After beating and completing the game, I have mixed feelings about it, and while being my opinion mostly on the negative side, I have to give credit at the love that the creators of the game have given, since it seemed to me that this game was a passion project, but sadly, it was also a flawed project.
The thing that irks me the most is the gameplay balance, and I'm not joking, but I think this is the most untested game I've ever played. I played the game on Insane, which is the highest difficulty, and the name is perfect, because you need to be insane to program it. In the first area of the game, I needed to rely on RNG to even survive combats, since almost all enemy groups you face would kill you before you were able to attack. This just shows me the game wasn't even tested for that difficulty, since there was nothing I could do to improve on my situation.
I like a challenging difficult where I have to optimize my resources to beat the game, but on this one, that wasn't the case, there wasn't much thinking behind the strategy you have to follow, only pray to the RNG gods to be lucky all the time.
Insane Mode has also a really stupid addition, which is that to not face random encounters, you have to participate on 9.999 encounters on an area. On other difficulties, it is always around 25, but here, you are assigned an impossible to reach number, I imagine that they wanted to make things harder, but at least they could have made it that once you defeat the area boss, encounters were disabled, because random encounters appearing every few seconds makes exploring the maps harder.
The difficulty spikes were weird, one area was almost impossible and the next one could be a breeze, so after completing the game I can't really tell where I've been overleveled or underleveled.
I thought that maybe those were complains for playing the highest difficulty, but the next one is present on all of them, and it's the dungeon design. Almost all dungeons are claustrophobic: They are big, look the same on all parts, and are mainly composed of different paths that connect into each other, being really hard to know where you have to go next, there's also no map so it's even harder to know where to go. In the end, I found that the easiest way to find the next room was to use the old trick of sticking your left hand to the wall and keep walking forward.
And those were my main concerns with the game, now, the positive ones:
The PC version has a new mode once you beat the game called "Cthulhu's Angels", which changes the characters you use, the story and some bosses. This mode is slightly better balanced in terms of difficulty, there's still random difficulty spikes but at least I was able to defeat the monsters I faced in the first dungeon without problems, so it seems to be slightly more tested. It also helps that this time, there's a fixed party instead of being able to pick from several characters.
This mode also adds a new final dungeon, and this one is actually good. This time, it seems that the developers learnt from their mistakes and actually made a dungeon that consists on several rooms connected in a linear way, instead of just random corridors that could be a labyrinth.
Another detail I liked was the addition of the characters of Breath of Death VII as superbosses which you could recruit if you win, an extra optional character to use is a cool reward for exploring, specially when it's a cameo character and it's what makes me feel like the developers actually care for the games they create, even if the product doesn't fulfill their expectations.
The thing that irks me the most is the gameplay balance, and I'm not joking, but I think this is the most untested game I've ever played. I played the game on Insane, which is the highest difficulty, and the name is perfect, because you need to be insane to program it. In the first area of the game, I needed to rely on RNG to even survive combats, since almost all enemy groups you face would kill you before you were able to attack. This just shows me the game wasn't even tested for that difficulty, since there was nothing I could do to improve on my situation.
I like a challenging difficult where I have to optimize my resources to beat the game, but on this one, that wasn't the case, there wasn't much thinking behind the strategy you have to follow, only pray to the RNG gods to be lucky all the time.
Insane Mode has also a really stupid addition, which is that to not face random encounters, you have to participate on 9.999 encounters on an area. On other difficulties, it is always around 25, but here, you are assigned an impossible to reach number, I imagine that they wanted to make things harder, but at least they could have made it that once you defeat the area boss, encounters were disabled, because random encounters appearing every few seconds makes exploring the maps harder.
The difficulty spikes were weird, one area was almost impossible and the next one could be a breeze, so after completing the game I can't really tell where I've been overleveled or underleveled.
I thought that maybe those were complains for playing the highest difficulty, but the next one is present on all of them, and it's the dungeon design. Almost all dungeons are claustrophobic: They are big, look the same on all parts, and are mainly composed of different paths that connect into each other, being really hard to know where you have to go next, there's also no map so it's even harder to know where to go. In the end, I found that the easiest way to find the next room was to use the old trick of sticking your left hand to the wall and keep walking forward.
And those were my main concerns with the game, now, the positive ones:
The PC version has a new mode once you beat the game called "Cthulhu's Angels", which changes the characters you use, the story and some bosses. This mode is slightly better balanced in terms of difficulty, there's still random difficulty spikes but at least I was able to defeat the monsters I faced in the first dungeon without problems, so it seems to be slightly more tested. It also helps that this time, there's a fixed party instead of being able to pick from several characters.
This mode also adds a new final dungeon, and this one is actually good. This time, it seems that the developers learnt from their mistakes and actually made a dungeon that consists on several rooms connected in a linear way, instead of just random corridors that could be a labyrinth.
Another detail I liked was the addition of the characters of Breath of Death VII as superbosses which you could recruit if you win, an extra optional character to use is a cool reward for exploring, specially when it's a cameo character and it's what makes me feel like the developers actually care for the games they create, even if the product doesn't fulfill their expectations.