" I would say this is an idler because the only component that benefits from clicking (your familiar's DPS) becomes incredibly useless after a few hours of playing. It sort of helps when you rebirth and are level 1 again, but not by enough to matter. And it doesn't help at all with progression.

The next point is how attentive you need to be. There are only a couple things you need to pay attention to: when you hit a wall and want to go back a few stages to leave your guys to grind. And timer missions. The shortest timer mission is ~20 minutes (with upgrades). These are those missions you see in phone games where you just click "start" and then once the timer completes you turn in the quest. So that means you, at most, are checking the game every 20 minutes. There's also some daily quests you have to fiddle around to complete each day. Those take about 30 minutes to do, I think? I've seen some people say this game requires too much attention. I don't think so. I find this to be a good amount. The most interaction you get is when you try to push progression by spending levels and using consumables. By the time I was level 80 or so, I only did this every couple days. Eventually once a week. Maybe I was being lazy, but it didn't seem like pushing was always an option. You have to idle for long periods of time, as the genre goes.

The social aspect of the game is super easy. You have guilds and fellowships (which are like secondary mini-guilds that require no effort) but both can be joined using search tools. These don't take any effort on your part, unless you find some kind of weird hardcore guild (not sure how people manage to be hardcore here but they always exist). They both provide huge bonuses so you'd be a fool not to join them. There's a guild activity where you farm a crystal, but this takes mere seconds out of your day. Just about the least commitment needed to be "fully active" I've ever seen in a game, so I think it's nice.

Other than that, we have... STUFF. Lots of superfluous menus and bonuses and things to click on. It may look overwhelming in the screenshots, but they are introduced very slowly. Each thing doesn't take much to manage, and can be safely ignored for long periods of time. It adds a kind of management to the game, albeit a very casual and "idler" version of it. A lot of it is redundant, quite frankly, but it provides the illusion of depth. The most notable side content is the tank battles. The tank battles are pretty stupid. And kinda feel like a huge waste of time. But it's more bonuses so you do them. Again, they only take a few minutes out of your day (this is where a lot of that "daily quest 30 minutes" I mentioned earlier comes from).

In conclusion, I think this is a pretty good idler. Maybe my favorite so far? A lot of numbers and increasing them. The right amount of auto-play vs management. For example, I couldn't get into that AFK Arena because you have to click on every level to go to a new one. That's probably the most important part. The idle combat just keeps going and going without having to do a bunch of menu-ing. Checking once every 20+ minutes is good. Checking every minute is bad. That's where my head is at.

EDIT: I forgot to mention monetization. I actually wanted to give the game money since I was playing it so much. But I never did because none of the things you can buy seem necessary... or even worthwhile. So I guess that's a good thing. Although this may change in the future (or already has), you never know with f2p games.

First thing I should mention is that I'm not a rogue-like guy. So there are bits I'll mention that fans of the genre can just immediately disregard, I guess. If anything, reviewing this game is testing my own self-reflection because I have very mixed feelings.

The most notable thing is that I have 30+ hours in the game. Only something like... 12-20 was to complete the "story" of the character I chose. My point is that this game got me excited and invested not only to "complete" it, but to play it beyond completion. Which is where my recommendation comes from. Certainly, even at full price, this game earns its worth.

I'll start with story, since I mentioned it. And it's usually something I care about. I didn't pay attention here. It's told via text screens between loading into levels. It's so disconnected from the gameplay that I didn't even realize at first it was talking about my character. You end up seeing the same text over and over due to the rogue-like nature, too, so that makes it feel even more like it's not the same reality that you live in.

The next thing I'll mention is the jank, since everyone makes mention of it. What I felt was that the jank was deliberate. It added- for the most part- to the learning curve of the game. So I don't consider it a downside... sort of. The most noticeable jank had to do with crap being in the way of doors and stairs. Sometimes this seemed like things were misaligned, but it's hard to tell. Clearly the game seemed to have fun making locomotion a chore for the player. The second thing was enemy pathing. They just walk in a straight line at the player. It's funny at first seeing them knock over bookshelves and tables. But it gets eyeroll inducing when they get stuck on EVERYTHING.

The thing that ultimately ruined the game for me was, indeed, the rogue-like nature. Even though this is a rogue-LITE in the sense that you can retain so much after each death that you just get stronger and stronger despite continual failure. At first it seemed clever to me. What an interesting twist on RPG leveling mechanics. But then I thought, "Why not just make the game longer?" Indeed, since you are continually fighting the same enemies and seeing the same rooms, rather than have a 10 room dungeon, why not 100? Just make a regular game where dying sends you to the checkpoint. At some point I died to something stupid. I stepped on an easily avoidable trap and it ONE SHOT me, despite having really good gear. And I was carrying both items for a rare character unlock I had successfully been retaining for my entire playthrough thus far. And I just had that defeated sigh of losing that, plus all the awesome gear I was carrying... and I just gave up. I'll never know why people find the idea of losing progress to be so exciting. I'm guessing there's some correlation to people who enjoy gambling. Hell if I know. So I started a new character (the demon) I had unlocked and UGHHHH starting from the VERY beginning was so much worse. Sorry, but I have other games to play.

So why even play this game? Personally, I'd say it's a fascinating set of systems design and execution. It's a pretty niche experience. Like the dungeon-crawler/looter aspect is there and all, but figuring out how to succeed is really interesting.

Oh, and the second biome sucks. Too many traps, too much platforming. It might be one of my recommends with the MOST warnings/caveats.