Fatermyth Steam Charts & Stats

Top review says: "First of all the big question: Is the translation good? Yes it is." This is a LIE. A horrible, blatant lie. The game is filled with buttons, tutorial screens, and more that *aren't even translated at all*. Literally unplayable for an English-only speaker.

This is going to start with a lot of complaining about the translation, but I truly enjoyed this game and think it's something special, and I'll die on the hill that it's superior to the likes of Octopath Traveler in every way. (Octopath sucks by the way, do not play that game) The settings list the current English language mode as "English (Alpha)," which hopefully means a better (or at the very least cleaned-up) translation is coming soon. The game is [i]legible[/i] as is, but it's also riddled with grammatical and usage errors (e.g., a king telling his son "You may as well don't participate if you feel bad"; "You have no more tears for a weep and no more voice for a cry"; "What are them?"; "Stop fancying!" to mean "Don't joke"; multiple incidences of the word "kid" thrown into a formal context, apparently because the translator doesn't understand that "kid" is not a direct one-to-one equivalent for "child"; "fair boy" as a jeer where any native speaker would've chosen "pretty boy"; a math problem in one of the Bai Chi sidequests that seems to be unsolvable as written without back-plugging in every one of the multiple-choice answers due to ambiguity over whether "gained a total of 110 bunches from the trade" excludes the expense of the initial purchase; Xiao's initial moves including a card named "WTH do u mean?" and a baffling censorship of the word "idiot," hilariously all in comic sans; and so on and so forth) as well as typos (one memorable one being "She smiles as she shaves your nose with a finger playfully"). There are also a few text boxes that lack translation entirely and only show up in Chinese at the moment. A few more things that could use a touch-up: over the course of one complete playthrough I've run into the same bug two or three times where I got softlocked in battle after right-clicking a card to auto-assign the required assets but then couldn't unselect the card or target any enemy with it, the problem persisting even when I gave up and ended the turn in the hopes it would free that move. There's also a minor continuity error in [spoiler]Kui being pictured with both arms when he appears in the boss battle at the end of Xin Jiao's storyline[/spoiler]. That said, the gameplay is fun enough and the many characters lively enough to more than make up for the flaws in translation. I'm not saying the writing will blow you away (especially in its current state), and a couple of the characters' arcs especially are questionable in execution, but there's a ton of variation in the content and some neat ludonarrative tricks, and the goals are tight enough to keep you focused and invested in what's happening. Each character's arc comes with a new combat style and a bunch of (generally optional, but you'll really be missing out if you skip them) sidequests ranging from mystery investigation to combat to quiz game to luck-of-the-draw, and you only play part of each character's arc before switching to the next and looping back at the end to tie all the threads together, so the game is always mixing it up. The combat isn't complex and the game itself is very forgiving of death, which might turn some off, but the element of luck in the dice-based combat is interesting and the cost-based skill customization offers a fair bit of room to play around with different strategies. A couple times I found myself running into a wall, only to realize I just had to retool my setup to get the skill synergy I needed to smash my way through. Immensely satisfying. I'd especially recommend this to anyone who was as disappointed with the unfulfilled potential, flop storytelling, and tedious gameplay of Octopath as I was. I had a ton of fun, ([spoiler]Jing Yin's abuse of medical authority to sexually harass one man and straight-up sexual assault of another [who'd just saved her life no less, and who also is portrayed as her grand endgame fated love??][/spoiler] aside, what in the hell [i]was[/i] that? [spoiler]Also, her overall storyline was definitely the weakest, and why wouldn't they let you kill that snake-ass b Su what'sherface at the end??[/spoiler]), and I hope I can inspire at least one other person to give it a chance!