????Gaia's Melody II: ECHOED MEMORIES Reviews

Do you wanna know how I got here? It all started when I decided to get RPGMAKER MV on steam. In my head, I thought it would be neat to use: Everything I need to make an epic RPG adventure of my very own. There was one problem, I had no idea how to use it. So I did what most people did and find Youtube tutorials. And that's where I came across Echo607's Youtube channel, I watched her video on how to make a good story, and that's where I seen and heard of a video game she made. Something about addressing how her game opening is cliched, but I didn't mind. All I cared is that she made a game and is on steam. As an aspiring Game Maker myself, I showed my support to her and bought the fist game in the franchise (according to steam) "Gaia's Melody: Echoes Memories." It wasn't until later where I learned that this is a remaster, hence the title. At first, I wondered why so few people played despite having over a ten thousand subs, especially since the game is now 6 years old. As I played Gaia's Melody 1, I realized I was having a good time. Before this, I played Bravely Default 2 which bored me to stop playing halfway through. I much prefer to play a game by a flawed individual with a vision in mind. Plus it still bring a new mix to the formula. For example, how many RPG games have a Gravity Falls style body swap episode? And then, halfway into story, the game updated which completely surprised me. Before then, I seriously thought the developer had long abandoned this game and moved on to better things. The fact that Echo607 took time to make her game a better experience makes me respect this game even more. When I finished Gaia's Melody 1, I didn't realize that this was only the beginning of this Usagi hole. After beating the first game, I decided to go to Echo607's website which was more or less her personal blogging and dev log. Off to the left was her twitter page and that's where I discovered that Echo607 was in fact Mrs.Echo607 for 3 years (I never did a close look at her Youtube Icon). So for at least a half an hour, I scrolled down her twitter posts finding that first announcement of her newborn. It was the most engrossed twitter experienced I ever had in my life (I don't go on twitter unless I'm forced to). And then one week later she closed it off to the public. On Mrs.Echo607's website, she said she would work on the sequel to Gaia's Melody along with saying she's done with YouTube. I ironically subscribed to her after seeing that. Anyway, I made me realize that she must have been on this grind for at most 8 years now on top of raising a family. So to see her publish these games with her own determination is inspiring. With all of that weighted, I went ahead and purchased Echoed Memories. It was on sale at the time and I felt guilty, so I bought the DLC costumes to make up for it. For the record, I'm a busy guy, so I could only play this game for 1 -2 hours per day. Since this game is at least 80 hours long including Epilogues, that meant I was playing this game for LITERAL MONTHS. Every day, this game would swim in that back of my mind. I started to have dream starring the character in this game (My favorite was the one where Doken crashed on my couch). And when it came time to write a review, I didn't want to (Like a thumbs up recommended wasn't enough). These games had taken me on a 7 month long journey that chanced the way I play games on steam, it made start finding more game maker like Mrs.Echo607 and see what their journey was like, these old games with less than 100 reviews deserve more attention. I will never forget this series, because now I'm gonna spread the word to my friends, in reddit posts, Opera Gx Live Wallpapers, and even game mods. Anyway, here are my head-cannon voices: Akira : Arin Hanson Girl voice Kachie: Loud Irish Accent Tarra: One of the Mean Girls Tadase: Voice crack and they never dropped Kari: High Pitched CrankGamePlays Choko: Sandy Cheeks Okko: Tom Holland Mikki: Johnny Test Nikki: Jenny from My Life as a Teenage Robot Whype: Monotone Dan Avidan (For the longest time, I though it was pronounced as "wipe") Doken: Superman Ferrik: Horny Shadow the Hedgehog Zephyr: French accent Kasumi: Vernias with a lisp Agares: Mr. Bean Aneka: Goofy Anybody from the Magic Academy: British Accent That one teacher obsessed with school Uniforms: Failboat Anybody from Terrene: New York Accent Rakai: Wacky Arin (Yes I do watch Game Grumps don't you?) Alright I'm going to bed, or as this game puts it: "Alright everyone! Sleep time!"

[h1]A Few Steps Forward and a Few Steps Back[/h1] [h2]Story[/h2] Gaia's Melody 1 already had a decent story and worldbuilding, and the sequel expands on a lot of backstory and world history. As a consequence, this game is much longer than the previous, which is both a good and bad thing, since some arcs, such as the school arc, feels like filler, while others feel relevant to the overarching plot concerning the Gate. The epilogue quests are definitely one of the best parts of the game, since it gives proper time to wrap up various plot threads and prevents the pitfall of having rushed and unsatisfying endings. As for the dialogue, I noticed that the characters don't speak in as childlike of a manner anymore, which makes sense because they're older. Additionally, Choko doesn't use the speech patterns of the Usagi anymore, which is a nice attention to detail that shows how much traveling the world has affected her. The game also finalizes several characters' romance arcs, and while these are well-written, I do feel like giving Akira a canon pairing does render the previous game's choices irrelevant to some extent if the player was shipping her with someone else. However, it's still necessary to give her a canon partner sooner rather than later because she's going to show up in Endless Melody. That said, there are some sussy bits with the age gap for some of the couples, such as Bawr x Yuina and Tara x Ryuan (FBI open up?), though this is only noticeable if you read the guidebook. [h2]Gameplay[/h2] I complained about the balancing in the first game and sadly, there are only minor improvements at best. There are still characters like Kari and Kasumi who have such low HP that they're not viable against enemy skills that have high enough damage formulas. It's also very grindy to make sure everyone is strong enough for story challenges, since the game doesn't have any shared EXP. There is an accessory that can cause EXP that was supposed to go to Akira go to someone else, but you don't get it until the final dungeon, which is too little too late. As for damage formulas, I noticed that they aren't very consistent. Skills that cost about the same amount of MP seem to do very different damage, even when you consider stats and elemental weaknesses. This also applies to enemy skills, where an enemy can deal scratch damage with one skill and OHKO with another. I'm not sure if this is intentional or if the skill damage wasn't tested properly, but it does lead to a difficulty curve that feels like a sine wave. Maybe it would help if the damage formulas were also written in skill descriptions? As for the party meta, Doken and Zephyr got nerfed to put them closer to the level of the other characters, though Doken is still one of the most consistent damage dealers even if he can't spam his ultimate skill as easily. However, due to the enemies having inconsistent damage, bosses are best dealt with by having a fast character like Tara to keep them stunlocked. Basically, the game's balance feels just like modern Yu-Gi-Oh, in that your win condition is to keep the enemy from taking any action. The game has some new features, such as a difficulty setting and an improved version of the previous encounter setting. For the difficulty settings, Boost mode increases EXP gain and lowers enemy stats, which can make the endgame grind less tedious, but it still feels like a band-aid solution to the overall balancing issues. Hard mode multiplies enemy stats and lowers EXP gain, and it would take massive amounts of grinding to catch up to them. I suspect hard mode was meant for NG+, since the multiplier can't make enemy stats go beyond the stat cap. There's also a neat little art collection that functions as a collection sidequest that spans the entire game. Unfortunately, the game also lost some features, such as minimaps and the bestiary. The former was crucial in figuring out where to find story objectives, so this could make it tricky to avoid advancing the story too far. As for the bestiary, it seems to have been replaced with a scanning feature, but scanning the enemy doesn't give very useful information at all and it might as well not even be a feature. Edit: Minimaps are implemented now, along with objective markers. Also, hard mode was rebalanced. The combat animations in both games tend to be very long, even if you hold down the examine key to force the game to make the animations faster. Additionally, I personally don't like having characters move all over the place randomly, since this could make it more annoying to check on their states or figure out if an enemy is covering up another. IMO, it would be better if the characters returned to their original positions at the end of each turn so that it would be less disorienting. [h2]Verdict[/h2] 6.5/10 The story has some sussy bits and filler, but it's still very well-written and it's satisfying seeing the characters get their happy endings. Unfortunately, the combat is still not much better than the previous game and I'd go as far to say that this duology has some of the worst combat I've ever seen in an RPG Maker game. Overall, I'll have to give a barely recommended score to the game once again, since a game really shouldn't neglect its [i]gameplay loop[/i].

Good RPG game! I spent my time playing most of this game's story, and honestly, it's worth my time. Although, I would recommend you playing this game for the story as this is what the game's main focus, I wouldn't recommend starting off with this one in particular, since this game is [b]heavily filled with spoilers from GM: Echoed Melodies[/b], even if this game's storytelling mention the story from that game already. There's only 1 thing that I wouldn't recommend on though: The battling system in this game feels unbalanced...? Some bosses in "The Usual" difficulty require to get constant reloading the save files. It only occurs on the Second quarter until the final quarter of the game, even if you hoard enough items to begin with. Some may disagree, but that's only my opinion. That shouldn't be a problem if you're only here for the story, because this game has easy mode. Overall, great experience. (I reviewed this game when it shows 66.6 hours played into the game. I didn't realise that until now. But anyways, thank you for making awesome games.)

All I have to say this game is a labor of love and passion. I was able to feel how much care was put into the game. The characters are the star of the show they may all come off as tsundere (anime term) but the more you get to know the characters the more you begin to care for their struggles. As for some criticism, the battle difficulty is way too swingy where you are wiping the floor with enemies or they are wiping the floor with you. Also the in-game economy was way too imbalanced where you get alot of money but there is many worthwhile things to buy. Maybe having one or two bromides unlocked when you buy them could be an incentive to see a few more pieces of art by the creator. Overall, it was a good game with a great cast of characters, with a few gameplay flaws. If you can look past those flaws you will find an engaging characters that are mostly endearing.

I love this game so much. I was so sad when it ended. I can tell this was made with love. The characters are amazing, and the game is amazing. The combat might be a bit flawed, but I love this game regardless!

UPDATE+ Ultra: Developer addressed my concerns with the ABBA bug and will implement measures to make it not game stopping, so will change back to recommended, as I really do like the game, but was unable to finish due to said bug. -------------------------------------------------- ORIGINAL REVIEW BELOW: I recommend this game, especially for the story, but with some caveats.... The Good: -Unique hand made assets -Great Story and Character Interactions -Great Level Design -Beautiful worlds -Characters are relatable, and humanized. YMMV: -Story does lean heavily on anime tropes, kids saving the day, bad guys are evil, etc. It does subvert some tropes but others not so much, so if that's not your jam, you may not like the story as much as I did. -Battles are really unbalanced, but there are difficulty levels and encounter rates to suit your grind preference. I enjoy a hard game, but don't necessarily like battles every 2 steps, so it was fine for me. -Can't really choose your party. Each chapter focuses on specific characters, so you can't choose from the roster most of the time like in other jrpgs. I didn't mind it, however, I can see if you grow to have a favorite character and can't use it, it would be a downer. -No way to choose window mode. Always in fullscreen. *Was informed that F5 puts it in window mode, whoops!* The Bad: -The game has frozen on me a number of times. Not crashing persay, but it will get stuck on a screen/menu/map and while you can hear the sound effects as the game still runs, your actions don't reflect on screen. This could be due to the sheer amount of events running on the game at any given time. With that said, my rig runs most modern games on High settings at 60+fps, so I shouldn't be having this issue. Even with the performance options on, it still does this from time to time. The game does have an autosave however, so you're not really missing a lot of progression. This does not take away from how annoying this is. -Some of the plot objective are not intuitive when it comes to keeping the story flowing. There were a few places I got stuck at, because the objective wasn't really clear, which required me speak to every NPC in order to get back on track. If that wasn't it, then I had to explore several maps to trigger progression. Whereas some events automatically progress the story where you least expect it when you're trying to explore the area or talk to story characters. With that said, this truly is a passion project and it shows. The number of hours that had to be dedicated to this game shows in the quality and storytelling. For this reason alone, I recommend it. The story is coherent and touching, the environments are beautiful and the characters have depth.

This is a really great game, its super underrated, its plot is a bit messy and confusing but it excels at its character writing, though you should play the first gaia's melody before playing the second one of course, though I do have to admit the first one isn't quite as good... its still pretty good though.

This game is legendary. I had so much fun playing it that while I was playing it, I didn't do anything else. Got home from school, played the game, from work, played the game. I was engrossed in the story and I hope to gid theres a third game too continue this story. Thank you Echo!

It was a joy to play through this adventure. It was such a satisfying conclusion to an adventure that was years in the making. Especially for someone who has been following the development of both games for years. Congratulations Echo for completing the story you wanted to tell!

game has good graphics and good combat also has anime cutscenes and such The story is amazing and so emotional and i love it so much