Muy buen juego. En el aspecto narrativo se nos presenta un Hogwarts inclusivo que apuesta por las minorías y por la representación. Se tratan temas de cambio de edad y de salud mental con mucho cariño y delicadeza.
La parte jugable es un Paper Mario muy sencillo pero con una escalabilidad de los números bastante apretada. En cualquier combate puedes besar el suelo si no timeas bien los ataques y las defensas. De todos modos, el juego tiene modo asistido e incluso un "botón para ganar" opcional por si se te acaba atragantando el sistema o te aburre.
Todo en Ikenfell derrocha cariño. Los personajes son muy entrañables y bastante redondos. Es raro que termines el juego sin haber elegido un personaje favorito y sin que ese haya sido Petronella en algún momento del mismo.

I really like this game. Playing the first few hours, I wanted to love it, in fact. But I don't, and I feel sad for what could have been.

It's evident that this game had a lot of heart and passion poured in it's characters, world and story. It shows a diverse cast with actually great queer representation! All characters are fleshed out, have their own quirks, their own likes and dislikes, they never feel like just combat stats, but like friends.

The art style is really cute and gameboy inspired. The music was mostly great (except one or two songs which just... weren't good).

Where the game falls flat, and where I could see the most potential, is in the combat system. It relies on timing inputs with the attack animations to deal more damage/take less damage. And in the first few hours/battles/levels, it was really awesome! Party members' movesets were varied, with clear strenghts and weaknesses, and combat felt strategic and rewarding... Until it didn't...
As the game went on, I saw the characters' stats going up, as I tried to optimize equipment, but I never felt fights were getting any faster or more strategic. It just started feeling like a 5-10 minute slog every encounter, that I just wanted to end so I could get back to the story. Bosses still remained fairly interesting, even though battles took EVEN LONGER to go through. Also, party members can unlock stronger abilities through levelling up, but they never really felt more interesting, just slightly different and stronger (and not even all of them). I felt no incentive to change the party lineup, and just went into every combat with my 2 top damage dealers + 1 healer with damage.
This all kind of ruined the game for me, really. Eventually (about 80% of the game) I just enabled the auto win accessibility option (which is a great addition, in fact, good job devs) and started using it in every random encounter (and some bosses too).

Some other negatives I encountered were that there were SO MANY ITEMS that I just never felt were worth using, the fact that the (many) secrets' rewards were mostly underwhelming, and that the ending reeeally dragged on more than I expected. The epilogue was cute though, I really dig it.

Overall, I really like this game, but I don't love it. If you are super into turn based combat, maybe you will love this. Otherwise, if you want to play a casual RPG with great story and characters, play this with combat accessibility options on, so you can make it less of a chore.

You had me at "Paper Mario Combat" and everything else was just kinda bonus points. Tactical battles? Dank. Cool music? Rad. Shameless diversity? Hell yeah.

Ikenfell is a pretty solid RPG romp with a story that's not groundbreaking, but fun. The art and music are a joy, and it never felt too grindy. I could nitpick some of the design of items, upgrades, menus, and the like. Really the majority of my frustrations came with how precise the combat timing had to be in order to maximize damage delt/received. I feel like the timing window for button presses was simply too low, and with no good way to practice.

After finishing Ikenfell, I can’t help, but feel a strange sense of calm. Apart from a few scenes etc… that purposely very lightly lean into horror aesthetics, this game is just so cosy from start to finish.

The visuals remind me of the GBA, but is very clearly it’s own distinct thing. The music beautifully mixes chip tune sounds with instruments such as an acoustic guitar. I can wholeheartedly say that at least 4 of Ikenfell’s songs are going on my playlist after writing this review. This game’s presentation is flawless.

The combat is extremely rewarding to learn and always offers something new and how getting new spells is tied to levels you always feel like you are getting a new tool often enough that lasts the whole game, but still gives you enough time to play around with the final spell. My only complaint on the combat would be how it felt it fell off for me towards the end (Tbf my strat revolves around increasing defence and having regen) as bosses and even some regular enemies felt like damage sponges. The only real time combat overstayed it’s welcome though was having a few final boss phases too many, genuinely closer to 10 phases then 0 iirc.

The story is so pretty, like the rest of the game. Every character, especially the party members just feel so fun, unique and real. While the story may be investigating a magic school that has lost the plot, the character interactions is where it shines.

Lastly I want to touch on some Switch specific (as far as I can tell) issues. Whenever I would open the game from sleep mode my Switch would freeze (This may have had something to do with my Switch settings and having the usb wired connection for pro controllers on) and the final boss I noticed some performance issues with a drop in frame rate. I get sometimes games need to choose between visuals and performance on Switch, but when you have stuff like quick time events drastically changing how much damage you do/take and how potent buffs/debuffs are being effected by a frame rate drop feels way poorer then any visual sacrifice. Genuinely scared my Switch was gonna crash during the end.

In conclusion, Ikenfell is way worth the experience. In 20 or so hours I have experienced one of my favourite jrpgs and is a very unique take on the tactics genre. If you have any desire to play Ikenfell just do it. ❤️

Upon my initial playthrough of Ikenfell I was left less than impressed. There are very few games that change my opinion from bad to good upon a second try, and if I'm being entirely honest, nine times out of ten, it's usually the opposite. Ikenfell must have left an impression on me because after playing it I couldn't seem to forget it and every time I saw it in the Gamepass catalogue I would have a strange urge to do another playthrough. Finally seeing it go on sale for Playstation I gave in and bought Ikenfell.

After finishing my second run of the game, I was left with a completely different experience than the first in almost every way. For starters, I wasn't too keen on the characters originally and felt they were kind of stereotypical and didn't have much to offer. I also didn't care too much for Ikenfell's narrative and that I felt it was a little over the top, melodramatic, and immature. Now, I feel the opposite because I find the characters charming and endearing. Even though I don't think they were written with great depth, the game does show the characters to have their own flaws and struggles to make them feel relatable. As far as the story, I still find it somewhat exaggerated and a little silly, but I grew to like it a lot more this time around.  Ikenfell's storytelling is a little simplistic, but also has more emotion than I gave it credit for.
 
Sadly, the only the thing I really didn't change my opinion on was the battle system, though I did give it more of a chance by playing legit this time. Being honest, I did turn off the timing for the attack/defend prompts because I found it to be tedious. Since I didn't choose to skip all the battles in a rush to get to the story, I was able to go through the all the characters spells and attacks which the games give you a lot of. The spells were something that I enjoyed experimenting with and it was fun to see what magic did what. Most of the battles are not that bad and can be finished somewhat quickly, especially if you know how to utilize your attacks, but as the game goes on the more the battles seem to draw out due to a lot of the enemies calling for reinforcements. About three fourths into the game I did turn on auto-victory because I just didn't want to spend a lot of time fighting random enemies.

Overall:
 
There is a lot about Ikenfell that I came to appreciate while playing this time and I might not have if I didn't give the game another chance. The game isn't perfect, but it's still a nice little indie game filled with heart.
 
Pros:
+likable cast of characters
+decent story
+charming art design
+fun world exploration and puzzles
+in game cheats to skip battles
+nice catchy soundtrack
 
Cons:
-characters/story can be a little over dramatic at times
-battles can be boring and drawn out

Um RPG extremamente diverso e acessível - o que é diferente de um RPG com diversidade e acessibilidade. Esses temas não são um mero adicional ao game: eles percorrem todas as decisões mecânicas e narrativas do jogo, fazendo com que nada pareça forçado ou mal-pensado. É um game que quer que todos possam apreciar seu divertidíssimo combate e seu elenco único e carismático.

Ser acessível, entretanto, não é a mesma coisa de ser trivial. Pelo contrário, ninguém pode culpar Ikenfell de ser um RPG sem profundidade mecânica. Sua inspiração explícita nesse sentido é Paper Mario, mas com bem mais complexidade quantitativa (você controla três personagens, em vez de dois; o timing das ações têm dois estágios; há bem mais stats e equipamentos para você se preocupar) e qualitativa (a arena é grid-based, com o posicionamento de seus personagens sendo essencial para vitória; as animações dos ataques são bem mais variadas e longas, então o timing das ações é mais desafiador; há várias estratégias possíveis baseando-se em armadilhas, controle de multidões, stats-boosting, etc). Os combates entretém bastante do início ao fim e, caso você tenha alguma dificuldade com ele ou só não esteja com muita vontade de enfrentá-lo e só liga para a história, há várias opções para facilitar sua vida, inclusive a de vencer as batalhas automaticamente.

Falando na história, há muito o que gostar aqui. Nenhum dos personagens é estereotípico ou clichê, mas também não são exagerados e diferentões porque sim. São todos críveis e singulares, como deve ser. Eles carregam a trama com força e o desenvolvimento deles é o foco - o que não quer dizer que a ambientação e a mitologia que criaram para esse mundo também não tenham seu valor, muito pelo contrário, são tão bem construídos quanto o resto.

Por fim, sou obrigado a reservar algumas palavras específicas para a trilha sonora. Ela foi composta pelo dueto Aivi & Surasshu, que trabalharam em Steven Universo. A performance do duo aqui está no mesmo nível do desenho, com direito até a algumas músicas cantadas em momentos especiais.

Very solid tactical RPG, with great music, and charming visuals.

Held back by some pacing issues, the big cast needed a bit more room to breathe for the emotional beats to land more solidly, could have done with either setting some lore aside to let characters come to the fore a bit more or maybe cut down the cast a bit.

Some minor issues with the gameplay, can be unclear what the timing is for the timed hit system, sometimes the isometric perspective blocks key visual information, just a little bit too much time spent in random battles.

Loved the very queer cast, and variety of levels and enemies, great length for the price.

'Ikenfell' has my heart. Fun combat, a delightful world, and engaging characters, 'Ikenfell' has all the qualities required for a heatfelt indie hit.

But what makes 'Ikenfell' special, to me, is just how queer it is. Most of it's cast is gay and/or genderqueer, including the only use of neopronouns I've ever seen in a videogame.

Not only is 'Ikenfell' a great time on paper, but it's the only game that's made me feel 'seen', and for that it has my heart.

Un juego maravilloso que recomendaré siempre a cualquier amante de los rpg y de las buenas historias, esto es una carta de amor a su genero.

Su ambientación y universo, junto con una banda sonora increíble, hacen que te sumerjas de lleno en su atmosfera. Tiene toques retro pero te recuerda que es un juego actual con pequeños detalles como su música, por ejemplo, que te recordará a esos rpg que jugaste en tu gameboy pero que, sin embargo, no recurre a hacer que sea de 8 bits para ello. Una mezcla compleja nada fácil de conseguir.
Además, es completamente LGBT friendly sin hacer que un personaje gire en torno a su orientación sexual como forma de personalidad, que tampoco es algo que haya visto muy a menudo.

Por si fuera poco, habla de temas como la depresión, los traumas, la falta de confianza y el no sentirte suficiente nunca, a través de sus personajes.

Después de el increíble viaje, giras la vista atrás y recuerdas con nostalgia el principio.

"Cuanto hemos conseguido, juntos. "

En resumen: una obra increíble que no olvidaré jamás.

PD: La versión de Microsoft Store esta rota al final, he tenido que ver la cinemática en YT. Comprad la versión de steam o consola.

So I should probably start this off by saying that uhhh this game did not play particularly nice with my Switch for whatever reason. Every time I put it into sleep mode and then pulled back out, it had to find the controllers again and then sometimes it would freeze instead of just delaying getting the game going again? I genuinely don’t know if this is a weird problem that literally only happened to me or what since I haven’t seen anyone else talk about it, but it did mean I had to re-fight bosses every once in a while and that was pretty unpleasant!

That particular issue aside, I generally had a pretty good time with this game, even if I do agree with a lot of the common criticisms. While I thought all the characters were generally pretty fun, I do wish they all had more space to breathe. I think Mariette and Perty had the strongest actual arcs, and I do have to complement the writers on making teen relationship drama compelling without sending me back into my own embarrassing high school memories, but Gilda especially kind of felt like her character arc stopped the second she joined the party. Which was a shame, because I enjoyed her vibes a lot.

I didn’t manage to do all that much of the side content, so I don’t know if there was some stuck behind that… the stuff I did manage to find was just loot related, which wasn’t super exciting. I would’ve been happier with character related stuff honestly.

The story itself wasn’t super original, but I don’t think it really needed to be. It was a fun queer magic school romp with the opposite of any Baggage that some other magic school stories might have, and I will admit it did throw some surprising curve balls! And the ending and epilogue did Kinda get me, not gonna lie. Also a lot of the enemy designs were colorful and fun, and the music was pretty excellent. I also liked the world itself! While I do think the lore could take precedence over the characters it was at least neat lore.

I do have mixed feelings on the gameplay. While I think it was conceptually very neat and creative and made me really look forward to learning new moves to see how they would work, I feel like the difficulty curve was just a little too sharp at a certain point, particularly given the weird sleep mode glitches I had. Some timed hit tells from the enemies could be just a little obtuse, with one example that nearly made me quit being an enemy with an animation I could not figure out the timing for that did massive damage and inflicted poison if you got anything less than perfect timing. And then it was brought back for the final boss fight as an add… maybe I should have turned on story mode, except I forgot I could. Oh well. I also wasn’t sure if increasing speed actually did anything after a certain point, since it didn’t actually seem to make my characters’ turns come around more quickly. The game positively drowns you in stat increasing and decreasing items, but I’m not sure how actually useful the speed related ones are because of that.

Anyway, it’s definitely worth a shot! Like I said, I don’t know how much my weird problems were specific to me or not, so I don’t know if I can actually say you should get it on a different platform than the Switch, but if possible you should check it out. It’s very much worth the time. I’d definitely love to see a spiritual successor or follow up sometime that irons out the kinks a little.

I don't like to go hard on games like this, but as someone who is ostensibly the exact target audience for this(ex-tumblr lesbian jrpg fanatic), its awful and basically the exact opposite of what to make a faux-jrpg as.

To start, lets get the combat out of the way. Its a mix of Paper Mario and Battle Network, except somehow lamer and significantly slower than either of them. Even trash encounters take 3-5 minutes because you spend an inordinate amount of time walking up to hit the guy only for them to jump away immediately. Combined with the generally low combat numbers and high HP pools of enemies, in addition to the action button combat making it so you can't speed up combat its just a miserable slog. By the halfway point of the game, I just turned on the "instant win all combat" button, except that STILL makes you wait until the protagonist's turn in-combat to activate so you're still sitting there 30 seconds each fight waiting. That alone killed any momentum in the game for me.

Next, the world. You'd think a Magic School would be a slam-dunk setting for a jrpg--lots of fun themes and tropes you can choose from, quirky npcs to encounter, etc etc. Ikenfell does a very bold move here and makes the entire map a dungeon. Besides one tavern at the start of the game(and ceases to be relevant 10% of the way in), there is no real "towns" or calm places. You walk into the school courtyard, which is a dungeon, which leads you to the dorms, which are a dungeon, which leads you to the botany labs, which are a dungeon, and so on. There is functionally no "downtime" from the combat portion of the game, you are just shuttled from dungeon to dungeon to dungeon. There also aren't really any npcs to deal with, no sidequests to handle, nothing of the sort. Just large dungeons bereft of anything interesting or exciting. This game is honestly a masterclass in how not to pace your game, the constant slog of enemy encounter after encounter just removes any tention or interest the game could have.

But surely, I thought, this game should be heartfelt. Perhaps to someone younger, it might be, but I could not connect with any of these characters. The most interesting one is the hot-blooded lightning lesbian, in part because she does something besides mope around the entire game. The writers focused so much on either the grander Plot stuff or the traumas the various characters have that any sense of comradery or fun is lost. And like, you can make characters who just mope around all the time--I recently played Tales of Berseria, where the main character is a deeply traumatized young woman who spends 80% of the game with coping with that trauma, but there she's surrounded by people who don't take things as seriously and the game isn't afraid to clown on her from time to time. The plot itself is also generally whatever, its basically just a collect the macguffin plot to lead you from place to place. It doesn't even really use the setting in any interesting way.

An odd note as well is that there's three vocal themes in the game, all of which belong to later-game party members who's function is just not plot-critical. Which, its fine, I love hip hop and am a huge sucker for vocal themes but its a weird choice. None of the main characters, just these three weirdos. It feels like a bit of a waste of dosh, but like sure why not.

What actually gets me is one of the songs has a lot of references to real life figures like Martin Luther or Bob Ross, and it took me out so much. Like, the game pretty expressly does not take place on Earth so..???? Petty concern, for sure, but its actually funnily enough the thing that stuck with me the most.

All in all, a waste of talent and time by all involved. I feel bad because every lesbian-themed western indie jrpg seems to disappoint(even Christine Love's Get in the Car didn't hit the marks it should have), and I don't want this to be the case because, well, thats me.

But that's the world we live in. Its a pity.