Rave Heart Reviews

Great story rich game which i thoroughly enjoyed. Even shed a tear or two. Highly recommend.

One of the better RPG Maker games out there! I loved every minute! A great story filled with emotions, well written characters with varying personalities, and fun gameplay!

I have only played up until the first boss but what I have played so far is exceptionally good storytelling, more than what may be seen on the surface. This game may use existing assets but you will find if you play that the story inside is very well directed. And actually, surprisingly, the gameplay is super solid too. I was greatly surprised by this entry, since it is a lot more emotionally affecting and gameplay-strong than it may look on the surface. I will continue to play this when I get time (hard to come by for me nowadays!) But what I have played is so good. This game is excellent! A+++

I enjoyed basically everything about this game. Combat is fast, and if you decide to do all the side things and become a demi-god... easy. Story is solid, space diplomacy at it's finest. Most side quests are good, though there's a bit of hit and miss there. Characters are fun and well-written for the most part. There's only two minor thing I could complain about: - All the "wasteland" areas feel the same. I wouldn't be able to tell one from the other to be honest. - There's a lot of arrows all over the place that show interactable things, chests and so on. These never go away so some areas are brimming with arrows forever. Even though you've done everything. Would be nice if they went away after you interacted with something. Still, those aren't nearly enough to warrant anything less than an 8/10. So 8/10 it is. Definitely worth a 100% playthrough in my opinion.

[h1]Raving and Ranting[/h1] [h2]Story[/h2] The premise is that the protagonists must fight back against the political conspiracy of Count Vorakia Estuuban, and the leader of the party, Ellemine, must develop into a proper leader rather than remain an innocent princess forever. I really liked her growth throughout the game, since she becomes more confident and ruthless while also still retaining her sense of empathy. The game does bring up some interesting thought experiments, such as the Erran ability to read minds and sense emotions. There's technology to defend one's mind against being read, but as Eryn points out, [spoiler]it can be scary that someone can figure out your insecurities and give you unwanted pity[/spoiler]. It's also subtly implied that depending too much on mind-reading means one will be much worse at reading people without it, since Arcturo misread his "friend" Vorakia until it was too late. That said, there is a pretty blatant use of writer's convenience at the start of the story. [spoiler]Eryn made the foolhardy decision to have Chad arrested simply for speaking out against Arcturo's charges. This seems like a risk not worth taking, since Chad had no evidence and is unlikely to significantly sway public opinion, plus Lady Marselva correctly points out that doing so will just make the other councilmembers suspicious. As a result, Vorakia is forced to accelerate his plans and lose the advantage of good publicity that would have otherwise made Ellemine's alliances impossible to form. While it's implied that Eryn's real reason for doing this is to gain hostages to use against Marselva, it still comes off as a blatant freebie for the good guys in the long run and it also seems like an overly convenient way for Chad to get involved in the plot. Additionally, it seems strange Vorakia and the rest of the conspiracy were surprisingly lenient about Eryn's mistake, and even stranger that Ellemine and Arcturo seem to hype Eryn's political wisdom so much. Personally, I would have preferred that Chad actually do something to warrant getting captured, since doing so would make him look more like a chad for taking initiative and make the enemies seem more competent.[/spoiler] On the other hand, if there's going to be a major screwup in the story, I definitely prefer it be on the antagonist side than the protagonist side. That way I can take some pride in playing as comparatively competent people. As for the use of races in the game, there's a subtle aesop that one's environment contributes more to how one turns out than racial stereotypes. For example, the Farians on Kardel are known for using their hexes for crimes or at best, resorting to extreme measures to defend themselves against criminals in a dog-eat-dog planet that was ravaged by volcanic activity. In contrast, the Farians on Yurielle live peacefully due to being on a stable and pristine planet. Unfortunately, the Draconians and Gulanians/Granians get no individuality or nuance, since they're just generic conquerors and scientists respectively. While Zazir is a Draconian/Granian hybrid, he's a lab creation and is essentially an outsider to both races' societies, which to me comes off as a lazy way to technically have one of each race in the party without having to actually flesh out Draconian and Gulanian/Granian society. We really need to be able to visit their civilian zones somehow. Finally, the script needs some proofreading. It's better than a machine translated game, but there are still some awkward word choices and grammar errors. [h2]Gameplay[/h2] The game uses a RPS damage type system where physical attacks are advantageous against tech, tech is advantageous against ether, and ether is advantageous against physical, ensuring that AOEs won't be enough to wipe out sufficiently balanced enemy parties. Interestingly, most tech and ether skills function as "magic" under the hood and therefore can be reflected, but physical attacks buffed to deal ether or tech damage do not count as "magic" and therefore can ignore reflection. I don't know if this is actually mentioned anywhere in the game's dialogue though. The game starts out fairly balanced, but the endgame starts getting weird. Since the characters have buffs and synergies that would be considered too OP in most games, the late game bosses start cheating the turn system like crazy. They tend to do things like AOE dispel, buff, and AOE debuff as sequential actions, and these can be triggered as HP threshold events or even at the start of rounds. As a result, combat gets really messy when you have use several turns to remove enemy buffs and set up your own, only for the bosses to reverse all that with what I refer to as their "boss combo." Astral Mode is a really sloppy attempt at a survival horror minigame IMO. The idea is that Ellemine has to dodge Astral beasts while collecting powerups, but this isn't implemented well. For one thing, the powerups show up as glowing balls, which are easy to mistake for various lighting effects. Additionally, there's no indicator showing how many items are in each area, making it hard to tell if an area is fully looted. As for the Astral Beasts, damage from them persists into the next time you Astral dive and their positions don't seem to reset, so if you exited an Astral zone with several near the activation point, going back in will immediately result in damage. [h2]Verdict[/h2] 7.5/10 The story and world building are ambitious, but some parts definitely needed a sanity check. The bosses do start to feel samey at the end, since they're all just spamming slightly different variations of the deadly "boss combo" just to keep up with the player's powerful skills. This is an opinion, but personally, I prefer the pre-June update face portraits, since the AI-generated ones just feel more offputting than the RPG Maker style face portraits from before.

The gameplay is much better than I expected, going in. The writing is another story, though, and I can't shake the feeling that the music was picked out of some repository with less care than I'd like. I won't recommend that you don't play the game - there are some very neat ideas that I hope the developer get to play around with in the future - just don't expect a masterpiece.

Great dev who loves their craft. The game is a little basic in looks at times (Most RPG Maker games are like that), but the characters and story make up for any shortcomings. Well worth your time to check out.

I'm about 9 hours in and this game's story just keeps getting better and better! Graphics are futuristic and I like the animated battlers style, music is great, battle system is awesome (love how the dev utilizes weaknesses) but sometimes I feel like even normal enemies hit far too hard. If I had any critiques about this game it would be that. Challenge is great, but sometimes the challenge feels too artificial in nature especially if just regular enemies are hitting not once but twice in the same turn for huge amounts of damage (and I always have the best equipment and even grind a bit when I'm around a healing spot). I do really enjoy the challenge of the bosses, there were several times I was on the very edge of my seat hoping for a miracle (luckily I haven't party wiped yet). One suggestion I have to the dev, is that while I'm pretty good at remembering which kinds of enemies are weak to Physical, Tech, and Ether, you might want to look into some kind of method that automatically allows the player to see what innate element the enemy is when selecting them. That way players are not going "was it machines that are weak to Physical?" and the like during battle (and some of us have horrible memory). It would make building our strategies a fair sight easier if we had some kind of automatic visual cue. This is a solid RPG with a fantastic story so far, and when I beat this game, you can bet I'm going to rave (no pun intended) about it on social media. It's not often I find a RPG Maker game that sucks me into the story, but this game definitely has. If I had to give it a score, it's a solid 8 out of 10 so far. I'll update this review more when I beat it.

If you like epic classic old-school JRPGs (made with RPG Maker) that utilize a science fiction setting, give this game a try. It features a decent playtime and fairly challenging rock/paper/scissors-style battles. Most other reviews go into more detail, I simply wish to let the game reach the magical mark of 10 positive reviews (which gets the game more exposure due to how Steam works). So let me just tell you: As someone who mainly plays this type of game, and as someone who has played through hundreds of JRPGs, including the most bare-bones indie garbage, I can tell you that a lot of care went into this game and that I really enjoyed my playthrough.

I stumbled on this game while looking at the new releases. I had never heard of it and was surprised that after about a week of being out it had no reviews. So for the price of a over priced coffee I decided to give it a shot. Its a really charming game. I grew up playing these pixel RPG's like Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger. The music is actually pretty good. I am about 3 hours into it with a restart after I learned a few things about game play. I made it to the first "BOSS" fight and so far the story is interesting. It has a star ocean feel to it for sure. If you want to see the first 90 min or so of the game you can check out my Twitch channel. https://www.twitch.tv/hollownostalgia I realized after that my game was way to loud and my mic was too quiet. I just put it together quickly because I couldn't really find any game play. I'll keep streaming (hopefully with better audio mix) as I progress in the game so if you want to experience the story with me drop a follow and join in next time I play.