Monochrome Mobius: Rights and Wrongs Forgotten Reviews

Any love Anime games. Got to pick this up!

The Utawarerumono VNs are absolute masterpieces, and generated enough good will for me to try this game out despite JRPGs not really being my cup of tea. In short, it's a great story (as usual), ruined by absolutely horrible, dumpster-tier gameplay. Pros: - Story - Voice Acting - Music - Worldbuilding Cons: - Graphics that look like a PS2 game (maybe PS3 if we're being charitable) - Terrible, boring turn-based combat system where characters have a cluttered mess of 15+ abilities each, the bosses don't have HP bars, and the game encourages you to memorize a dictionary's worth of enemy weaknesses and types and such which, while that type of thing appeals to some people, it really just is not very engaging. - "Open world" with a crappy map system, uninteresting exploration, and the world is a "fake" 3D (i.e. jumping doesn't do anything, you can't clear any gaps/obstacles) - Perhaps the most infuriating final stretch of bosses I have ever seen. There are 2 final bosses. Once you beat one, the open world is locked out and you can only fight the 2nd boss, or load a prior save. However, the 2nd boss is higher level/more difficult than the 1st boss. So if you are just barely leveled enough to beat the 1st boss, but the 2nd boss overwhelms you, you must go back to before you beat the 1st boss in order to grind out some XP, then redo both. This wouldn't be the end of the world, except for the fact that there is about 30 minutes of dialogue you must get through all over again as well, with no skip option. Truly mind-boggling levels of horrible game design and the only way to avoid it is to make sure you comfortably overlevel the 1st boss in advance. Aquaplus should stay in their lane and stick to VNs. If their next Utawarerumono entry looks like this I'll just watch a walkthrough to see the story and call it a day.

The game is by no means perfect, but for a fan of the utawarerumono series it will be an enjoyable prequel. The voice acting is superb, the soundtrack has some nice standout tracks and the story is pretty good too. It's shortcomings stem mostly from inconsequential rpg-mechanics.

A fun RPG covering the journey of Oshtar to become the famed warrior he is in the visual novels, alongside the mystery of Shunya.

After having played the previous entries in the Utawarerumono series (Prelude to the Fallen, Mask of Deception and Mask of Truth), Monochrome Mobius does not reach the highs of those games, but is a decent RPG nonetheless, which bodes well for the future of the series, but might on its own not be recommended for newcomers. Pro's: * Combat system is well thought out. In the beginning of the game it might seem lackluster, but new additions later on make it interesting and distinctive from other RPG's. * Visuals of enviroments look stunning. * Voice actors are great. Con's: * Poor PC-optimalization. Only recently mouse controls were added for the camera/basic actions, the latter of which don't register half of the time. * Story is not well paced and not very interesting on its own accord. Most value is provided in fleshing out the casts' backstory, which can only be appreciated if you have played the previous games. * NPC's in cities were an afterthough: models were/are still realy bad (have been patched, but might be immersion breaking). Overall: solid entry in the series for returning players, but not sure if its a good entry point for new players.