The first couple hours of this game are absolutely incredible but the tension and excitement fades pretty quickly over the subsequent hours spent running through some pretty uninspired dungeons that often require far too much backtracking. The combat system has some cool ideas, mainly being the elemental sprites that you can summon to raise your own damage while dampening the damage of your opponents based on type matchups but the characters all feel a tad too similar in their use cases for there to be any real variety. I bet this game eventually escalates enough both narrative and gameplay-wise to have an impactful and satisfying conclusion but I just couldn't stick with it long enough to find out.

A lovely little game whose most compelling moments are entirely within its first hour. The game's opening act is nothing short of jaw-dropping—melancholy rests beneath this game's every moment like the underpainting does any well-crafted painting. The characters are grounded, their relationships believable, and their struggles interesting. I wish it had stayed in that sort of bittersweet tone for, if not the whole game, at least a little longer than it did. It hit for me in the same way Night in the Woods does, and considering Night in the Woods is one of my favorite games of all time, that is no small feat. Though I wasn't a fan of the score, the art of this game is unlike anything I've ever seen, pixel art or otherwise. I feel that this game isn't the best at being a JRPG—though I found it charming, it's a bit unwieldy. I was not charmed by its obtuse mechanics and demands of the player's time. Where it fails as a JRPG, however, it succeeds as a piece of art that will definitely stay in my mind for a while. I know I got what I wanted out of it, though I was far from reaching the credits when my playthrough ended.