Of the indie RPGs I’ve played so far, this is the one that’s understood how to capture the classic JRPG appeal the best, from the combat system to the story scenario and presentation. I don’t mean this as an insult to most RPGmaker games or anything, as they usually have different goals and strengths as a final product, but that this one is very explicitly aiming to scratch that itch for people who love the 16-bit classics like Chrono Trigger and FFVI. The systems it crafts have their missteps, which I’ll get into, but it gets enough right that the overall experience is very much worth it.
Combat encounters take place on the field after entering an enemy’s proximity with very little transition into battle, making the background of each fight different. Very notably, your resources minus the ultra bar reset at the beginning of every battle—eliminating the need for resource management on the field. Most people will see this as a convenience, and I’m pretty inclined to agree (or at least say that it works well here) as it allows each encounter to challenge the player without having to account for all your characters being unable to use their best moves. You’re also guaranteed an escape from these battles, however the enemies will still block your path meaning that you’ll have to beat them either way. My only annoyance is that the rewards for fighting don’t feel all that significant due to how progression works in this game, but I’ll get into that later. Basically how this works in practice is that battles are obstacles first and a way to get stronger second.
The battle system borrows from one of my favorite turn based systems to take inspiration from: FFX’s. Turns are decided based on each character’s agility, with characters who are fast enough sometimes getting more than one turn in before someone with a lower agility stat. Also after a certain point, you’ll have more than four party members and be able to switch freely with reserve characters during battle. One difference here is that instead of you being able to switch with any reserve party member, each character has to be linked with another when you set up your formation—putting limits on when you can switch to that character and who can be in battle with them simultaneously. For instance, I had my fastest character linked to a healer, so that she would get the most turns in battle and be able to switch out for a heal the easiest at the cost of me having to wait a bit until I could switch back because my healer was a lot slower. I like the strategy this offers for setting up your team, as I had to experiment with it for a few battles before settling into a formation I liked whenever changes were made to my party lineup. The only thing that lets this down is that unlike FFX, the game doesn’t really design enemies around you switching all that much. Like in that game, you were incentivized to use Tidus against evasive enemies, Wakka against flying enemies, and Auron against armored enemies, but nothing like that happens here so ultimately I settled into a party by the mid game with most other characters keeping the bench warm. I think it’s mainly early on that I got the most enjoyment out of this option when each character’s options were still fairly limited so they all had a unique niche of sorts, because after a certain point there’s just some characters whose stats aren’t as favorable as someone else who can effectively do many of the same things.
The other important aspect of combat is something I haven’t seen anywhere else at least, which is the drive meter. As you perform actions, a slider is pushed further down a bar and you are incentivized to make it stay within a certain range. You can lower it by defending, swapping characters, or performing an action of a corresponding type shown next to the meter. This is an interesting addition as it seemingly discourages spamming the same moves and encourages diversifying your party and swapping between members frequently. I think it’s another aspect of the battle system that works best early on and loses relevance later in the game except during boss fights. This is mainly because you’ll learn how to tear through regular encounters after a certain point while boss fights being longer mean you’ll need to dial it back a bit so as not to overheat. The other complaint I have with it is that enemy actions increase the gauge as well, which often times can be the primary source of frustration when taking on an optional fight with a lot of enemies and there’s basically nothing you can do to not be overheating because of THEIR actions. In case you needed any more reason to avoid using slower characters, that’s a big one right there.
So while the on foot combat is flawed but overall very enjoyable, there’s another form of combat to talk about: mech battles. While they’re not bad, I feel as if they take a step back from the strategy of the main combat. There’s no more swapping so you’re locked to the same four party members for every battle, which makes the overdrive meter the primary mechanic of the system. You can perform actions in one of three gears: 0 which restricts you to basic actions while restoring your resources and doesn’t move the slider at all, 1 which is your default setting and moves the slider right (the same direction that enemy actions move it!), and 2 which makes actions more powerful but more costly while moving the slider left. So overall it’s fine for what it is but I just don’t enjoy it quite as much.
As I alluded to earlier, the part of combat that’s really the most disappointing is how it doesn’t feel all that rewarding to actually fight enemies as they serve as obstacles more than a way to gain experience. I want to be fair to this game’s progression system as I understand what it’s going for and appreciate a couple of the conveniences it offers. In this game’s attempt to eliminate grinding, the only “level ups” you get will be from defeating bosses. This allows the game to dictate around what power level you’ll be for specific fights, so that you won’t be too over or under leveled for them. That doesn’t mean you get nothing from regular battles, as they drop items and SP which can level up your skills (this will also become mostly irrelevant later), but it’s significantly less of a reward from other games. Each level up gives you a point to invest in either a battle skill, passive skill, or stat increase, with the first two options being things that you have limited slots for—meaning that once you have a kit to work with everything else goes into stat increases until you’ve run out of those. It also restricts which ones you can select until you’ve spent enough of these points, so sometimes you just have to invest in something you have no plans to use. At the end of the game I was just picking things at random for most of my party because it literally didn’t matter anymore, and even before that sometimes I almost didn’t want to level up because then I’d have to choose which skill to waste the point on. This system works. It is functional. But I did not find it satisfying as a means of seeing my characters grow.
The mech progression system is a bit more traditional but still kind of annoying. As you use weapons in battle, you gain SP and reach higher levels with them which give you stat boosts and new actions. That’s pretty alright on its own, but then if you want any stat boosts after that you’ve gotta start all over with a new set of weapons and learn new moves with them—leaving behind all the ones you had on your previous weapons. I guess it encourages switching around your party’s composition and again it’s fine and functions but it’s not fun to go from eight moves to two because you don’t want to have mediocre stats.
One thing I will praise the mechs for is their use in exploration. I actually had quite a bit of fun flying around areas I’d been through previously on foot and being able to check just about every corner of the map thanks to their capabilities. The game limits you somewhat in terms of where you can land or takeoff in pretty smart ways so that later areas aren’t too easy to just plow through, and it adds an extra challenge to finding secrets in the rest of the areas. This is probably the most fun I’ve had backtracking through the map to find chests I missed, upgrades I could still use, or even areas I could reach before. So the overall addition of these actually ended up being pretty neat even if I didn’t enjoy fighting in them as much as I did on foot.
The one aspect of the progression system I’d call a complete flop is the upgrade and gem system. I don’t know if this was in Xenogears since I haven’t played it yet (it’s cited as one of the inspirations) but it did remind me quite a bit of how the gems worked in Xenoblade where you’d find a deposit and you could put them into weapons. The problem with this is that you aren’t holding onto weapons long enough for it to be worth investing into them. I might find a nice gem that suits a character’s fighting style, but then I switch to better equipment two hours later and lose that bonus. So I didn’t really feel encouraged to use these. Same with upgrading weapons, as it costs crafting materials and money when I might just stumble across a better one later. I think the only time I really let myself use these except at the beginning when I first experimented with them was right before the final boss because at least THEN I knew I had the equipment I’d be using.
I don’t want to go into detail about the story here, but overall I liked it too. Similarly to the gameplay there’s some things that I maybe wasn’t totally sold on but when I look at the big picture of it everything fits together pretty well. Glenn especially grew on me as a protagonist, who at first I felt pretty neutral towards as he reminded me of other characters I’d seen done better but later on his arc really came into its own. It makes me even more interested to see how other games like Xenogears influenced this one. The story also has its fair share of subversions, but overall it doesn’t feel like something that set out to flip the genre on its head or anything so much as just play on a few expectations for narrative purposes and it does so pretty well.
I also really liked how the sidequests were handled, with the game making it pretty clear where to find most of them. Each one continued on a narrative thread that the story had left off and seeing that smaller part of the story get a proper conclusion made doing the quest feel very worthwhile. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that most of them feel like they’re part of the main story itself. There’s a couple that set up major points later in the story so much that I’m legitimately not sure how it would’ve handled these plot points if I hadn’t done the quests. I had to look it up to see if there were multiple endings perhaps if you hadn’t done them but no there’s just one, so honestly I don’t know how it’s done but my guess is the concept just gets explained differently. I said that most of them were easy to find, but I ended up missing at least a couple, and after reading a bit about one of them I felt a sense of regret at not having done it because it followed up on a party member’s character arc in a way that I felt was lacking in the main story (meaning I have to look it up later to either do it if I can or watch it). So while you could maybe argue that it’s a disappointment that the main story doesn’t tackle everything that it could, I don’t necessarily mind it being handled in sidequests especially since I like feeling rewarded for doing them.
Anyway, I hope this didn’t sound too negative since I legitimately enjoyed my time with this a lot and appreciated its efforts in capturing this many of the aspects that make JRPGs so special. Most of these complaints are more nitpicks rather than major flaws, and I’m also a huge nerd about turn-based combat and progression systems. This makes me hope that the team makes more RPGs in the future, because they’re very clearly on the right track here.
Combat encounters take place on the field after entering an enemy’s proximity with very little transition into battle, making the background of each fight different. Very notably, your resources minus the ultra bar reset at the beginning of every battle—eliminating the need for resource management on the field. Most people will see this as a convenience, and I’m pretty inclined to agree (or at least say that it works well here) as it allows each encounter to challenge the player without having to account for all your characters being unable to use their best moves. You’re also guaranteed an escape from these battles, however the enemies will still block your path meaning that you’ll have to beat them either way. My only annoyance is that the rewards for fighting don’t feel all that significant due to how progression works in this game, but I’ll get into that later. Basically how this works in practice is that battles are obstacles first and a way to get stronger second.
The battle system borrows from one of my favorite turn based systems to take inspiration from: FFX’s. Turns are decided based on each character’s agility, with characters who are fast enough sometimes getting more than one turn in before someone with a lower agility stat. Also after a certain point, you’ll have more than four party members and be able to switch freely with reserve characters during battle. One difference here is that instead of you being able to switch with any reserve party member, each character has to be linked with another when you set up your formation—putting limits on when you can switch to that character and who can be in battle with them simultaneously. For instance, I had my fastest character linked to a healer, so that she would get the most turns in battle and be able to switch out for a heal the easiest at the cost of me having to wait a bit until I could switch back because my healer was a lot slower. I like the strategy this offers for setting up your team, as I had to experiment with it for a few battles before settling into a formation I liked whenever changes were made to my party lineup. The only thing that lets this down is that unlike FFX, the game doesn’t really design enemies around you switching all that much. Like in that game, you were incentivized to use Tidus against evasive enemies, Wakka against flying enemies, and Auron against armored enemies, but nothing like that happens here so ultimately I settled into a party by the mid game with most other characters keeping the bench warm. I think it’s mainly early on that I got the most enjoyment out of this option when each character’s options were still fairly limited so they all had a unique niche of sorts, because after a certain point there’s just some characters whose stats aren’t as favorable as someone else who can effectively do many of the same things.
The other important aspect of combat is something I haven’t seen anywhere else at least, which is the drive meter. As you perform actions, a slider is pushed further down a bar and you are incentivized to make it stay within a certain range. You can lower it by defending, swapping characters, or performing an action of a corresponding type shown next to the meter. This is an interesting addition as it seemingly discourages spamming the same moves and encourages diversifying your party and swapping between members frequently. I think it’s another aspect of the battle system that works best early on and loses relevance later in the game except during boss fights. This is mainly because you’ll learn how to tear through regular encounters after a certain point while boss fights being longer mean you’ll need to dial it back a bit so as not to overheat. The other complaint I have with it is that enemy actions increase the gauge as well, which often times can be the primary source of frustration when taking on an optional fight with a lot of enemies and there’s basically nothing you can do to not be overheating because of THEIR actions. In case you needed any more reason to avoid using slower characters, that’s a big one right there.
So while the on foot combat is flawed but overall very enjoyable, there’s another form of combat to talk about: mech battles. While they’re not bad, I feel as if they take a step back from the strategy of the main combat. There’s no more swapping so you’re locked to the same four party members for every battle, which makes the overdrive meter the primary mechanic of the system. You can perform actions in one of three gears: 0 which restricts you to basic actions while restoring your resources and doesn’t move the slider at all, 1 which is your default setting and moves the slider right (the same direction that enemy actions move it!), and 2 which makes actions more powerful but more costly while moving the slider left. So overall it’s fine for what it is but I just don’t enjoy it quite as much.
As I alluded to earlier, the part of combat that’s really the most disappointing is how it doesn’t feel all that rewarding to actually fight enemies as they serve as obstacles more than a way to gain experience. I want to be fair to this game’s progression system as I understand what it’s going for and appreciate a couple of the conveniences it offers. In this game’s attempt to eliminate grinding, the only “level ups” you get will be from defeating bosses. This allows the game to dictate around what power level you’ll be for specific fights, so that you won’t be too over or under leveled for them. That doesn’t mean you get nothing from regular battles, as they drop items and SP which can level up your skills (this will also become mostly irrelevant later), but it’s significantly less of a reward from other games. Each level up gives you a point to invest in either a battle skill, passive skill, or stat increase, with the first two options being things that you have limited slots for—meaning that once you have a kit to work with everything else goes into stat increases until you’ve run out of those. It also restricts which ones you can select until you’ve spent enough of these points, so sometimes you just have to invest in something you have no plans to use. At the end of the game I was just picking things at random for most of my party because it literally didn’t matter anymore, and even before that sometimes I almost didn’t want to level up because then I’d have to choose which skill to waste the point on. This system works. It is functional. But I did not find it satisfying as a means of seeing my characters grow.
The mech progression system is a bit more traditional but still kind of annoying. As you use weapons in battle, you gain SP and reach higher levels with them which give you stat boosts and new actions. That’s pretty alright on its own, but then if you want any stat boosts after that you’ve gotta start all over with a new set of weapons and learn new moves with them—leaving behind all the ones you had on your previous weapons. I guess it encourages switching around your party’s composition and again it’s fine and functions but it’s not fun to go from eight moves to two because you don’t want to have mediocre stats.
One thing I will praise the mechs for is their use in exploration. I actually had quite a bit of fun flying around areas I’d been through previously on foot and being able to check just about every corner of the map thanks to their capabilities. The game limits you somewhat in terms of where you can land or takeoff in pretty smart ways so that later areas aren’t too easy to just plow through, and it adds an extra challenge to finding secrets in the rest of the areas. This is probably the most fun I’ve had backtracking through the map to find chests I missed, upgrades I could still use, or even areas I could reach before. So the overall addition of these actually ended up being pretty neat even if I didn’t enjoy fighting in them as much as I did on foot.
The one aspect of the progression system I’d call a complete flop is the upgrade and gem system. I don’t know if this was in Xenogears since I haven’t played it yet (it’s cited as one of the inspirations) but it did remind me quite a bit of how the gems worked in Xenoblade where you’d find a deposit and you could put them into weapons. The problem with this is that you aren’t holding onto weapons long enough for it to be worth investing into them. I might find a nice gem that suits a character’s fighting style, but then I switch to better equipment two hours later and lose that bonus. So I didn’t really feel encouraged to use these. Same with upgrading weapons, as it costs crafting materials and money when I might just stumble across a better one later. I think the only time I really let myself use these except at the beginning when I first experimented with them was right before the final boss because at least THEN I knew I had the equipment I’d be using.
I don’t want to go into detail about the story here, but overall I liked it too. Similarly to the gameplay there’s some things that I maybe wasn’t totally sold on but when I look at the big picture of it everything fits together pretty well. Glenn especially grew on me as a protagonist, who at first I felt pretty neutral towards as he reminded me of other characters I’d seen done better but later on his arc really came into its own. It makes me even more interested to see how other games like Xenogears influenced this one. The story also has its fair share of subversions, but overall it doesn’t feel like something that set out to flip the genre on its head or anything so much as just play on a few expectations for narrative purposes and it does so pretty well.
I also really liked how the sidequests were handled, with the game making it pretty clear where to find most of them. Each one continued on a narrative thread that the story had left off and seeing that smaller part of the story get a proper conclusion made doing the quest feel very worthwhile. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that most of them feel like they’re part of the main story itself. There’s a couple that set up major points later in the story so much that I’m legitimately not sure how it would’ve handled these plot points if I hadn’t done the quests. I had to look it up to see if there were multiple endings perhaps if you hadn’t done them but no there’s just one, so honestly I don’t know how it’s done but my guess is the concept just gets explained differently. I said that most of them were easy to find, but I ended up missing at least a couple, and after reading a bit about one of them I felt a sense of regret at not having done it because it followed up on a party member’s character arc in a way that I felt was lacking in the main story (meaning I have to look it up later to either do it if I can or watch it). So while you could maybe argue that it’s a disappointment that the main story doesn’t tackle everything that it could, I don’t necessarily mind it being handled in sidequests especially since I like feeling rewarded for doing them.
Anyway, I hope this didn’t sound too negative since I legitimately enjoyed my time with this a lot and appreciated its efforts in capturing this many of the aspects that make JRPGs so special. Most of these complaints are more nitpicks rather than major flaws, and I’m also a huge nerd about turn-based combat and progression systems. This makes me hope that the team makes more RPGs in the future, because they’re very clearly on the right track here.