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chuckroThe laziest, pithiest pseudo-immortal has been recruited to go keep a demon asleep for another few decades. As his first two acts are to recruit a talking rooster and lose the necessary artifact to thieves, this might not have been the best plan.
A gigantic, quest-based, wacky RPGMaker game. The difficulty is very uneven, and the order you're supposed to do things is often unclear. After the prologue, the first major sidequest involves killing a beast in a cave--a beast that will destroy you, even if you've grinded to the point that the random battles in the cave are easy.
The plot forks as you are given options to rearrange your party. The ninja girl you get early on is forced out by the Princess (unless you reject her), and then you're given a choice of human characters from various schools after you beat the first boss. And you retain the animals you recruited, but because equipment makes a much bigger difference to battle effectiveness than levels, they become fairly useless. (Also, the animals have basically no special abilities, and every human has at least a couple.)
The save system is wonky--you can only save in (some) towns or by using a spell that costs 10 MP, but there's an autosave after every battle.
The "casual" mode reduces encounters (they're pegged to every set number of steps) and heals/revives your party after each battle. The difficulty on "rpg" mode must be utterly insane, as I could barely keep my animals alive while grinding as it was. That said, I like to feel that I’m being rewarded for exploring (as opposed to the “punished for exploring” problem that show up in most beef gate-heavy games), and the casual mode was pretty good about that. Your characters heal partially and are auto-revived after every battle, and the auto-save means you never get kicked back too far. You can meet a boss that trounces you, and the auto-save means you don’t lose your progress and pickups from the dungeon leading up. And that almost (but not quite) makes up for the uneven difficulty.
In the second area, there's a quest to defeat a thief in a hidden forest. She and her tiger will join you if you win, and I beat her at level 25 by landing a lucky paralyze effect--she then joined my party at level 41 and was an absolute beast in combat. And then she was absolutely necessary because my main character was inexplicably “distracted” during the next boss battle and would not take any actions. Oh, and I had to have my backup characters form a second party and fight some random minion battles during the same scene. This does not inspire confidence that there won't be either an absurd glitch or just a badly-designed insanely-difficult encounter coming up later.
Overall: HowLongToBeat.com claims there’s 40 hours of game here. I’m not really up for that, especially since I have reason to believe there will be a random difficulty spike (or several) and a chunk of that is pure grinding. This is neither funny nor exciting enough to warrant that kind of length. But I paid less than a dollar for it and played about seven hours (and beat two demons), so I think I got my money's worth.
A gigantic, quest-based, wacky RPGMaker game. The difficulty is very uneven, and the order you're supposed to do things is often unclear. After the prologue, the first major sidequest involves killing a beast in a cave--a beast that will destroy you, even if you've grinded to the point that the random battles in the cave are easy.
The plot forks as you are given options to rearrange your party. The ninja girl you get early on is forced out by the Princess (unless you reject her), and then you're given a choice of human characters from various schools after you beat the first boss. And you retain the animals you recruited, but because equipment makes a much bigger difference to battle effectiveness than levels, they become fairly useless. (Also, the animals have basically no special abilities, and every human has at least a couple.)
The save system is wonky--you can only save in (some) towns or by using a spell that costs 10 MP, but there's an autosave after every battle.
The "casual" mode reduces encounters (they're pegged to every set number of steps) and heals/revives your party after each battle. The difficulty on "rpg" mode must be utterly insane, as I could barely keep my animals alive while grinding as it was. That said, I like to feel that I’m being rewarded for exploring (as opposed to the “punished for exploring” problem that show up in most beef gate-heavy games), and the casual mode was pretty good about that. Your characters heal partially and are auto-revived after every battle, and the auto-save means you never get kicked back too far. You can meet a boss that trounces you, and the auto-save means you don’t lose your progress and pickups from the dungeon leading up. And that almost (but not quite) makes up for the uneven difficulty.
In the second area, there's a quest to defeat a thief in a hidden forest. She and her tiger will join you if you win, and I beat her at level 25 by landing a lucky paralyze effect--she then joined my party at level 41 and was an absolute beast in combat. And then she was absolutely necessary because my main character was inexplicably “distracted” during the next boss battle and would not take any actions. Oh, and I had to have my backup characters form a second party and fight some random minion battles during the same scene. This does not inspire confidence that there won't be either an absurd glitch or just a badly-designed insanely-difficult encounter coming up later.
Overall: HowLongToBeat.com claims there’s 40 hours of game here. I’m not really up for that, especially since I have reason to believe there will be a random difficulty spike (or several) and a chunk of that is pure grinding. This is neither funny nor exciting enough to warrant that kind of length. But I paid less than a dollar for it and played about seven hours (and beat two demons), so I think I got my money's worth.
