This game disappoints me more than anything else. There are quite a few games made in this shitty engine (whatever it is), but none of them have been quite as depressing to me as this one.
For reference, recently I've started on a bit of a hobby where I'd rip sprites from skeleton-animated games (especially those with poor animation, like
D-Zone), and see what I could do to improve things. (Basically, going into Godot and rigging up a Skeleton2D, then setting up an animation or two. One could say Godot is probably not a very suitable animation program... and they'd probably be right.)
I've even mixed some sprites from different games. That's how you know I have too much time on my hands.
But in these games, if you look inside the assets (.tad files literally just being several .png files separated by commas)...
View attachment 0man_0.png
That's right. Despite games in this engine
clearly using skeletal animations, all of the animations are pre-baked into several PNGs (unlike Unity games where they're usually animated at runtime via Spine). Moreover, the original skeleton data is nowhere to be found.
For most games, it's been more like "well, that's a shame", but this is probably the game where I'm the most consistently crushed about it, a close second probably being
Closed Area Block Z. There's quite some variety in these games that I just can't use at all. Plus, it would be nice to add established characters like Byleth and Tifa to my collection.
I
really wish there was some way to reverse engineer these, but I feel like it's just not possible. Maybe if you're, like, the second coming of Photoshop Jesus. (Hypothetically, if I found the original artist somehow, do you think they would be able to give me the raw assets?)
I just wanted to vent about that. It really annoys me. To a possibly unreasonable degree, in fact.