A turn based RPG built around having a card and tabletop roleplaying aesthetic for visuals and narrative, neither of which it takes advantage of. Leaving it a short, overpriced, mostly mediocre RPG.
The visuals of the game are based around cards, this includes the menus, the characters and enemies, the map and dungeons you move around on are cards that flip over to reveal terrain as you move, during battles your equipped skills show up as cards with art and their description on them. As a game styled around a tabletop RPG, the story, events, character dialogue, and sometimes just descriptions or hints as you explore are narrated by an out of sight game master.
At a glance I would have assumed I would have enjoyed the game quite a bit because of how much I like those two things but it ended up being a fairly dull playthrough that takes advantage of neither of the elements the game is built around. With the fairly ridiculously high price of the game (as well as needless cosmetic DLC), especially with all the indies that have done much more interesting GM and/or card focused RPG games, they could certainly have gone further at making the card aesthetic a lot more visually interesting with less generic tiles you move on, the monsters you fight and your character skills could have had cool looking detailed artwork like you would get out of something like Magic/Lord of the Rings LCG/Netrunner/etc instead of just a generic small variety of monsters just drawn in a rectangle or weapon and element symbol with text of what skills do, the characters could have been drawn onto cards in different ways or on not just generic blank backgrounds to show emotion and be more visually interesting. What could have been a much more interesting world to explore ends up being fairly generic. The style actually lead them to having some other issues. Everything is a bit slower than it should be and the odd card style of the menus make them slow and more of a chore to navigate than they should be, even lacking basic functions like cycling through characters with the shoulder or trigger buttons when you are swapping out equipment (it all functions even worse with a mouse and keyboard). I used no combat items in the game until the final battle but for some odd reason instead of limiting the max number of certain kinds of items you can hold they give you an inventory limit of 30 total items. This lead to a lot moments in the last 1/3 of the game where I would find a chest and be given a useless item or finish a battle and be rewarded with a useless item that would then slowly bring up a text about having too many items before slowly taking me to a screen where I can slowly choose one item to throw away before being allowed to move on.
The GM narration focus is also a thing that really doesn't go anywhere. He's just kind of there to only need to pay one voice actor and for some reason to give away any hints when a dungeon does anything different (dungeon has walls that turn into doors when you move onto them, "Why don't you try moving there"). The entire Game Master thing is never really used to add anything to the world and ends up just taking away from it, even more so because the added assumption of having a GM would be that the characters would have their own players but it's just the GM narrating what few inner thoughts or actions they take.
What you end up being left with is a short, overpriced, and mostly mediocre RPG. What little story there is can have a few moments of humor but doesn't offer much for world or character building. Every town will have the same shops and a couple people to talk to, you can explore three larger landmasses near towns to find the dungeons or other towns you need to go to or to run into often repeating random events. There is never really anything interesting to the design of dungeons, the biggest thing they do is put some spikes in some tiles right before you reach the end boss that you just don't want to step on to avoid taking any damage (these spikes are clearly visible, though one of the character's best weapons does require you to just walk through a couple spikes to reveal a chest a few spaces in). There are no route deviations or big side quests as it is a primarily linear game, you can get four choices for your ending that will amount to a few lines before the credits roll.
Most of your time playing will be taking a few steps, getting into a random battle, and completely destroying those enemies (over and over and over again because the low enemy variety doesn't help things). If you remember to upgrade your equipment at new shops, 80% of battles will be over before enemies can even get an attack off. With an ice attack spell that can freeze enemies permanently and causes you to break them out of the ice but do double damage when you hit them, even the first couple bosses didn't get to attack me. You start off with a party of three characters and get two more characters to join you over time, one coming fairly late but you have a limitation I've never been a fan of of only being able to use three characters at once but then two of the characters seem more focused on buffing or having some defensive skills and this is a game where healing and buffing has no use 99% of the time. At least this is one of the games that doesn't make the mistake of older titles and the characters in reserve still gain full XP from battles. As characters level up and change their equipment they can add to their health, attack (which influences all skills be they melee, ranged, or magic), defense, and speed and gain access to a few passive skills they always have (mostly element or status effect resistance), and active skills of which they can equip four of. In battle your skills are powered by crystals, you start a battle with one and gain another at the start of every character's turn. A basic attack costs nothing but using more powerful or status effecting skills can cost between 1-4, so you will want use your heavier hitting skills or skills that enemies are weak to while focusing on basic attacks or turn passive to help prepare stronger attacks.
While the battle system works and can be simple and enjoyable at times, the AI is terrible. In addition to all those times where enemies just couldn't do anything there will be so many times where when they do get to act they will try to do something like buff itself as it is near death and all of your characters move next. You will frequently see an enemy use a turn to slightly debuff one characters defense or elemental defense, often to a degree less than what their hit damage would have done only to then have their other allies attack other non debuffed characters. One positive here is that even with the battles taking place with the card visual style the attack animations do have varied effects for every type of skill and additional critical hit they can do while moving the cards around, making it a bit more visually interesting than the what you would get with the old first person kind of Dragon Quest/Wizardry battles that the animations would resemble otherwise.
It's a simple and fairly quick play (taking me about 9 hours) with a few funny moments but with all the good ideas aesthetically and mechanically or ideas that can be used in a much more interesting way it doesn't take advantage of anything and when it is selling for $30-$40+ there are a lot of other games with some similar themes that are worth more, cost less, and support an indie studio.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1686640421357985792
The visuals of the game are based around cards, this includes the menus, the characters and enemies, the map and dungeons you move around on are cards that flip over to reveal terrain as you move, during battles your equipped skills show up as cards with art and their description on them. As a game styled around a tabletop RPG, the story, events, character dialogue, and sometimes just descriptions or hints as you explore are narrated by an out of sight game master.
At a glance I would have assumed I would have enjoyed the game quite a bit because of how much I like those two things but it ended up being a fairly dull playthrough that takes advantage of neither of the elements the game is built around. With the fairly ridiculously high price of the game (as well as needless cosmetic DLC), especially with all the indies that have done much more interesting GM and/or card focused RPG games, they could certainly have gone further at making the card aesthetic a lot more visually interesting with less generic tiles you move on, the monsters you fight and your character skills could have had cool looking detailed artwork like you would get out of something like Magic/Lord of the Rings LCG/Netrunner/etc instead of just a generic small variety of monsters just drawn in a rectangle or weapon and element symbol with text of what skills do, the characters could have been drawn onto cards in different ways or on not just generic blank backgrounds to show emotion and be more visually interesting. What could have been a much more interesting world to explore ends up being fairly generic. The style actually lead them to having some other issues. Everything is a bit slower than it should be and the odd card style of the menus make them slow and more of a chore to navigate than they should be, even lacking basic functions like cycling through characters with the shoulder or trigger buttons when you are swapping out equipment (it all functions even worse with a mouse and keyboard). I used no combat items in the game until the final battle but for some odd reason instead of limiting the max number of certain kinds of items you can hold they give you an inventory limit of 30 total items. This lead to a lot moments in the last 1/3 of the game where I would find a chest and be given a useless item or finish a battle and be rewarded with a useless item that would then slowly bring up a text about having too many items before slowly taking me to a screen where I can slowly choose one item to throw away before being allowed to move on.
The GM narration focus is also a thing that really doesn't go anywhere. He's just kind of there to only need to pay one voice actor and for some reason to give away any hints when a dungeon does anything different (dungeon has walls that turn into doors when you move onto them, "Why don't you try moving there"). The entire Game Master thing is never really used to add anything to the world and ends up just taking away from it, even more so because the added assumption of having a GM would be that the characters would have their own players but it's just the GM narrating what few inner thoughts or actions they take.
What you end up being left with is a short, overpriced, and mostly mediocre RPG. What little story there is can have a few moments of humor but doesn't offer much for world or character building. Every town will have the same shops and a couple people to talk to, you can explore three larger landmasses near towns to find the dungeons or other towns you need to go to or to run into often repeating random events. There is never really anything interesting to the design of dungeons, the biggest thing they do is put some spikes in some tiles right before you reach the end boss that you just don't want to step on to avoid taking any damage (these spikes are clearly visible, though one of the character's best weapons does require you to just walk through a couple spikes to reveal a chest a few spaces in). There are no route deviations or big side quests as it is a primarily linear game, you can get four choices for your ending that will amount to a few lines before the credits roll.
Most of your time playing will be taking a few steps, getting into a random battle, and completely destroying those enemies (over and over and over again because the low enemy variety doesn't help things). If you remember to upgrade your equipment at new shops, 80% of battles will be over before enemies can even get an attack off. With an ice attack spell that can freeze enemies permanently and causes you to break them out of the ice but do double damage when you hit them, even the first couple bosses didn't get to attack me. You start off with a party of three characters and get two more characters to join you over time, one coming fairly late but you have a limitation I've never been a fan of of only being able to use three characters at once but then two of the characters seem more focused on buffing or having some defensive skills and this is a game where healing and buffing has no use 99% of the time. At least this is one of the games that doesn't make the mistake of older titles and the characters in reserve still gain full XP from battles. As characters level up and change their equipment they can add to their health, attack (which influences all skills be they melee, ranged, or magic), defense, and speed and gain access to a few passive skills they always have (mostly element or status effect resistance), and active skills of which they can equip four of. In battle your skills are powered by crystals, you start a battle with one and gain another at the start of every character's turn. A basic attack costs nothing but using more powerful or status effecting skills can cost between 1-4, so you will want use your heavier hitting skills or skills that enemies are weak to while focusing on basic attacks or turn passive to help prepare stronger attacks.
While the battle system works and can be simple and enjoyable at times, the AI is terrible. In addition to all those times where enemies just couldn't do anything there will be so many times where when they do get to act they will try to do something like buff itself as it is near death and all of your characters move next. You will frequently see an enemy use a turn to slightly debuff one characters defense or elemental defense, often to a degree less than what their hit damage would have done only to then have their other allies attack other non debuffed characters. One positive here is that even with the battles taking place with the card visual style the attack animations do have varied effects for every type of skill and additional critical hit they can do while moving the cards around, making it a bit more visually interesting than the what you would get with the old first person kind of Dragon Quest/Wizardry battles that the animations would resemble otherwise.
It's a simple and fairly quick play (taking me about 9 hours) with a few funny moments but with all the good ideas aesthetically and mechanically or ideas that can be used in a much more interesting way it doesn't take advantage of anything and when it is selling for $30-$40+ there are a lot of other games with some similar themes that are worth more, cost less, and support an indie studio.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1686640421357985792