Damn that was a game, time to explain why Tevi is my new favorite game of all time.

Just a warning I may ramble a little here.

Going over the most obvious thing first the bosses are phenomenal, I would say this was no surprise given how much I loved Rabi Ribi's bosses, but these broke ANY expectations I had going in. From start to end the bosses are constantly one-upping themselves, getting better and better culminating in some of the craziest final few bosses I have ever seen. Every boss is extremely distinct, all their movesets are completely original and at times will even take some VERY OBVIOUS inspiration from things such as Touhou and Devil May Cry. I love this, seeing Tevi pay homage to the games that very clearly inspired it is awesome, I adore seeing Tevi's own rendition of some iconic characters and attacks. These bosses are an absolute joy to fight, and this is one of those games where I will gladly bang my head against these bosses for hours on end not even realizing how much time has passed.

Alongside bosses being great Tevi also has ridiculously good balancing and gives a ton of customization through way of build variety and the multiple ways to customize how difficult the game actually is, even outside of the sheer number of difficulty options. The "ridiculously good balancing" part may seem controversial as it's very clear that some things are outright broken or have insane synergies but let me explain. A wise man once said, "You have control over the buttons you press" and that rings true here. Tevi's genius balancing stems from the sheer number of options you have that will vastly change how you play and how difficult the game is. Your base kit is balanced perfectly, everything you have feels about equal in strength with nothing feeling overtuned in the slightest. However, you can change this with optional equipment called "sigils" to make certain things stronger than others, and there are well over 200 of these equipables. You can obviously use a broken build with the sheer number of options you have, and spam consumable items while doing so, taking down endgame bosses with ease. But at the same time, you have the option to forgo those powerful options, making the game more difficult and drastically changing how you play at any point as you please. You can steamroll bosses, you can fight on an even playing field, or you could forgo all those customization options and fight with the odds completely stacked against you, I adore this type of game balancing. Very often I would fight a boss with a broken build, only to reset the fight near the end and switch to a build that would make the fight more difficult for fun. I always see people complaining about games with an obscene number of options having "balancing issues" because there's some obviously broken or weak options, even with Tevi, I've seen people complain about how bosses get easier as the game progresses, due to how powerful you can get. But I feel as if this is a misconception as to what good balancing actually is, outside of competitive games, good balancing isn't having all your options be at equal strength, good balancing is giving the player a wide variety of options to choose from with those options fluctuating in strength. Tevi masters this by having everything in your base kit be around equal strength, while having everything optional being at completely fluctuating strengths that you can change at any point. Using something less powerful will not detract from the actual gameplay and force you to avoid certain skills or mechanics, it will only affect how easy the game is, and that's why I believe Tevi's balancing is genius.

Exploration is also an absolute joy. I was a bit taken off guard at first due to how different this game's approach to exploration was compared to Rabi Ribi's. While Rabi Ribi is completely freeform with what you decide to do at any given point, Tevi takes a more linear route with bosses past chapter 1 being ordered and movement options essentially being unlocked with story progression. I may still prefer how Rabi Ribi handles its freeform progression, allowing you to get even endgame gear immediately, but that isn't to say I think Tevi is too far off with its linear progression. Tevi's linearity allows for the areas to be more catered to your current gear at any point, placing more emphasis on things that you may have just unlocked, leading to Tevi having far better areas in my opinion. Tevi's individual areas are a joy to explore and there were very few points where I wasn't having a complete blast exploring them, fuck mazes tho. Re-exploring areas to find hidden items and whatnot is also extremely fun with the only complaint I actually have being the odd number of places that look they should have items or resources.

Getting some last thoughts out of the way, aesthetically Tevi is fantastic. The soundtrack is incredible and goes way harder than it has ANY right to go and visually I adore how this game looks. Boss fights look incredible ESPECIALLY in comparison to Rabi Ribi. They have some of the coolest bullet patterns and attacks I have ever seen in a game period. I also love the artstyle of this game from the fantastic pixel art to the equally as good portraits to some of the best CGs I have ever seen, the quality here is unreal and they clearly were trying to go above and beyond in this regard. I also had fun with the story, while it's nothing too crazy and the main plot is pretty basic the characters are extremely fun, and dialogue is fantastic the whole way through. I especially love the main trio & the father/daughter dynamic between Tevi & her dad, it's really cute. I have also seen people already complaining about how "horny" or "anime" this game is and to that I say to refer to my Rabi Ribi review and read through the comments bc they're pretty funny (https://www.backloggd.com/u/AiriBan/review/953999/), for a tldr y'all complaining are pussies and only have yourselves to blame, fuck you.

I prolly missed something while writing this review but oh wellsies

TLDR this game is crazy fucking good and broke any expectations I had before it released. I love Tevi.

This game fucks dude it has everything I'd ever want in a game
>Rorona except she's a loli now bc nobody wants to see her in her 30s
>Absolutely no story whatsoever
>Sterk but this time he's basically a butler and argues about stupid shit with the real Sterk
>Meruru
>Mimi and Totori being gay cg (real)
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DAGljC4dcU

Need more jrpgs with no dumbass story about killing god or saving the world, dumb bitches doing alchemy is the real deal

Why do I need 40 triangles and 15 circles to learn magic!?!?!?!
This game sucks!

Edit:
As of writing this "review" I was still under the impression that this was a "good game" and wrote this in "jest", but as of finishing this game it actually sucked dog penis, so this is now 100% serious

Crystal Project is an unfortunate one for me because on one hand I love what it's going for but on the other hand holy HELL it's bogged down by so much tedium and annoying design choices that feel very intentional and because of that becomes such a SLOGGGGGGG to play

I'll just get what I like out of the way first so I can get into the actual nitty gritty BULLSHIT I wanna talk about. I think the bosses are fucking awesome. They use the mechanics of the game to create fun boss fights that all feel unique, they're fun to build around and very seldom feel like they actually rely on RNG. I've had a ton of bosses that came down to my last character being put in a clutch or kick situation and that's badass. BASICALLY, I LIKE COUNTERBUILDING BOSSES. THIS GAME DOES THAT WELL.

Ok now time for the booboo ass shit i HATE abt this game. I THINK THE EXPLORATION FUCKING BLOWWWSSSSSSS. At the beginning I was down with it but progressing a bit more I was like damn, this shit stinks! Why's that? Well it's for a LOT of reasons. For one, I think the platforming kinda sucks most of the time and isn't fun. This may be considered quite controversial as most people I've talked to like the platforming aspect of the game a good bit. My biggest problem with the platforming is you'll often be put into situations where if you fuck up one instance of platforming you'll have to redo the entire thing due to how respawning works, that sucks. Another issue to go alongside this is a lot of the time I feel like the perspective is kinda fucked, so I'll often have to work around that which just adds to the tedium of platforming, not fun stuff. I also think the amount of encounters in areas can be super annoying especially when I don't like the normal encounters that much in the first place (we'll go over that later). Lastly, and this is probably my biggest issue with exploration, is that for some god forsaken reason they decided to make maps things you have to unlock??? Normally in super roundabout ways???? Like I get that's part of the exploration but exploring a game like this without having a map fucking blows and makes finding out where you're supposed to go next EXTREMELY tedious. Btw it's kinda up to you to find out where to go next, which I get that's part of the fun for some people but for me personally I just found it added to the tedium. This isn't a problem depending on who you are I just found that aspect of it to be annoying.

Anyways with that out of the way time to get to the actual combat. Combat is weird for me because on paper I like it and it does a lot of things right. You always know how much damage you'll do, how much delay you'll have so on and so forth. Very little is left to the imagination and nothing feels random and that's cool, I wish more jrpgs would follow suit with this. My problem mostly stems from the teambuilding options not feeling very satisfying to play around with. What I mean by this is that most jobs really don't have much fun options and it feels like the creators tried VERY hard to create something impossible to break the game with. Which is fair and I get that but at the same time this mindset restricts the classes so much to the point where I wasn't really excited to see what tools a class would give me. Most of the time upon seeing a classes skills I'd just be like "yeah ok" or "this class seems kinda bad". For a game BASED AROUND PLAYING WITH CLASSES this is NOT GOOD. If I don't shit my pants upon getting a new class literally what are you doing. I get this game is trying to create a balanced experience but it feels like I am being offered breadcrumbs instead of fun and unique classes to play with. Even the Bravely Games, which I am very lukewarm on, did this well. Yeah those games were easy to break but it's up to the player to break them, and I'm 100% fine with that because each class felt extremely unique, fun to play with and almost always felt worth using, as opposed to here where they do not.
Aside from the teambuilding options kinda sucking I found normal encounters to be tedious as all hell. Yeah bosses are sick but most of the time you'll be fighting the same encounters with an oddly high amount of HP and can do a pretty big number to you. I get wanting to make normal encounters difficult but I feel as if this misses the mark HARD and just turns them into an absolute slog. Even worse is that areas have a LOT of encounters and more often than not in dungeons they're very difficult to actually avoid meaning you'll have to go through a LOT of them which SUCKS when encounters take as long as they do. Overall not a good time.

Tldr: I like the bosses and game has some cool ideas but most of the ideas are kinda executed like shit which made this super tedious to play and made me decide to drop it.

Mfs will watch the purple girl exposition at you abt the world for the entirety of Unlimited and most of Alternative and say this is the greatest gift god has ever bestowed upon mankind. For the record, exposition is about all you'll get out of this world as the majority of Alternative takes place in one singular spot, giving you very little time to see what the hellscape of Alternative's world has to offer, cool writing man, I love hours upon hours of infodump about a world I never get to actually see aside from 3 segments. Not only this but these fellas will look at the ensemble of poopoo fart characters with 0 depth and whisper under their breath "Peak Fiction". At least Chapter 7 was cool doe!