This game is clearly ambitious and has some interesting ideas, but every inch of it is infested with the feeling of an amateur.
Firstly, the game is technically quite nice. The storybook aesthetic is complimented well with the physically flat characters, and the backgrounds are simply gorgeous. However, the characters are also a bit over-designed in a way that renders them a bit bothersome to look at. Something about the art style also makes these characters extremely hard to relate to. I’m not quite sure why this is, but I found it very distracting and not at all immersive. Not to mention the load times reaching 20-30 seconds just to enter or exit a battle. This is admittedly probably the fault of switch optimization, but there’s really no excuse when hardly any RPG has load times into battle PERIOD.
The story was fine, if underwhelming. I played for a couple hours and found it serviceable but uninteresting. I had zero interest in where it was going. The voice actors I found grating but they aren’t really doing a bad job.
The battle system is clunky, annoying, and feels like missed potential. Being able to send enemies to the past and present is a pretty cool idea, but for some reason the past is locked to enemies to your left, and same for the future on the right. The time gimmick isn’t even that fun anyway, some enemies become young and weak when you send them to the past and if you plant poison on an enemy in the present they’ll get poisoned in the future. It feels like it lacks depth that should’ve been thought out more as the main mechanic of the game. The menus in combat are controlled with four arrow directions, seemingly trying to replicate intuitive UI like Persona 5 or Yakuza, but this just missed the mark and felt like I couldn’t see my options, and I very often went to click on an enemy only to accidentally hit one of my party members. The opposite of intuitive.
All in all, this game feels like nothing more than good practice for a starting indie dev, and they are clearly quite talented. It just seems like they lacked the experience to make the ambitious game they wanted to.
Firstly, the game is technically quite nice. The storybook aesthetic is complimented well with the physically flat characters, and the backgrounds are simply gorgeous. However, the characters are also a bit over-designed in a way that renders them a bit bothersome to look at. Something about the art style also makes these characters extremely hard to relate to. I’m not quite sure why this is, but I found it very distracting and not at all immersive. Not to mention the load times reaching 20-30 seconds just to enter or exit a battle. This is admittedly probably the fault of switch optimization, but there’s really no excuse when hardly any RPG has load times into battle PERIOD.
The story was fine, if underwhelming. I played for a couple hours and found it serviceable but uninteresting. I had zero interest in where it was going. The voice actors I found grating but they aren’t really doing a bad job.
The battle system is clunky, annoying, and feels like missed potential. Being able to send enemies to the past and present is a pretty cool idea, but for some reason the past is locked to enemies to your left, and same for the future on the right. The time gimmick isn’t even that fun anyway, some enemies become young and weak when you send them to the past and if you plant poison on an enemy in the present they’ll get poisoned in the future. It feels like it lacks depth that should’ve been thought out more as the main mechanic of the game. The menus in combat are controlled with four arrow directions, seemingly trying to replicate intuitive UI like Persona 5 or Yakuza, but this just missed the mark and felt like I couldn’t see my options, and I very often went to click on an enemy only to accidentally hit one of my party members. The opposite of intuitive.
All in all, this game feels like nothing more than good practice for a starting indie dev, and they are clearly quite talented. It just seems like they lacked the experience to make the ambitious game they wanted to.