Well, decided to give this a look over the weekend. I've had this on my Watch list for a while after seeing it recommended in some other places, and figured now is the time to get some impressions.
Said impressions are mixed, but that's pretty normal for "in progress" games most of the time, especially complex ones like this one.
First of all, the biggest... disappointment? I guess? Is the fact that the Corruption thing is basically not implemented at all right now as of 0.28, and based on the change-logs I read on itch, it's not implemented even in 0.30 either. Given that the corruption thing is advertised as one of the game's biggest features... and somehow not even the beginning stages of it have been implemented until now... which makes it difficult to decide on how interested I should be about it all. It's supposed to decide the endings and the flow of the story and more... but right now it does nothing and I find that concerning, if only because the more content there is in place, the more difficult it'll be to account for it when it's implemented later.
What I mean by that is that it doesn't take much effort, currently, to cap Corruption for Nether and Aether, especially if you choose to play with any kind of magic and learn one or both of them, which means that the first stage should be easy to jump over early on. As a result, there's a lot of potential early interactions with various characters that may or may not be affected by the change(s).
It sounds like a lot of work when just after the intro you already have 5 girls around to have events of various kinds with... and that's before you get into whatever impact it might have on the main story.
As is, the complexity of the interactions rears its ugly head at times because there's clearly a lot of stuff to keep track of and/or account for. Like the fact that training in Nether magic with Ashley mentions the Qlippoth and that she heard about it from Sarah, but then one of Sarah's latter trust events mentions that she has no idea if Nether magic works like an opposite of Aether and she doesn't know if there's an opposite of the Sefirot. Or the fact that you can train with Sarah first in Aether disciplines, and then with Metatron, and both talk as if you did it in the opposite order. There's probably a lot of examples, both big and small that can be dug up... but I seriously think that this sort of problem is going to get WAY worse the more the Corruption system is left unaddressed.
I'm no expert on game development, obviously, but if the corruption system is meant to be a fundamental part of the game, I figure it should also be part of the game's backbone in terms of development.
Then there's also the fact that trying to account for all possible permutations of what a player might do and which order they take things in might be pure madness... So there's that to consider too I guess. >.>"
Moving on.
I'm not gonna comment on the story, mainly because I didn't dive too deep in it. I mostly focused on grinding affection and trust with the "starter girls" to look at their events and pick up Nether Magic and Aether Magic, as well as experiment a bit with both of those things. Dunno if I'll keep playing right now or if I'll put this in the "check again in another year or two and/or when I have money to throw at it" folder.
I will comment a bit on the magic system though.
At first, looking at it, I wasn't sure what to think about the fact that all the elements have very similar spells in terms of damage output and that there's some overlaps between certain spells of various elements. Like Ice Armor and Adamant Skin, or that one spell from Cryomancy that inflicts bleed and a spell from Nether that does the same thing... But then, I stopped to actually think about it.
First of all, the fact of the matter is that there's no guarantee that a player will pick up more than one element, or which elemental combinations they'll pick at all. As such, there's no guarantee that they'll run into any real overlaps. Then, even if they do, there's the fact that there's still distinctions between them, like Aether and Nether having options to help deal with Evasion, while Ice/Water has exactly nada for that particular problem, at least by default, but I'm not sure about all the Masteries. Plus, while early on this doesn't seem to be a thing, the possibility of having enemies that are more resistant to one element while not resisting, or even being weaker to others, would also help with the potential problem of overlaps. Then there's the fact that right now, the magic system is still at Initiate level, which means that we haven't seen anything about what will be present in the higher tier for each element or for elemental combinations or whatnot.
On a brief side-note, being able to see Masteries before picking up a base ability would be extremely useful.
In any case, the point is that it's probably too soon to worry about "samey options" in magic when the game is far off from offering the full possibilities of permutations. That's probably a worry for when the next levels come in.
For now though, I'll leave it at this. I'll decide later if I want to keep messing around or not, and if I want to comment more.
