If you like Atelier / Mana Khemia games, you'll probably like this. If you dislike games that give you chores, maybe look somewhere else. It's a 7.5/10 game, it has its flaws but if you can look past them, it's a nice experience.
I started playing it yesterday and clocked in 12 hours without even noticing. Started at 7 PM and it was 7 AM before I even took notice.
Yes, it's a bit dark,
but nowhere near "Black Souls" level. The faint of heart may need to
get prepared for some heavy scenes after 1-2 hours of gameplay (depending on how much you wander around), but don't give up. The good endings are good endings.
Really don't give up, the game gets a bit lighter as it goes (but also "not too light", this is not your Atelier game) and there's some good things that come from all the bad, if you take the right choices (do all the bulletin hunt quests, kids! Doing all guild and castle quests is not all that important though!).
Overall, the gameplay is interesting but unbalanced (especially if you use acchievement points, I don't know if those were even intented to be used or if that's a cheat), magic system works well (although I unlocked only 2 spells during the entire game), bow and arrows are overpowered... But for a game with this RPG Maker engine (which dates from 2003), it's really not bad, although it would have been 10x better with RPG Maker MV or Unity.
Pros:
- Excellent art, beautiful maps, excellent world-building
- Interesting story, although with flaws and lots of unexplained parts
- Main characters are interesting and all interactions between them feel organic
- Several different endings, and the true ending is exactly what players want
- Quite polished gameplay for a 2000s RPG Engine, but below average compared to recent Unity / RPG Maker MV games
- Excelent translation, only a few missing flavor texts from random NPCs, but 99% of the game is well translated
Cons:
- Lots of backtracking
- Lots of padding with quests, too many IMO. If it had half (and more interesting quests), it would have been better. Took me 12 hours to get a "100% vanilla ending, but it could have been reduced to 6-8 hours without the "fat")
- Relationship system with other characters should have more interactions/scenes, it's very shallow. Lost potential.
- HEAVY AS HELL on certain scenes, which can go as low as 5-10 FPS, and it's not even the fault of my computer, it's just badly optimized for an old RPG engine. But it's not enough to be an issue, at least on PCs. Android users are probably fucked.
- Several parts of the game features are underdeveloped
Overall, I loved it and I haven't even unlocked all sex scenes yet, I just played the virgin playthrough and it was good. I'll actually buy this game now, it's really worth it and I want to see a sequel. It's not "One of the best games", but I went expecting a cutesy "Atelier / Mana Khemia" style game with a 7/10 or 8/10 score and with the same problems that Atelier games have (bad quests, lots of padding), and got exactly that, albeit darker and with more rape. But still cutesy.
Does anyone know how to fix animation lag in joiplay during combat?
It lags even on PC. It's not well optimized and it uses an old RPG engine with too much stuff on it. I don't think there's much which can be done, this game runs single-threaded and that's bad especially for ARM processors like Android devices use. If x86 processors running @3.0 GHz or more struggle with this, I don't even want to think how bad it is on Android...
does anyone know where to find black soul (or get a recipe to craft it)?
Keep killing the necromancer on the forest at the 4th floor. Do it like, 20 times until it drops.
Holy crap, that went from cute to fucked up real quick. If is that fucked that early then it can't be less fucked later.
It is far less fucked up later.
Don't give up.
Really, you'll come off worse if you give up now. Do all the hunt quests and finish the game.
I got ED0 and ED2
ED2
I'll try to lower my infamy to 0 using Cheat Engine and see if that makes me get ED1 or something. And also go "full whore", maybe that's necessary for ED1.