RealityMinds Reviews

peak fiction

Quick low-energy summary: A good linear RPG story with pretty character artwork and custom background art. A positive story with potential to be really dark (kinda). Throws you in some interesting but simply executed situations. Characters are entertaining with a tiny cast of named characters. Probably my favorite aspect of the game though! As for combat (on normal); while mostly avoidable, unfortunately suffers from basically doing the same thing nearly the entire game. Maybe I should have tried hard...? Music was pleasant, though a song or two seemed like low bitrate... Overall a soft recommend for a good little story. And it has some extra bells and whistles for replay value/post-adventure. 10-20 hours for all content? So not too shabby value.

[h1]Story[/h1] The underlying story is pretty good, since it shows the pros and cons of being motivated or dismotivated. It also hits close to home with the concept of falling into a spiral of pessimism. The translation is readable and does a decent job of getting everyone's characterization across, but it still has some errors and is rough compared to a lot of other translated games. [h1]Gameplay[/h1] The combat features no item usage and instead relies entirely on skills to maintain HP, MP, and TP. It seems tricky at first, but not having to worry about stockpiling items does significantly remove a lot of anxiety that comes with exploring long dungeons. When characters use specific skills in a round of combat, they can activate a follow up "chain skill" with a nice looking face cut-in. These chain skills include offensive, healing, and buffing skills, so it's important to plan each turn around them. Fortunately, the game allows the player to view a list of available chain skills during battle in case they need to look it up. As for the balance, hard mode is beatable, but the post-epilogue enemies can easily outspeed Astrake unless he's equipped with 2 or 3 haste accessories. Though due to how buff skills and revival skills are "instant" and don't take up a turn, winning a battle is usually a matter of finding an opening, buffing, and attacking the enemy until the party loses their advantage. It reminds me of Sacred Earth Promise, though I consider it a bit easier due to the lack of skill cooldowns. Instead of levels, each character has a skill tree that they can spend EXP and Strong Stones on. Tree nodes include usable skills, passive skills, and stat increases, and it's important to allocate EXP evenly to ensure everyone has sufficient stats. However, during the main story, the player is trapped in the dungeon until they beat the boss. There is a merchant inside each dungeon, but this merchant has higher prices than the one in the castle and lacks any equipment trading or upgrading. This means the player has to grind up a lot of EXP before beating the boss if they want to upgrade their equipment, but it can be hard to estimate how much EXP is needed for this purpose. The saving grace is that the party doesn't need to upgrade their gear too much until the endgame, but it can still be anxiety-inducing to lack constant access to the equipment shop. [h1]Verdict[/h1] 8/10 This is a short and sweet RPG Maker game, though the translation has room for improvement.