Another 'mining themed' game I played for an hour. This one has three types of ore which you randomly find and can be used to upgrade your equipment. You couldn't really use knowledge to 'optimize a hunt for copper/silver/gold,' rather you just have to invest enough time until the ore you want spawns. Deeper levels of the game give you more ore, but the structure means you have to always navigate easier random dungeons to get there.

The combat fundamentals are decent for a simple platformer-action game, although the real issue is that this plays too much like a regular action game, so the roguelike elements wear thin when you repeat runs as rooms require you to kill all enemies. It's like if you had to clear Dungeon 1 in zelda every time you died in Dungeon 2. So even if I'm interested in trying to beat Boss 2, I have to play through a lot of easy/boring content to try again...

There's not necessarily anything wrong with making you start at the surface, but it works better in something designed around that like Isaac or Spelunky - floors aren't too long nor grindy and it's focused on mixing emergent combat situations together, or lots of item/equipment combos.

Played in Japanese on PS4. Got partway through the Quatre chapter (in the science town).

The game uses the classic "cast of 8" JRPG ensemble, characters introduced each chapter. I think this game is too long (I'm 2-3x as slow playing in Japanese due to the amount and difficulty of reading here), though part of that is exhaustion with playing in a second language. It's an 60-80 hour RPG with regular timing.

As a Trails fan (who frustratedly put up with the entire ho-hum Cold Steel series), Kuro makes some nice and positive moves for the series. The lead, Van, seems to actually have a canon romance, there isn't any creepy harem dating shit, and other characters seem to have romances of their own as well as interesting ties to organizations or their home cities.

I love the battle system changes - most of the time you can just hack away in dungeons, and more fast-paced Trails-y turn-based combat feels really good! I got the sense that it's easier overall than past games, but I play on Normal difficulty so who knows. That being said, there isn't any real tension in the dungeons. It mostly feels like padding before the next plot beat.

I still feel like the Massive Countries within the Kuro arc has similar problems to Cold Steel - you get a pretty disjointed sense of the entire world, and things start to feel cyclic/repetitive after a while.

Well, I'm not sure if I'll finish Kuro 1, but I'll probably still try out Kuro 2 (or at least watch the series to the end...what's gonna happen??)

Neat and robust RPG Maker game where you strategize a bit about how to 'equip' your rooms so that you make money from the guests. Seems to have the entire Harvest Moon arc going too - learning mysteries about the town, unlocking new areas, expanding stores, etc. I appreciate how that experience is condensed and how little character arcs dot the gameplay experience.

Overall I felt the writing style to be a bit dry/well-trodden and just good enough to get the job done, but the creator does express a love for this kind of British(?) period setting, so I appreciate that.

The game has a sort of subtle sense of humor that was interesting. Maybe a bit stereotyped... I mean, the name of the game... has a bit of those early 2010s "Things Asian Parents Do" youtube vibes, but it's interesting as this comes from a Chinese developer.

That being said, as far as stat life sims go, it had some fun systems like the stat grid. It got tedious/boring after too many times though, and I wasn't interested enough to play the game past one generation. The girl friendship system just felt totally random, and the endings weren't that satisfying, at least the one I got. Maybe if it was a bit easier to hunt for endings or something, I don't know...

Final Judgment: A sloppy "Ys Oath"-like with poor level design and a so-so JRPG story with uninteresting characters and padded out dialogue. Has a few interesting ideas here and there but doesn't add up to much.

-----
Other Thoughts:

So far, I like the bosses - you can bring food in and heal your way through the fight, but they're more fun if you try to not heal at all. It feels kind of like Ys Oath/6/0, but slightly sloppier? Hitboxes are iffier, the camera is tilted too low. Being able to magic-bullet spam with the girl while dodging reminds me of the fighting style in later Gunvolt games.

Dungeon design is repetitive/mini-map-watching focused. It's hard to get a sense of where you are in the scene, and there haven't been any interesting puzzles. The enemies can sometimes have interesting designs but the game gives you a lot of tools to make most combat encounters trivial.

The dungeons have a grading system around not taking damage, breaking all the pots, and finishing in a certain time. It's... not a very interesting grading system - I don't think the game has enough precision for a 'no damage' achievement to be 'fair'. But I guess it adds a tiny bit of replayability. (The grading system gives you points towards your Hunter Rank - similar to Bracer Rank if you've ever played Trails in the Sky). I would be interested in a low-hit run, but taking zero hits in sometimes 5-10 minute levels is too much!

Setting/story is fun - that mid-2000s tsundere girl/happy go lucky guy pair protagonists vibe. Nothing particularly deep, very light. Very 2000s Falcom, too. Has a bit of Gurumin! to it as well.

I like how the world is compact (well, certainly there will be a 'there's more!' jrpg world reveal, but atm it is compact!). Each time you clear a dungeon the dialogue of all NPCs gets refreshed, which is very Falcom-y.

The UI Widget items were cool, though. Kind of a funny idea... put a pedometer on the UI, or a widget to let you solve math problems, or something that reveals the tricky timing behind critical hits!

There's a weird system to leveling. Enemies drop food, and you can eat food for healing AND EXP in a dungeon. OR, you can try to obtain 10 of a food, and trade it in for a higher-grade food that gives 50% more EXP.

It seems to incentivize grinding or like, staying underleveled near the end of a dungeon. It feels like they wanted to keep leveling limited to after clearing levels, rather than within levels - by making food also heal, you're less likely to waste it all in the middle of a level (as you might need it later to heal.)

I wonder if it was some weird attempt at fixing how in Ys games you just end up overpowering everything by the end. It's hard for me to tell if the food 'works'... because the levels themselves aren't very hard to begin with. So far, I've just ended up saving all my food and trading it in for better food so I can be at a decent level for the boss.

Casual town-builder that is overall feels like optimization puzzle. The interface is a little bit slow and information is organized kind of weird. There were a few discoveries to make in terms of how to best grow the town, but it was annoying to constantly cross-reference the structure evolution paths and keep in mind what needed to go where. Progressing time felt a bit needlessly slow even at 4X. The "Goddesses"' dialogue was... unique at what it was going for (this sort of 'maid' vibe) but they all felt a little similar with repeated text.

There's a metaprogression that makes it easier to score well on levels. I didn't like that simply because it made me feel less able to gauge how well I was actually doing the levels...?

I played a few hours but there were still more mechanics to see. This is really easy to get into and simple to start for a town builder, though, so it was fun to learn about the genre.

Kevin and Ries's story is nice and well done, I love the bonus content and emotional wrap-ups we get for all of Sky's other characters. It's an amazing sendoff to the Sky series and sets up the rest of the trails games nicely (even if those later games aren't that great)

Gameplay-wise, the game is a bunch of long dungeons, some REALLY sprawling and maze-like. I was already pretty sick of the battles by Sky 2, so I wasn't really into them here, either. Thematically, I did like the weird, distorted dungeons that were warped versions of areas in Sky, but playing through them was just kinda whatever...

Love some of the music!