Demo impressions:

The narration and presentation create a really uniquely relaxing environment that I really enjoy. It really feels like playing an imaginative card game with a veteran GM. Yoko Taro's signature small stories being there for every npc that you can unlock just by playing and collecting their card is a cool idea too.

But, because of that comitment to presentation, everything takes a million years. The battles play out on a wooden surface that needs to be taken out and placed onto the main board, and that and every card placement animation takes way too long. The movement and input feels sluggish because the game has to turn off player input in between animation states, or at least that's how it feels. It's like, you know you gotta go left, so you hit left ten times, but you have to wait for the minor animations working in the background that you've stopped noticing to end first, before it registers anything. And any inputs you've made before the end of that don't get listened to, so it makes the game feel kind of...stubborn.

The worst part though is the combat is just braindead. In the demo at least, there's no choices to be made, you can either kill the enemy in two turns or in one turn. It's very hard to lose advantage in anything. I feel kind of insulted when the narrator keeps congratulating me for victories and I keep hitting level ups when I didn't experience any feeling of combat

Reviewed on Sep 24, 2021


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