Frontier Hunter: Erza’s Wheel of Fortune Reviews

Holy Shit some of the NPCs are HIDEOUS!!!! Got a bunch of horrible metroidvanias sitting in my Library that suddenly don't look all bad now...

Board room meeting: "I hear the new game has a female lead character, are you sure that's going to be okay? People might get the impression that we respect women. There are a lot of complaints about DEI and woke stuff in the reviews these days." "It's not a problem, we'll just have basically every other character in the game objectify and sexually harass her constantly." "Can we really get away with that?" "Sure, no big deal, we'll have her point out how inappropriate it is and threaten them with violence... and get this, one of the characters will be a lesbian." "I don't know... that might be going too far in the other direction." "We'll throw in a gratuitous shower scene." "Sold!" Most of the characters in this game are difficult to like, which hurts it more than one might think. It may be kind of possible to ignore the story, but the gameplay is not really spectacular, with many of the systems feeling a bit like the devs were ticking boxes "do we have this system, do we have that system?" moreso than doing something extremely good in any particular direction. The Metroidvania gameplay is okayish. It's not super great, but it does have you thinking about ways you can use your new abilities to get to areas you couldn't before and find all the hidden treasures, which is good. Some of the individual art assets in the game are amazing -- in particular some of the alien plants are pretty striking and contribute a lot to the feeling of exploration -- but overall the art feels quite inconsistent. It's not terrible, and could even be charming if the rest of the game were awesome, but it's not good enough to make up for other weaknesses. The RPG levelling aspect is a bit dull and just sort of there without serving much purpose, you just get static stat boosts as you level by gaining XP. I think this could just be removed from the game (obviously with some balance tweaks) without really losing anything at all. It does mean that you can probably grind a bunch if you find some part of the game too hard, but I think the game would probably be more interesting to figure out, and easier to balance well without it. The gear system is a bit more interesting, you collect tiles from monsters that socket into your items and give stats and passive abilities of various sorts. The UI/UX around that isn't the best though, you constantly want to know what passive abilities you've already got from the rest of your gear because they don't stack, but the only way to find that out is from a different user interface from the one where you're doing the socketing. There also seem to be a few too many stats, and apart from major upgrades you get by having higher tier base gear, the tweaks you get to your stats from either choosing different items in the same tier or from socketing tiles are for the most part pretty subtle. Resistances are a thing in the game, but the game isn't really balanced around needing to get them, and it's often kind of unclear what types of damage enemies are doing anyway. There's a bunch of stats which feel like they're only there because some other game had them moreso than because they serve any purpose in this game. The main interesting thing about the tiles is the non-stat passive abilities you gain from them. But you also tend to end up with many copies of the same tiles without even trying very hard to farm them, so it's basically possible to equip all your characters with more or less the same buffs. There are some character-specific synergies which are possible, but for the most part, I found that if some tile's passive was good and it fit into any of the gear I had, it would be silly not to just fit it somewhere on all of my characters. A lot of the combat abilities have fighting-game style combo input controls, and while I've been fairly happy with that in some other Metroidvania games (Guacamelee being perhaps the best example), here it felt pretty random quite often whether an ability would trigger or not. Basically for anything but the very simplest inputs, it seems very hit and miss. Might just be a personal problem, though I feel like to put these kinds of combo mechanics into a game and have it really work well, there sort of need to be specific reasons for the player to work on learning each button combination, and it doesn't feel like that really exists here. The abilities are kind of cool when they trigger, but you don't really *need* them so much. Guacamelee did a really good job of designing all its environments so that you'd be rewarded for using button combo abilities to move around and learn to chain things together in ways that would also help you in combat. If that exists here in some way, I didn't really notice it. It also had an NPC that encouraged you to try out specific combos and get them perfect to teach you what you could do by chaining moves together. Nothing in that direction really exists here either from what I've seen. The magic system is a bit weird. There are some spells which just seem like obvious choices for combat, and once you have them, it's a little difficult to consider equipping something else. It might be more interesting if the spells were restricted to a specific character, or if they could only be equipped by one character at a time. You can set up all your characters with the same homing projectiles that kill everything nearby and are also really good against bosses, and then just use your other characters as additional mana pools. There are a few places where you need to use specific fire or water spells to interact with the environment, but they're rare and felt a bit tacked on just to make sure it was in the game somewhere, with characters explicitly pointing out the need to use a spell, probably because there are enough spells and equipping different ones is just clunky enough that a player wouldn't necessarily figure that out on their own. The explicit call-outs take all the fun out of discovering something like that for yourself though, so it just ends up being a bit weird. The boss fights... I think there might've been one boss early on where I had to think about its patterns, but after that, it's sort of been about spamming a good spell and maybe dodging the very biggest move. I haven't quite finished the game though, so if they've saved the better ones for later, I could be missing something. But all in all, unless you're *really* starved for a Metroidvania game, it's hard to recommend this. I'm not sure I'm going to finish it. The gameplay is serviceable to the point that if the characters were likeable or it had any kind of interesting writing, it might work well enough as a vehicle, but it's all just a pile of systems you've probably seen explored more fully in some other game. If it cut most of the systems and went way harder on the jigsaw-tiles obtained from enemies mechanic which is probably the most interesting thing about it -- maybe even get rid of all other equipment slots and sources of stats and just make everything about placing perhaps-more-interestingly-shaped tiles representing all your abilities and spells in a somewhat bigger grid -- that could have been a neat thing to explore in a Metroidvania. It's better to pick one thing that not a lot of other games have done much, and do it really well, rather than trying to cram as many systems from other games into the game as you can and not really say anything new with them. Borrowing things from other games is fine, but do it with purpose, to solve design problems with the core thing you're trying to do in a way that players will understand, rather than entirely because they're familiar.

Has interesting ideas but the game is too easy. Story is somewhat bland and stupid. It's a mid metroidvania but I got stuck with a bug in the boss with waves attacking the base and only solution is to press alt + f4. I was thinking to play this until the end but don't wanna deal with any other alt + f4 situation.

This is one that really surprised me. I love Metroidvania titles and got the game on super sale, and was absolutely blown away. I expected maybe a 10 hour game and ended up playing for nearly 30 hours. While the storyline is a bit out there, and the anime-fan service can be a bit cringy at times, behind the flashy exterior is a really fun and well developed Metroidvania that is significantly longer and more polished than I thought it would be. I can easily recommend this to fans of the genre looking for a well rounded and fun experience. For the money, this is absolutely a must play game.

Imagine Bloodstained, but with: fewer weapon types, barely any combat challenge, a monotonous gear slotting system, a crafting system that never produces anything worthwhile, and finally... boob physics. This is Frontier Hunter.

I bought this game on sale and enjoyed it way more than I thought I would. If you liked Bloodstained you will for sure like this as the core gameplay is very similar, but it sets itself apart from it and I think I ended up liking this game a little more. The map is huge and all the areas are unique and have great designs, my favorites being [spoiler] altar and graveyard. [/spoiler] The graphics are beautiful and you can tell a lot of effort went into them. The enemy designs and music were also top notch, and I also don't think there were any reused enemies until right at the end. The movement felt way better than Bloodstained, and the dash made it super snappy and responsive. The map regions also allowed for a lot of exploration, but I wish there was more hidden stuff other than the breakable walls. I thought the gameplay loop would get repetitive like it personally did for me when I played Bloodstained, but I think the skills set this game apart. They are kind of like a fighting game where you press a chain of d-pad inputs (like left-right-x), and my favorite part of this game was creating combos with them (the whip being my favorite). Pair this with the dash and fast movement and it makes for a great experience. There are also a ton of weapons across the characters, and I had a lot of fun switching them up frequently and testing out new attack combos. The magic cores were a little tedious to keep changing, but I was fine with it. The gameplay loop managed to keep me deeply interested throughout my entire playthrough, which is not something I can say about most metroidvanias. If you're looking for a challenging game this isn't it. I played on normal and didn't die at all during my playthrough, and only came close during a few boss fights. I don't think this is was a bad thing though, and I enjoyed just relaxing, making combos, and creating new builds. The story was good but I didn't really care for it until the second half. You don't need to play the first game to understand this, but I will probably go check it out after the great experience I had with this one. I played about half of it on steam deck and it was mostly a positive experience, although there were some frame drops and it had a little trouble hitting 60 fps without some messing around in the settings. I ended up playing on high with v-sync off at 120 fps in game but the fps locked to 60 in the steam settings. The text was small, but not too bad and it was overall very playable. I didn't encounter any major glitches, there were some boxes and pots that glitched out after breaking them, but overall it felt pretty polished. Now some things I didn't really like. I thought the first 5-7 hours of the game were a little stale, and I don't understand why they kept the space shooter and other minigames at the start. They don't appear ever again, and I'm glad they don't as they felt unnecessary. Some of the npc designs around the base were not very good, but this was minor as you don't really talk to them much. This might just be me but I didn't really use the artifacts at all, which is strange because the shards (artifact equivalent) were such a big part in Bloodstained. I also didn't like the first few areas of the map, but this was probably because skills were very limited so it was hard to deal with a lot of enemies easily. I thought the game really starts to get good around [spoiler] outside the forgotten city. [/spoiler] The game also doesn't have any backtracking after the 4th or 5th area, and you go directly from new region to new region without using your new movement skills to unlock the next area, this started after around the 4th or 5th area. If you're into that then you might be a little disappointed, but personally that wasn't a big deal for me because each region was great and had enough to explore in it. The new movement skills were also used to traverse around in future areas so its not like they were wasted. Overall, I enjoyed this game more than I thought, and if I gave Bloodstained an 8.5/10, this would probably be between an 8.5/10 and a 9/10. I would buy it again even if it wasn't on sale because I liked it so much, but if you're still on the edge pick it up on sale, I cant recommend it enough to lovers of this genre. It definitely manages to set itself apart from Bloodstained and create an amazing experience. I really look forward to what the developers have planned for their next game!

The character designs looks low budget but are absolutely stunning. The gameplay is a blast, offering dynamic action with a ton of combo variety that keeps every fight feeling fresh and exciting. Exploration is pretty solid too, rewarding curiosity with cool discoveries. This is a solid search action game, not the best out there but worth the try.