I don't like This Way Madness Lies very much. I have a soft spot for Zeboyd games, but it wasn't enough to really let this one land for me.
This is a fairly straightforward RPG with a magical girl and Shakespeare theme. The two things don't have much to do with each other and it feels more like a meme than an interesting setup.
The magical girls as party members is a unique take, though I wish the characters were more differentiated. You get most of them in your party at the beginning of the game and I didn't find the differences in their gameplay to be very easy to grasp right off the bat. The number of characters combined with fairly complex systems and the number of abilities each character has just doesn't work.
There are a couple of distinct personalities (sports-girl, smart-girl, gamer-girl) but the remaining three girls have basically no personality to speak of. Throwing them all at you at the beginning of the game certainly doesn't help, but cutting the cast down to at most four would make things more manageable and wouldn't require the strange justification of "oh! some of my friends didn't end up here with us!" that occurs for the first 75% of the game.
Mechanically the game is trying some interesting things. It has the now classic Zeboyd reusable items and fully healed characters at the end of battles, but expands it with some not-quite-but-almost interesting advancement and ability mechanics.
Each girl has a series of Fire Emblem-style bonuses they unlock as they level, which you can assign to affect your play-style. These are fine though I never really found myself making too many hard choices.
Additionally, the girls have quite a few abilities, each of which has a basic function and an alternate or more powerful function that happens when they are in Hyper mode (it just occurs every few turns). This is a cool idea, but there isn't any way to see what the alternate functions are, so you are meant to just memorize them, I guess, which is pretty bad. Abilities also can only be used once before they have to be recharged, but each girl has enough abilities that in all but about three of the fights I never had to interact with this mechanic. There are simply too many abilities and the time to kill on enemies is too low for this sort of thing to ever really be important.
Additionally, there is zero tooltipping in the game, leaving status effects unexplained and unknown. Abilities also reference each other by names you won't remember or have descriptions that make their effects simply unclear. Most of the technical writing in the game is a mess.
I think you are meant to be here for the narrative writing. It is passable, trying very hard to be goofy and funny, but it wore pretty thin with me almost immediately. The writing in Zeboyd's previous games was similarly styled, but I feel like there was simply less of it, so it wasn't quite as grating. Dialog sequences here are very long, with each of the six main girls having to get their quips in for every event (again, cut it to four). It is just too much. When the writing isn't comedy it is transcripts of Shakespeare (with irreverent optional translations) that just feel hollow and out of place here. I didn't get much out of it.
The story flies like an arrow. There is a main plot of alternate dimensions (based on Shakespeare stories) being attacked by monsters with some gesturing at a side plot of the magical girl friends putting on a series of school plays. You aren't making choices here, just going from fight to fight and dungeon to dungeon. It is fine but I wasn't invested in either the alternate dimension or the side plot.
I really like the pixel art though some of the environments get samey. There are cool magical girl transformation cutscenes that are impressive and look like they are pulled straight out of a pixel version of Sailor Moon.
The premise here is so cool, it is a bummer this game didn't work for me like Zeboyd's past games have. With a bit more restraint to the storytelling and some iteration on the mechanics this game would be pretty solid, but I can't really recommend it as is unless you are a massive fan of the theme or Zeboyd.
This is a fairly straightforward RPG with a magical girl and Shakespeare theme. The two things don't have much to do with each other and it feels more like a meme than an interesting setup.
The magical girls as party members is a unique take, though I wish the characters were more differentiated. You get most of them in your party at the beginning of the game and I didn't find the differences in their gameplay to be very easy to grasp right off the bat. The number of characters combined with fairly complex systems and the number of abilities each character has just doesn't work.
There are a couple of distinct personalities (sports-girl, smart-girl, gamer-girl) but the remaining three girls have basically no personality to speak of. Throwing them all at you at the beginning of the game certainly doesn't help, but cutting the cast down to at most four would make things more manageable and wouldn't require the strange justification of "oh! some of my friends didn't end up here with us!" that occurs for the first 75% of the game.
Mechanically the game is trying some interesting things. It has the now classic Zeboyd reusable items and fully healed characters at the end of battles, but expands it with some not-quite-but-almost interesting advancement and ability mechanics.
Each girl has a series of Fire Emblem-style bonuses they unlock as they level, which you can assign to affect your play-style. These are fine though I never really found myself making too many hard choices.
Additionally, the girls have quite a few abilities, each of which has a basic function and an alternate or more powerful function that happens when they are in Hyper mode (it just occurs every few turns). This is a cool idea, but there isn't any way to see what the alternate functions are, so you are meant to just memorize them, I guess, which is pretty bad. Abilities also can only be used once before they have to be recharged, but each girl has enough abilities that in all but about three of the fights I never had to interact with this mechanic. There are simply too many abilities and the time to kill on enemies is too low for this sort of thing to ever really be important.
Additionally, there is zero tooltipping in the game, leaving status effects unexplained and unknown. Abilities also reference each other by names you won't remember or have descriptions that make their effects simply unclear. Most of the technical writing in the game is a mess.
I think you are meant to be here for the narrative writing. It is passable, trying very hard to be goofy and funny, but it wore pretty thin with me almost immediately. The writing in Zeboyd's previous games was similarly styled, but I feel like there was simply less of it, so it wasn't quite as grating. Dialog sequences here are very long, with each of the six main girls having to get their quips in for every event (again, cut it to four). It is just too much. When the writing isn't comedy it is transcripts of Shakespeare (with irreverent optional translations) that just feel hollow and out of place here. I didn't get much out of it.
The story flies like an arrow. There is a main plot of alternate dimensions (based on Shakespeare stories) being attacked by monsters with some gesturing at a side plot of the magical girl friends putting on a series of school plays. You aren't making choices here, just going from fight to fight and dungeon to dungeon. It is fine but I wasn't invested in either the alternate dimension or the side plot.
I really like the pixel art though some of the environments get samey. There are cool magical girl transformation cutscenes that are impressive and look like they are pulled straight out of a pixel version of Sailor Moon.
The premise here is so cool, it is a bummer this game didn't work for me like Zeboyd's past games have. With a bit more restraint to the storytelling and some iteration on the mechanics this game would be pretty solid, but I can't really recommend it as is unless you are a massive fan of the theme or Zeboyd.