Damn, I really wished that I liked Jack Move. I bought it for a small discount, mostly because I'm prone to try new little JRPGs and I found the battle screenshots to be very appealing.
This is the kind of indie JRPG that is betrayed by its short length. Take a good look at the characters at the cover of the game: these are all the characters that you're going to see for the whole of the story. You have one friend, one mentor, a missing dad, and a couple of villains. All the characters are tropey and one-dimensional, and plot-wise, the story can't do much, because we don't have a lot of pieces to work with. (I'm thinking about red herrings, plot twists, you can't do this plot embellishment stuff without some extra characters to create distractions.)
The dungeon design is very basic, but I liked it. The upgrade system feels as undercooked as the quantity of relevant characters: you can buy everything the game has to offer in a couple of hours, and then just spam your best moves until the end of the game, a couple of hours later.
The combat makes a good first impression, but it is just a basic "triangle strategy" kind of deal. You have three different types of moves, and three different types of enemies (color-coded). You look at the color of the enemy and choose the skill that does the most damage to that one color. Worse, still: they use the color-code thing to reutilize enemy types, and the game does it too fast.
It's pretty basic stuff and the game does feel like a demo. I don't know, it's not like the game doesn't have any qualities. The art is great to look at (although it doesn't convey verticality well enough, making some traversal segments unnecessarily confusing). There is some cool music. But, all in all, it feels lacking and too expensive for what it is.
This is the kind of indie JRPG that is betrayed by its short length. Take a good look at the characters at the cover of the game: these are all the characters that you're going to see for the whole of the story. You have one friend, one mentor, a missing dad, and a couple of villains. All the characters are tropey and one-dimensional, and plot-wise, the story can't do much, because we don't have a lot of pieces to work with. (I'm thinking about red herrings, plot twists, you can't do this plot embellishment stuff without some extra characters to create distractions.)
The dungeon design is very basic, but I liked it. The upgrade system feels as undercooked as the quantity of relevant characters: you can buy everything the game has to offer in a couple of hours, and then just spam your best moves until the end of the game, a couple of hours later.
The combat makes a good first impression, but it is just a basic "triangle strategy" kind of deal. You have three different types of moves, and three different types of enemies (color-coded). You look at the color of the enemy and choose the skill that does the most damage to that one color. Worse, still: they use the color-code thing to reutilize enemy types, and the game does it too fast.
It's pretty basic stuff and the game does feel like a demo. I don't know, it's not like the game doesn't have any qualities. The art is great to look at (although it doesn't convey verticality well enough, making some traversal segments unnecessarily confusing). There is some cool music. But, all in all, it feels lacking and too expensive for what it is.