Recent reviews by StormSaber

Pretty good, I enjoyed it a lot. The environments look great and the level design is good, with some moments where you look into the distance and see an interesting landmark, then you eventually get there and look back and see the spot you were previously at. Combat also feels really good and is not a complete souls ripoff because of the sync bar mechanic that replaces stamina and the spell frame with abilities you can switch on the fly. There is a bit of jank though, like the enemy pathing being kinda bad as they can get stuck on corners and such, but it's not a very common issue, unless you go out of your way and abuse it I guess. One other complaint I have is that there aren't many technique (dex) and spirit weapons, especially early game, but at least the options that are there are good. Also I wish there were more spell slots, you only have one and if you want to change from a too strong spell to something weaker for example, you have to open the menu.

Actually quite good, but a bit short. The core mechanics are pretty solid, but it could use more stuff like spells, consumables that aren't just restoration items, maybe alternative weapons etc., though the amount of content matches the game's length I guess. Hopefully we'll get a sequel one day.

Good game, but needs more content like new levels, rooms, bosses etc. to balance the amount of characters you can play as imo. Still pretty fun to play though.

Very good. Even after finishing the story, there's still a full game of content left, but I kind of feel burned out now. I might write more later.

Very cute game. I'm not really a fan of this style of turn based combat, but it's serviceable and I kind of liked how different attacks have different effects that encourage mixing it up, but ultimately every fight turns into the same rotation. Also I kind of wish there was a better emphasis on the training aspect of the game and minigames. The training minigames don't really feel that important as you can do 4 by playing just 1 and they are super easy. They have a raising difficulty level though, but it goes up really slowly and I never reached level 3. You also don't have to do them very often for something that's supposed to be a main part of the gameplay loop.
The strongest aspect of this game are definitely the characters, story and visuals. Story isn't anything deep, but it's enjoyable and full of happy and even sad moments. The music is also pretty nice.
I'm looking forward to whatever this studio makes next.

Tl;dr, game is good for anyone looking for a casual experience with an adorable main character.

Btw, play this on hard from the start. I played it when there was only 1 difficulty and it was too easy (life staff is also op as hell).

Better than Elder Scrolls.

Game has great mechanics such as:

• The skill trees that let you experiment with taking different skills without gimping your overall build, as they are isolated, and offer pretty fun modifiers that can transform the skill into something else. Some skills are also pretty fun mechanically.
  
• The crafting system that lets you reroll some bad affixes on an otherwise good item, or you can just improve the existing ones.
  
• Very good loot filter that lets you do almost anything.
  
• The endgame system is pretty solid and a good base.
  
• Some endgame bosses are fun mechanically.

But, the content itself is just boring.

• The maps are boring and empty with generic layouts that feel procedurally generated, except they are not procedurally generated.
  
• Enemies are boring and don’t pose a real threat. They might as well just die when you approach them.
  
• The campaign, story and lore is boring and the characters are straight up cardboard cutouts and unmemorable.
  
• The endgame is just the same boring maps you played through the campaign (gameplay wise, they might look different) with the same boring enemies. At least it has unique bosses.

Everything just feels so soulless and like it was put there only to get you to the endgame grind treadmill as fast as possible. Game has good potential, but they need to make it actually fun first.

It's good, though I feel a little disappointed, maybe because my expectations were way too high, and I’m not even a hardcore Rabi-Ribi fan. Game improves a lot over the previous game, but also some things are worse, but overall I think it's an improvement.

What I liked:

• Combat. It's an evolution of Rabi-Ribi with some DMC added on top. You basically have the same or similar moves, but more, and you can chain them into various combos that allow you to air juggle your enemies and more. They also added various enemy states where they are more susceptible to juggling or immune to stunlocks if you miss taking advantage of the previous state, and it all really flows together well, it's really fun.
  
• Customization. There are a lot of sigils and they do a lot more than the ones in Rabi-Ribi, like unlocking new moves when your combo reaches a specific rank/count, changing the behavior of some moves etc. They also added crafting, which replaces item shops for item upgrades and consumables. Shops now only sell stat potions, sigils and sometimes consumable recipes. You can also research new sigils and ranged attacks via crafting. Though i must say that the amount of sigils is maybe too much. You kind of start getting lost in the menu picking what's best for your build before every boss to utilize all the equip points you gained by exploring. There are also 3 build presets you can switch between any time outside combat, so you can make an exploration build and a boss build for example, which is nice.
  
• Level design and exploration. I enjoyed exploring all the various zones that have distinct gimmicks and such, except one major thing, which is the story gating.
  
• The art, especially the stage backgrounds and character sprites. I also liked the VN sprites, despite a lot of people finding them ugly, except maybe some characters (mostly the males), but it grew on me.
  
• Voice acting. I don't usually care about voice acting, but it's really good here.

What I didn't like:

• The story. It's pretty bad. It consist of a series of mostly isolated subplots, which I think are fine, but the problem is that they are pretty much irrelevant as a whole, because they get completely dropped after they conclude. The game just introduces so many subplots and characters that feel important, but never really expands them and they get forgotten pretty quickly. The main plot only starts in like the last quarter of the game and it's so rushed and honestly kind of edgy and cringe. The story also gets in the way of gameplay a lot, be it blocking entire areas with "We can't go there just yet." dialogues and your character walking away, frequent and quite lengthy dialogues everywhere breaking the flow of the game or those annoying story teleports, where it just forcibly teleports you to the area you're supposed to go to after a dialogue ends, instead of letting you continue exploring your current area.
  
• Difficulty. I played on Hard (because Expert felt too hard in the demo) and the game just felt way too easy. And I sucked on the easier difficulties in Rabi-Ribi. It only started getting somewhat challenging at the half point, but I still beat most bosses first try, only having some trouble with 2, but using consumables usually means a win. I think a big problem of this is that many sigils can make you way too tanky and powerful.
  
• No training dummy. Unless I didn't find one, but I think there should be one near your home so you can try new sigils, because sometimes they are not very obvious with their benefits (how much improvement is -17.5% hit lag?) or to just test if adding new moves to your combos actually improves dps and such.
  
• Music is kind of hit and miss. It's not that it's bad, some tracks are really good, but I think Rabi-Ribi has better identity. I didn't want to make a category just for this one, so it goes into dislikes.

Overall I enjoyed it and I hope for future updates bringing some conclusion to unresolved story bits in the form of post game and maybe some rebalancing.

A unique fun little game. All the battles were pretty fun and distinct, but the non combat parts were a little bit boring. I liked the visual novel style dialogue though. What I didn't like much was the use of the photorealistic nightmare fuel cliche at the end.

Also Fei a cute.

Really good. At first the game felt like a less polished Ori game, but the more I played the more hooked in I got. The game has a lot of issues though, but overall I had a blast playing it.

• The game is really nice to look at, the environments are very detailed and a lot of the areas and their music give off a dreamy fairy tale vibe. The main character is very well animated, while the rest of the characters and enemies are rigged. The dialogue character sprites are very nice too.
  
• The world in this game is huge, there are at least 20 areas you can visit with distinct art and filled with unique enemies. The areas themselves are also very large with all sorts of paths, platforming and secrets. The areas are all connected to each other and can be accessed in multiple ways. Even when doing the main story, you can easily take a different path to your goal. If you love exploration, this game is for you.
  
• There are a lot of things to do. The main thing is obviously exploration, but there are a bunch of side quests too, which are very similar to Fromsoft games in design, but they at least put a marker on the map if the npc moved to a location you already visited, so you don’t have to wonder where they went off to, and you have a quest log. There’s also cooking, but it’s just about bringing materials dropped by monsters to an npc to make you the food, which beside the time limited buff give you a permanent stat upgrade on first use.
  
• Combat is very good, except maybe for the first few hours. It starts really simple as you only have basic attacks for your weapons and the enemies usually only try to charge you or throw some easily reflected projectile at you, while you can stunlock them very easily. But as you unlock more moves and the enemies get better attack patterns, it starts feeling better.
  There’s also a large variety of weapons. At first they start simple with only basic stats, where you just find direct upgrades, but then you start finding weapons that have a specific niche in stats, like giving good offensive stats, but making you more vulnerable. Further on, they start having passive effects, like elemental damage, applying poison or causing an explosion after landing multiple hits. Even further on, they start having unique abilities that either replace or upgrade an existing skill, or even give a new one.
  
• There’s a good variety of enemies for every area with unique attack patterns. Later in the game there are enemies that can have 3 different attacks that you have to keep an eye on.
  
• Bosses are great, especially in the second half of the game. As with everything else, they start off pretty simple and you can easily brute force them with healing potions, but they start getting more complex later making me actually learn their patterns. Though I also decided to handicap myself a bit by only using healing potions if the boss is almost dead and I need to heal. I definitely recommend not using potions if you find the bosses too easy.

• The translation is quite bad, it’s full of errors and the sentence structure is really weird in a lot of cases. I had to keep rereading sentences a lot to actually understand what they mean.
  
• The talent interface is really clunky to navigate. The nodes are spread around in all sorts of directions and you select them by jumping between neighbors. A free cursor would probably be better. Also the nodes don’t show their level requirement or how many points you’ve spent in them unless you select them, so you’ll have to constantly jump through the nodes just to check if you can actually put points in them. The nodes are only blacked out if you don’t have enough points to spend. Also the whole menu doesn’t show what level you are.
  
• The whole talent tree itself also feels like an afterthought. There’s no decision making to be made as you’ll be constantly swimming in talent points, that you can just put them in everything for your current level. The nodes themselves are aside from the weapon skills just boring +1s to stats similar to Path of Exile. On their own, they feel like a waste, but they’ll eventually stack into something worthwhile.
  
• Some weapons skills have pretty questionable uses. For example the first skill you unlock for the scythe is a double slash, that has a small windup time and doesn’t do that much higher damage, so it’s just better to spam normal attack. The greatsword has a skill where you fly diagonally downwards with the sword in front of you, which would be an amazing skill, but the game has contact damage so when you hit an enemy you actually hurt yourself instead.
  
• Magic could be honestly better. A lot of the spells are just simple projectiles you shoot in front of you, at least early on. The main thing I dislike about the spells is that you can’t cast while in the air.
  
• No buff indicators. This is especially bad for spells that buff you in some way as you are left guessing what they actually do and how long they last. As for food buffs, the items themselves tell you what they increase, but you don’t know if the buffs stack or how long they last.
  
• Story/dialogue sequence breaking. Sometimes I had characters talking about stuff that didn’t happen yet as if they already happened, like visiting a certain area or meeting another npc.
  
• Pacing I guess. Right after the beginning, your main quest objective is to travel across the entire world map through like 10 areas just to get the story to progress. Getting there also isn’t as simple as just going in that direction, your path will be blocked by obstacles and you will have to take detours to learn an ability or get an item that will let you continue. This in itself wouldn’t be a problem, but you’re just left to wander around until you find what you need.
  
• I didn’t like that you have dash unlocked right from the start. This was supposedly introduced by a patch for some reason, which made an entire smaller area at the beginning completely skippable. It’s obvious that you had to visit this area first, because you can’t continue without dash and there’s a room where you were supposed to learn it, which even contains out of place tutorial popups. It also put less importance on air attacking to make your jumps longer, which was how you were supposed to do some early jumps, plus it’s also important in the future for platforming.