Lost in Random oozes charme from every corner - at the same time many of other corners were cut. There are multiple points during a playthrough where certain parts of the story are so incredibly rushed that they gotta have to have been scrapped mid-development, other times the quest summary in the menu tells a completely different story than the one you actually got to experience and 60% of the cards you could use in combat are absolutely useless. There is a lot of transparency in how many things were changend during development - they didn't clean them up very well.
But I still had a lot of fun with the game. The gameplay kept me entertained throughout my 12hr playthrough, the presentation of the entire game was consistently brilliant and even the overall story was quite fun to witness in the end. Special shoutout to the sound team tho. You ppl KILLED it, especially with the VO for the characters. Every single character becomes so charming trough the voice work alone (which is direly necessary when there are like 15 models that get reused over and over again).
There are also some legit amazing moments in this, where everything - gameplay, music, and all of the visual stuff - just works so, so well together. And for those moments I will treasure this game. The rest is fine, good enough. Those cut corners are also... weirdly charming? in a way?
ps. there is I think a lot to be said about gender in this game - moreso by accident I think. Those fifteen reused character models get voices of varying gender associations and the pronouns of each character do quite often not coincide with that association - which for me at least resulted in me not assuming any characters gender at some point. At the same time, as soon as there is some degree of narrative tropes, everything is kept strictly heteronormative. There's a lot to talk about here.
But I still had a lot of fun with the game. The gameplay kept me entertained throughout my 12hr playthrough, the presentation of the entire game was consistently brilliant and even the overall story was quite fun to witness in the end. Special shoutout to the sound team tho. You ppl KILLED it, especially with the VO for the characters. Every single character becomes so charming trough the voice work alone (which is direly necessary when there are like 15 models that get reused over and over again).
There are also some legit amazing moments in this, where everything - gameplay, music, and all of the visual stuff - just works so, so well together. And for those moments I will treasure this game. The rest is fine, good enough. Those cut corners are also... weirdly charming? in a way?
ps. there is I think a lot to be said about gender in this game - moreso by accident I think. Those fifteen reused character models get voices of varying gender associations and the pronouns of each character do quite often not coincide with that association - which for me at least resulted in me not assuming any characters gender at some point. At the same time, as soon as there is some degree of narrative tropes, everything is kept strictly heteronormative. There's a lot to talk about here.