I bounced off this game several times before finally getting properly into it, but boy am I glad I finally stuck with it (shoutouts to @unforeseenboy for picking it for my backlog “spring cleaning”). What starts off as a kind of slow, small RPG about a wizard school that doesn’t suck gradually expands into a pretty compelling story about coping with loss and messy teen relationships, bolstered by a robust and pretty unique grid/lane-based battle system.

The battle system is really what made this game shine for me. Basically every element was tailor-made for someone like me, who really enjoys small-number RPGs with timed button presses like your Mario RPGs (of both the Paper and & Luigi variety) as well as grid-based systems like Live A Live or Trails in the Sky.

The action commands for attacking and dodging are tuned basically perfectly - quick enough to keep the pacing of the battle nice and tight, and just tricky enough to stay engaging without being too taxing over a long period. My only complaint is that the first hour or two felt like a bit of a slog because your action vocabulary is very, very limited at first.

As for the story, I thought it was very fun to center it around the sister of the sort of Harry Potter stand-in character. It allowed for some interesting exploration of how the average YA protagonist engages in some pretty shitty behavior, but also gave some of the secondary characters the chance to experience some real growth. And of course, we love to see the sheer amount of diversity on display - not a straight white male in sight for the entire game.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention the killer soundtrack. There’s lots of fun little chiptunes, some beautiful piano pieces, and several tracks with vocals, which i wasn’t expecting. My standout tracks were Showtime (Gilda’s Theme), and the first battle theme, Rhythm of the Wild.

Anyway, if you’re itching for a game that scratches a similar itch as the early Mario & Luigi games, or one with a canon they/them AND a cannon ze/zir AND at least 3 canon gay relationships that get happy endings, I’ve got just the game for you.

I got pretty much exactly what I was hoping for with this game: a variety of cute little levels where Peach gets to wear a bunch of fun costumes. The gameplay’s not much to write home about, but it was a fun, chill game that did just enough to keep things interesting and didn’t overstay its welcome.

I only had one major gripe, which was the final boss. I know it’s a bit silly to complain about a lack of challenge in a game that’s clearly meant for children, but boy was the final boss an absolute nothing-burger. The previous bosses were okay at best, but they at least had more going on than “hold A until you win.”

Anyway, an overall fun time. If you go into this with a similar mindset as you would going into Kirby’s Epic Yarn or Yoshi’s Crafted World, you’ll probably have a fun time too.

I wanted to give this game a higher score than I ended up at, but I just don’t think that it works very well as a video game. It’s definitely a beautiful experience. The calm, almost somber soundtrack, the interplay between mundane city life and fantastical little fables, the surprisingly dark places that the stories go, all come together into something unlike any other SNES/SFC game I’ve played.

The problem is that the player’s involvement in this world and these stories is minimal. This makes sense considering they’re adaptations of Kenji Hayazawa’s actual stories, but the result is that the game often struggles to find something to actually give the player to do. It gave me the same feeling that I got while playing through some of the less interesting Disney worlds in Kingdom Hearts games, the ones where Sora and co. just watch a Disney movie and occasionally do something very tangentially related to the plot.

I don’t really know what could have been done to alleviate this problem. It really just kind of feels like a video game isn’t a good medium for experiencing these stories. All that being said, I still enjoyed my time with the game and I’m glad to have been introduced to Miyazawa’s works. I’ve picked up a collection of his stories to read, and I can’t wait to dig into them.