SUMMARY - Worth a shot if it's one of your first few cRPGs. Disappointing writing but many hours of fun battles, though the gameplay isn't perfect.

WRITING - This game's writing puts together unfunny jokes, unlikable quippy characters, a mediocre chuuni JRPG-tier plot, and many shallow storylines together. The writing is a 5/10 at best.

GAMEPLAY - The gameplay is not perfect either. But I can't rate it lower than 4/5 because I was absolutely hooked on this game for 40 hours (to the point of lowering my life standards lol). But it IS the first cRPG I've really played more than an hour of. Anyway, it was fun trying out all of the different spells. Technically speaking it's definitely up there in recent years.

Two of my biggest complaints.

1) Too much shallow content. You just get a few lines per person in these side quests. I don't feel any investment. YOU CAN'T TELL WHICH SIDE QUESTS WILL BE GOOD. Or which people are worth talking to. You can talk to 100 NPCs hoping for something good and you'll get it like 5% of the time. Is it worth investing time in this area? Or this one?

2) Some things weren't obvious enough. An example is when there's some joke or crazy choices you can make - but is the game going to treat it as an innocent joke or will you get screwed over long-term? You have to spam saves.

Now, I'm not a game designer so I don't know how to solve these difficult problems, but they killed the fun like crazy.

There were also lots of small frustrating bugs (probably at least a hundred). At least a few times I had to restart the game or reload from an earlier save (which takes WAY too long) because of these bugs.

Finally I HATE how rigid the system is. It's like those simulators that lack human logic, you know? The things where the game is totally literal whereas an irl DM could feel things out. Anyway one example is perception checks. You don't know how important the perception thing is (sometimes you literally can't proceed without first "perceiving" a button) so you have to go to camp and get some fresh characters to come back and retry the perception. So dumb. Also the whole "guards noticing you doing bad stuff" system kills fun like crazy.

Also being able to speed up combat would be nice.

FINAL THOUGHTS - Honestly a game from the Persona series would be a better investment of my time. The linearity allows the devs to focus better. I don't need a Tech Demo of "freedom", I just want a fun series of experiences. Freedom comes second. And yeah, before you complain that I'm an "anime-biased person", Persona's writing is simply better. They at least spend time on writing the characters. Baldur's Gate 3 suffers so much from "poetry over story" (making things sound all fancy and poetical but it's all nonsensical so it doesn't matter) and characters only have a few lines, it's so boring.

An all-time classic with a beautiful story, but the gameplay is seriously outdated.
The Legend of Sword and Fairy can be considered the most influential game in China. It even creates a unique fantasy genre we call XianXia today.
But from the perspective of a modern player, I don't think it's that good. The dungeon design pursues complexity but lacks challenge, and the encounter battles are too monotonous. And as a JRPG imitation, there is no large world map to explore is also a major shortcoming.
If you want to learn more, this video made by Lunamos describes in great detail the background and specific content of this game

This was the first world I ever truly felt lost in. I played this game for hundreds of hours on a camping chair in my dad's old ass apartment. He used to burn cheap incense from a flea market and that smell instantly takes me back to the sprawling fields of Cyrodiil.

Listening to the soft overworld music walking through the streets of Skingrad, fighting back the Daedra at Kvatch, the busy port at Anvil - I could probably write a book about how beautiful this game is. This game is the absolute definition of comfort for me, and to this day, I can still turn on Oblivion and lose myself for hours. It still feels like a world where anything can happen.

The soundtrack, the painterly vistas, the amazing side quests and story - the flawed, but lovable AI - for the rest of my days I'll treasure Oblivion. As Todd Howard famously said at some point in his life - it just works.

The Dark Spire, and all heavily Wizardry-inspired dungeon crawlers, are honestly not very different from the roguelites that everyone seems to love nowadays.

The premise is there, go into a dungeon full of monsters and treasure, explore until you are low on resources (on roguelites you would just die though, and here that's not an option) and then go back to the town, upgrade your characters, and go back to dungeon, now a little stronger and with more information, hoping you can advance a little further than last time.

The obvious difference, though, and the reason games like this are so cool to me, is that nothing is procedurally generated. Every single spot on the map is hand crafted. Every spinner / teleporter maze, every long corridor inside secret passages that lead to absolutely nothing, and every cryptic puzzle that honestly most people would need a guide to solve. It's hard not to feel the love of the devs in every little tile of the dungeon, and honestly, if you are making a game like this, it's absolutely out of love and not because you expect to create a new AAA franchise.

The Dark Spire is not very different from the first Wizardry trilogy. Even though the game is made way easier by a save anywhere option and a game over screen (instead of having to create a new party and gather the corpse of your fallen allies), the game can still be pretty unforgiving. Screw up in character creation and you probably going to have a hard time getting everything in the game (and by a hard time I probably mean an extra 5 hour grind or so by the end of the game.), getting ambushed by some enemy formations, specially in the later portions of the game, means instant death, and your only option is... dealing with it and loading a save.

Either way, the game can be a good time if you're into that type of the game. Gameplay is very simplistic, featuring only 4 races and 4 classes that you choose, with some dual class options down the line. And even though the game doesn't force to have all classes in your party, you can't really go wrong with it because every class brings lots of utility to your party. Warrior is a great tank and single target damage dealer, thief is necessary for chests / lockpicking, mages can cast devastating spells that will be useful through the entire game, and clerics, well, they can heal, and healing makes you not die (too fast!)

The game presents itself as a traditional dungeon crawler, but the twist is that everything in the game is meant to resemble a comic book, sort of. The visuals are a great part of this game to be honest, and it adds a very unique feeling to this game. Obviously, the visuals also make the game slower, so eventually, after you explore a floor a lot, you're probably want to change to the "classic" mode, making the game resemble the original Wizardry 1, with extremely minimalistic graphics (but faster gameplay!)

Music is alright, I guess. It's also definitively unique, and I have a bit of a hard time describing it, but eventually it gets kinda old (most because you're going to hear the same songs over and over again for a while).

It's also important to note that, while the story is not the focus of the game whatsoever, the game totally gets the silly Wizardry humor that a lot of other games of this genre fail to replicate.

Overall, if you're a fan of Wizardry and dungeon crawlers, you can't go wrong with this one.

Seeing the rise of western AVNs thanks to platforms like Steam hosting them piqued my curiosity as someone who has been into the Japanese eroge scene since the early '00s. I decided to give them a shot to see if any are worthwhile and quickly realized that there are a million of these "work in progress" one-man project Ren'Py games. You're gonna have to dig through dozens of trite Being a Dik clones before you find any treasure. Luckily, Eternum is one such treasure.

What initially drew me to check it out was the fact that it used models created in Honey Select 2, a game that I have spent countless hours modding and toying with myself. I knew nothing else about it other than that going in. Starting out, I nearly dropped it because it seemed like the same familiar setup. Moving to a new town, rooming with girls, starting your first day of school, etc. The only thing that kept me playing was the models. Once you start learning about the titular Eternum; an MMO that the characters in the game play, however, things start picking up very quickly.

The premise is similar to something like .hack, with the characters hunting for powerful one-of-a-kind relic weapons, engaging with hostile high-level players, and unraveling the corporate conspiracy behind the game itself. Being in a setting like this, where the changing of a game server can send you to an entirely different world or time period allows for an endless amount of creative and entertaining scenarios to play out, and it's taken full advantage of. This is balanced with maintaining your relationships with the characters both in the real world as well as the game. The characters here all have very distinct, memorable personalities that set them apart from one another and make for a great cast. As for the H-scenes, the animation sequences are well done and stack up favorably to other games I've played. If I have one gripe, it's the constant use of asterisk actions in the writing. It's not a huge deal, but it happens enough that it's worth mentioning, and there are better ways to convey information that aren't as annoying.

As of writing this, the game is on release version 0.5. Hopefully, the developer can keep up the pace and stick the landing, because I think they've got something here.

TL;DR: Fun ride. Luna best girl and Annie is cuter than anyone in your favorite moege. Disagree? 1v1 me on Ion.