If there's two things in this world I love more than anything, it's QTEs and RPGM combat. And boy do I feel well-served by this game, which has RPGM combat in which you have to do as many as fifteen(!!!) QTEs per combat round (at least, the fight I found with the most totalled at fifteen) and as little as one.
Add to this the fact that the game is aggressively padded: you gain some stats for levelling up, true, but experience gains are minuscule and you can\are required to gain even more stats by spending money on passive stat upgrades, and the money you get from fights is practically non-existent compared to the more expensive ones of those, and there's a lot of them. You'll end up going through several fights (and remember, fights are padded with high HP, low damage enemies and lots and lots of QTEs per round) taking several minutes just to get one passive stat boost.
Now here's the kicker: the combat in this thing has bloated animations, and the developer couldn't be bothered to just have the skip action button on a command; no, that would be far too convenient. So instead, it's on the right arrow key, which you'll have a finger on for the inevitable QTEs, so if you misclick-- there goes your damage for the round, now enjoy more QTEs!
And none of this seems to lead anywhere. I've gotten as far as (probably) half-way to the second boss, but either I'm missing something or all of the artwork is concentrated exclusively on either game over loss scenes or talking to the bosses while bimboified or similar. 'Cause playin' it straight, I got nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zippo.
I read the comments saying there are a total of six scenes in this thing. For a game this bloated, are you absolutely insane? This is almost legendary levels of Sisyphean futility grinding the exact same mobs and following the same QTE sequences again and again and again just for what, a total of six JPEGs?
And I know I am harping on about the combat and QTEs, but that's only because this game
very literally has nothing else to offer you. There are no minigames, no side quests, the story is non-existent and the writing is mediocre and full of typos and broken sentences. Even if those things could be forgiven, it's one paragraph of dialogue for every hour or so of grind.
In points:
- The game does not respect your time (-1):
- Grind is unbearable for what you actually get. RPGM save editor is encouraged, but even going through all the fights once takes far too long and you are discouraged from using your skills because they deal a PERCENTAGE-BASED amount of damage to you whenever you use them (like some other games, except those featured passive regeneration and scaling costs to dissuade you from spamming; here it just bleeds you dry until you have to pop a potion or run to the heal zone).
- Your skills are abysmal; for at least the first two regions, you have no reason to do anything other than spam attack. Your skills hardly do any more damage, they don't have any important effects or do anything else useful.
- The QTEs and animations pad everything out far, far, far longer than it has to be.
- Balance is whack (-1): Most enemies have multiple sets of attacks. Some of those have one QTE, some have as many as three. But what the attacks do if you succeed or fail any or all of the QTEs is entirely arbitrary; there's an attack that'll gives you 40 "Peril" if you succeed the QTE, and then there's one that applies 20 if you fail it. There's attacks that take 10 resistance from each character, for a total of 20, if you succeed both QTEs, and then ones that take 20 only if you fail the QTE and none if you succeed-- ON THE SAME ENEMY. This is nonsensical. The balance does not exist. As mentioned above, you'll be spamming attack which costs 0 HP, instead of using your skills that cost a lot of HP and do no more damage than your base attack, or do a little more damage but have a high miss chance. Pointless disingenuous menu padding.
- Chronic lack of content (-1): There's a few standing pose arts, true, but nothing that I could find beyond that. Admittedly, I stopped probably half-way to the second boss, but until that point I found a grand total of zero scenes. Zero. There are way better games that have far more content out there. This isn't it.
- There is no story (-1):
- No world-building. No set-up. Not even a text dump to let the players figure out what the hell's going on when the game starts.
- NPCs give you exceedingly video-gamey dialogue lines, and ones that don't, are always "Cowardly X".
- There are typos. There are broken sentences. There are missing words.
- The characters are deliberately arses. "Sister Fister" is perhaps funny the first time around. Her using the word "fisting" with the intention of "beating up" is funny the first time around. The Nth time, it is not funny. It is not witty. It just grates. And "Copy Kat" isn't fun, she isn't cool, she's just a boring arse. She isn't even a cynical character like the game exposition claims she is.
In conclusion: 1/5.
