The art design, combat and playable characters are all great. Each playable character is unique in design, playstyle & personality but, because there are so many, some end up being more useful and memorable than others. The story is just okay with every NPC (especially the villains) being pretty forgettable. The worldbuilding, especially for an RPG, is disappointingly shallow but the story does have some good emotional and heartfelt moments with its central cast and the goofy, anime-esque humor mostly lands. What hurts this game the most is that its platforming elements are average and there is A LOT of backtracking through empty levels which can grow tedious after a while. Overall, it's good and definitely worth checking out but could have used a little more refinement in certain areas.

I played the demo back at 2015 and i liked it, but when i bought this game in 2020 i absoluted hated it, i couldnt bring myself to finish the game. I started the game in the same way i'm right now near the end of it, there is no sense of progression, yeah, you get some new friends along the way with new skills, but that's not enough. Exploring the world is such a chore, nothign interesting to see and the battles were super weird, sometimes the enemies had a super small health bar and sometimes they had a gigantic one, making the battles super tedious. The story up to the point i'm right now is ok, some of the animations and character designs are cool, thats it.

The art and music of the game are great, and the combat is pretty fun too. A fair number of the characters are also pretty enjoyable. I also enjoyed the platforming sections, even if they were a bit tedious at times. And I really like how the boss battles combined the out-of-battle mechanics with the regular combat to keep things interesting. If I was only rating this game on how fun it was to play, I'd probably give it around 4 stars, maybe 3.5.

That said, I also had problems with the game. Even though I enjoyed the platforming and traversing some of the levels, I didn't enjoy moving through the world after a certain point. The fast-travel system in this game is abysmally limited, and it takes forever to get anywhere minus the few fast travel points you have access to.

My main problem, however, was that I wasn't a huge fan of the story. I appreciate what it tried to do, but I don't feel like it was handled as well as it could have been. Ajna's character kind of just did whatever the plot demanded it to while only remaining somewhat consistent. I feel like the whole party gave Dhar way too much shit, even taking into consideration what he did.

I also don't get why they felt the need to include so many party members if only like 5% of them are actually important to the overall plot. You could spend that time fleshing out the combat mechanics of the more important characters much more easily. Speaking of character importance, it feels like they never focus on the right character at the right time. Why does the story barely highlight Ginseng at all when we're in their hometown not once, but twice, for example? Why is Qadira's brother never found in the main story of the game?

Overall, I feel like when the person who wrote this game wrote for Skullgirls, it worked. Because Skullgirls had pretty short story modes and the game wasn't as focused on the plot as this one. Here, I can't bring myself to gloss over the many problems the writing of this game has.

I don't know what exactly it was about this game that felt so underwhelming for me. The entire experience just felt off.

I love the concept of what Lab Zero Games was going for here, and I am truly glad I sat down to try what I did. There's a great mix of Metroidvania style map exploration with, what I can best describe as, Paper Mario style combat - maybe there is another RPG out there better for comparison but as the time of writing this I cannot think of it. I really do think this game is worth playing at the very least, but I have my qualms.

The first major issue I have with this game is just how easy it is. I guess it never hyped itself up to be the next Meatboy or Celeste, but I just though it would be tougher to collect the gems in this game that were there. Maybe I am at fault for thinking this is to easy, but I will be honest, this really infuriated me through out my time playing. It might be a bit of a stretch to be mad at a game for something like this, but I just could not get over how easily I was collecting everything without a guide or without multiple attempts.

My other major issue with this game is the story. I just could not give any less of a shit about what was going on in this game or the characters. Granted, this one is totally on me, but at no point in this game did I find anything that was going on on-screen entertaining. Towards the end of my time with the game, I was actually skipping cutscenes just to speed through it.

But is the combat good and is the platforming fun? My answer is eh?
I mean I didn't hate what I was playing but I felt like I got better results by spamming the buttons during combat while the platforming was just simple to begin with.

Everything said, I did honestly enjoy my time with this game. I just don't think I'll ever be re-visiting it. I mean even with my problems, the art is fantastic, the music was solid, and the idea behind the game was totally there. I just personally wasn't the audience for this game, I guess. I want to give this 3 stars, but, for the underwhelment I felt, I think I need to err on the side of pessimistic.

I wanted to like that game, I really did.

I'm a huge fan of Skullgirls and when I heart that the team behind it were making a Metroidvania RPG game, I was genuinely excited, but when I got to play it 4 years later I never found myself liking it.

The characters were bland aside from their designs, the gameplay was boring, the world is not interesting for me to explore. I honestly gave up playing it because I never found myself giving a damn about the story and I didn't enjoy the gameplay.

I would give it another shot if it gets a new major update that fixes the gameplay problems and adds more content, but all those plans were cancelled thanks to REDACTED being a bad person.

Premier fighting game developers usually stick to that genre for years if not decades. Even though NetherRealm in its many forms has experimented with unique minigames and brawlers in the past, it has almost exclusively created traditional fighting games along with the Tekken team. Or, in Arc System Works’ case, it’s the genre the team is generally associated with. Developer Lab Zero Games has bucked that trend by developing Indivisible, its RPG platformer follow-up to Skullgirls. Indivisible’s expanded scope gives it the freedom to tell an engaging story with a unique battle system that contains satisfying hints of its pugilistic predecessor, yet still plays like a developer’s first stab into a new genre.

Read the full review here:
https://www.gamerevolution.com/review/604401-indivisible-review

Indivisible borrows some of its gameplay and exploration elements from Valkyrie Profile. You have four party members at a time that perform different actions when you push the button assigned to their location, they might do low attacks, juggle enemies, normal attacks, place traps, heal, buff, etc depending on who the character is and many of the characters have a special attack where you use a meter that charges as you do damage and block. Some combat elements are similar to the Mario RPG games, you push the button assigned to a character about to get hit to block and blocking right before being hit will block more damage, some characters have actions that are improved if you continue to push their button at the right times. When you explore you can wall jump, use your axe to pull yourself up walls or smash weakened floors, a bow can hit targets as well as creating paths by stunning enemies or turning spiked walls into vines, your spear can launch yourself up into the air or be used to bounce on and near the end of the game you can dash forward in the air.

The game starts out quite well, maybe going a bit too far into the jokey territory a lot of indie games do, but the combat is enjoyable, animations look great, and you quickly gain new characters with their own way of fighting while being introduced to very different areas and enemies. It is unable to keep up this momentum though as combat becomes extremely tedious, always being easy while often having enemies with large health bars that need to have their guard broken, making the fights take even longer. Your characters will never learn any new combat moves and variety will come from swapping party members with the game's fairly large cast, though many of them are going to obviously be weaker than others. Characters focused on healing will basically never be as useful as other characters because there is just no reason to have a healer in the party, even in the off chance you need one the main character is capable of healing and reviving everyone. There is no equipment, accessories, or items to find giving even less options for combat and making map exploration often quite dull. The only things worse looking for on the map are red jewels that can be traded in to increase your defense or to give everyone an extra attack option (starting with 2 and getting up to 4). These don't give any new attack options, typically just making the already easy game easier.

The exploration elements worked in a game like Valkyrie Profile because you were often seeing new areas, finding useful items, and training a mostly constantly changing cast of characters. Here most of your time will be traversing levels, often going back and forth to the same areas, and it all just feels like busywork. You won't be finding anything useful, it takes no real though to get to hidden areas, and it provides no platforming challenge. Near the end of the game you are climbing to face the final boss of the game and it just keeps going and going, and throwing more repeated simplistic rooms at you to the point I thought I would have had to have been almost done on three separate occasions. It long passed the point where I could have seen it as anything other than padding out the length of a pretty short game.

Many of the characters join you automatically and everyone is fairly likable as far as being at least mildly entertaining goes, but they never evolve beyond being anything but one note with the exception of the first character you get. The main story is focused on the personality of the main character rushing into battles focused on her ideas to try to help people that usually just make everything worse until she starts listening more to her companions and the people she is trying to help or fight against. It gets a lot of focus all throughout the game, it just isn't very interesting. The factions and story of each area are even less interesting as they just don't have much time devoted to them. Side characters you recruit will rarely ever say anything once they join you which is unfortunate.

At one point of the game it needlessly splits into three separate locations you can sail through which waste time by locking upgrades needed to pass certain islands onto other ones. Some of these upgrades are things you should have been able to do the entire time but you just don't think to do them or aren't told about them by characters until you get to a certain point, and there's no real reason to backtrack for hidden areas since all you might find are more of the red jewels. Being split into three areas also obviously comes with unbalanced enemies and bosses, in this case with them all being far too weak to pose any challenge. This portion makes up about half of the game's length.

I ended up having to turn the music down, the music is decent but some of the tracks are so short and repetitive that I started to get a headache from hearing it over and over while traveling through each area.

Some of the reviews seem to be saying that characters haven't been released yet, limited and uninteresting side quests aren't complete, and that the game is so easy because they didn't have time to playtest a lot of the later content, all that combined with the game just doing a very poor job of explaining some mechanics to you and not even telling you how to do some platforming moves at all, leads me to believe it.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1200228710630084608?s=20