For the uneducated, Bloodroot is a metroidvania with clear inspirations from games such as Symphony of the Night. It's also porn, porn which some might call <problematic> considering most of the cast consists of <petite bodied individuals>.

With that out of the way this game is fucking awesome, with most metroidvanias I run into the issue of simplistic combat which isn't done any favors by lackluster boss design across the majority of the genre. Even games I adore, such as Symphony of the Night, have pretty w/e to shit bosses with some exceptions. Bloodroot however has some of the best boss design I've seen in gaming period, pair this with the insane combat system, which takes notes from fighting games of all things featuring shit like cancels & assists. And then pair THAT with the movement, which after a certain point becomes so ridiculous that the only limiter becomes your skill. With all that this game becomes something that feels so unbelievably good to play it's ridiculous, very few games feel as good to play as this one. Even aside from the basic gameplay there's so much to love here, the map design is great, with my only complaint being the odd visuals and structures of some areas (I can't really fault it for this considering how low the budget obviously was). There's also an obscene amount of customization here, allowing you to have up to 9 weapons equipped at once alongside 3 <sub attacks> (basically fighting game assists). The accessories here are also all VERY good and useful, forcing you to decide what you equip based on how you want to play rather than equipping the few things that aren't useless (thank you fromsoft). Basically, there's a lot to love here, this game is VERY well put together.

Now to address the elephant in the room, which is the porn. The porn is great, I will not comment further otherwise the team at backloggd may get somewhat upset, a tad bit perturbed. But what I will say is I respect this game so hard for being what it is. I despise when games are made to appeal to the masses, things like Hollow Knight I find so safe and boring, gameplay and aesthetics alike. Yeah, the (singular?) dev could've made something with mass appeal that could've been incredibly successful given how good this game actually is. But that'd be lame. We have enough games that try to appeal to the masses, give me more games like this that appeal to only the most specific of niches.

To preface I got midway through chapter 5 with around 20 hours clocked in before deciding to drop this.

I think my biggest problem with Astlibra Revision is the story itself, which I'm not going to call bad by any extent, it's just something I can't find myself caring about in any way shape or form. The reasoning for this is it follows a lot of trends I've never enjoyed. The biggest being the focus on a <grand adventure> with little room left for characterization similar to things like Xenoblade Chronicles or Radiant Historia. I've never fucked with games like this. You could have the most kickass story of all time but if I don't care about a singular character in that story then that story sux. Honestly though I think the silent protagonist was the actual nail in the coffin for me. It's especially unfortunate in a story like this where instead of someone that could've honestly been pretty cool we get uhhh Mario from da Mario rpgs (he emotes in basically all the same ways including the gibberish talk it's weird).

The gameplay itself is pretty neat, I do actually like how mechanically it's a huge mash-up of a ton of different rpg systems. The combat is also pretty fun outside of how quickly you'll die because the lack of i-frames and enemies doing huge chunks of your health. My biggest issues were the crafting/material system being pretty tedious forcing you to grind for materials & the way chapters were generally structured. There's a LOT of forced backtracking in these chapters to solve some pretty annoying & unintuitive puzzles which I can't really think of any reason to exist outside of unsubtle padding. I may seem like I'm bitching about the gameplay a lot (bcuz i am) but I honestly didn't mind it all that much, it's pretty dumb fun when it's not annoying.

Overall I don't like, I can understand why a lotta people like it doe, I just don't fuck w/ it.