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Sauge is a pilot who returns to her home planet of Cigalo in order to locate the distress signal of her sister, who went missing 6 years ago. This requires her to explore the ruins of the mostly barren and polluted planet, which causes her to learn about Shinra Electric Power Company the Consortium, a greedy corporation that exploited Cigalo at the expense of its environment. However, a mysterious stranger stalks her and interferes with her quest.

Outside of the stranger, who eventually makes peace with Sauge without a fight, there isn't a lot of conflict gameplay or story-wise, which feels slightly underwhelming due to how the Consortium is built up to be the big bad corporate empire. Though the ending implies that conflict with the Consortium will be inevitable, possibly setting up something for the sequel. As for the endgame, I feel like the unmasking of the Sand Witch could have been made more impactful if the player had a way to learn of Kea's past as a Consortium member through exploring the ruins. Otherwise, there isn't really any emotional impact to learning her true identity. As for the two endings, you have to choose between having closure with Garance or getting everyone to survive. I wish we could have both closure and survival, but I feel like the survival ending is more "canon" because it is meant to show that Sauge and Nefle need to move on from Garance's death and from the past in general, since seeking the glory days of the Consortium's temporary economic promises got them in trouble in the first place. I'm still feeling conflicted about this ending and I wish there was a secret condition for getting a combined "best" ending, like completing all quests and finding all of Garance's Toaster logs.

I do like the various sidequests in the game where Sauge can help the population of Cigalo and learn of their circumstances, which is necessary because of how many people are leaving for the space cities and how much of a wasteland Cigalo is. For the most part, you're helping the people look for items that they need and helping them learn about the planet. I feel like this captures the ideal of a "commune" much better than a lot of other games that have communes, while also acknowledging the hardships that come from a small community with population issues.


The game is more or less advertised as an intentionally easy 3D platformer with puzzles and a semi-open world. For the most part, you cannot fully explore areas, but unlocking new tools via collecting parts will increase the amount of areas you can explore. This will also allow you to find and destroy signal jammers in order to reveal more of the map. The gameplay works for the most part, but I wish Nefle could run faster sometimes due to the size of some areas.

As for the van, it can be relaxing to drive it around on the plains, but some of the roads in the forest feel very narrow compared to the van, making it easier to crash into obstacles and walls. As someone mentioned in the forums, it would be nice if the player could upgrade the van's speed and traction as a way to unlock new areas rather than using tools alone.

7.8/10

The way the Consortium is built up, it's a little unsatisfying to not be able to fight them with a giant sword in a more combat focused game. However, I think being able to help the community through non-combat sidequests and lending them an ear is a nice change of pace.

The game starts with some impressive cutscenes, but the characters have very minimal characterization and dialogue. At best, Yakumo is looking for another Soulbearer, but we don't know much about his relationship with that Soulbearer and one of the antagonists. Even the glossary barely explains anything substantial about any character.


The game has an interesting deckbuilding system where your characters have a "hand" of 5 soulbits and you draw from a "deck" to refill that hand. However, once you have less than 5 soulbits left, you have the option of reloading all Soulbits at the cost of HP, with the cost being higher on hard mode. To make the most of your deck, you need to set up Arts, which combine Soulbits into stronger actions. And to use up more Soulbits in one turn, you must fulfill conditions to increase your AP temporarily, such as buffing, healing, guarding/dodging an attack, landing a crit, or most commonly, hitting a weakness. Sometimes, it pays to cancel an art in order to use the individual Soulbits in a way that nets you more AP next turn, allowing you to use bigger Arts.

While this battle system is creative on paper, the grinding process is insanely tedious because there's no linear leveling. Instead, all characters have sync rates with Souldrivers, which functions as something similar to a class system that allows you to gain more stats and abilities. Additionally, unlike master quartz and Holo Cores in the Trails series, everyone has their own sync rate with every individual Souldriver, meaning you have to grind 21 souldrivers times 4 characters. Even in the endgame, you don't get much sync rate progress out of each battle unless you get lucky and spawn a silver or golden worm. You also need to worry about farming soul fragments in order to buy permanent upgrades from the Souldrivers, which is also a slow process unless you get lucky with silver/golden worms. The non-linear way of grinding also makes it hard for your postgame party member to catch up, despite his tanking gimmick. Worse yet, you have four total characters but three character slots, with Yakumo being locked in, and the inactive party member gets no sync rate progress.

You can equip enhancement items to your equipments' enhance slots, but storebought gear doesn't have slots while randomly dropped gear have random slot counts. As a result, you're probably not going to be using storebought gear unless you're desperate to change your Soulbit loadout.

The game's consumable item system allows consumables to be used without taking up a turn, but each character only has a limited amount of item uses per battle. This is fine in the main game, but in the post game, you will FEEL the items' lack of scaling. Other than revive items, other healing items only heal by flat amounts, making them powercrept as player HP and enemy damage increases.


6/10
The pixel art and card mechanics are good and it's satisfying to pull off flashy combat arts, but the game also expects you to do an insane amount of grinding for barely any story payoff. Maybe this game needs a remake with a proper story and a better growth system for the characters. This feels more like a proof of concept than a full RPG. Maybe if you're the type of gamer who cares more about combat than story, the main game is at least serviceable.

There isn't much of a story here. Basically, your protagonist, Fatima, is the guardian priestess of a nation, Donerksela, and she must help them manage their resources in order to expand their population and increase her power. Sadly, we don't really get much more dialogue than that. Some of the choices can let you be more lenient when it comes to your citizens' workload, but that's about it. We also never learn what's up with the enemies that show up, but the last guardian apparently failed to defeat them. All we know is that once the final boss is defeated on week 90, your protagonist is able to become a goddess or maybe something worse depending on your alignment. Your alignment stat determines what your character will look like, but I have no idea if going for negative alignment significantly changes the story. It probably doesn't change much, since there's no cutscene for winning the game. Personally, I'd like to see how ascending to goddesshood affects Fatima's relationship with her citizens.


As implied by the above section, the game is all about the resource management and card gameplay. You get a randomized board to build facilities on, and each tile has a preset type of facility you are allowed to build, but some cards allow you to override that restriction. Each facility also has durability that you have to look out for, though at high levels, you might not have to worry about that durability outside of friendly fire with your offensive cards. You generate a certain amount of resources each week depending on your facilities, so try to strike a balance so that you have every resource you need. However, to ensure you can't do a ton of stuff in one week, you have a set amount of EP that gets refilled each week.

But what exactly are you spending resources on? Food is spent to increase your population, wood is spent to increase your population cap, gold is spent on passives in the study menu, fuel is spent on repairs and manipulating your hand of cards, and ore is spent on facility upgrades. Passive skills in the study require almost all types of resources, and the nodes you can upgrade are randomized, though you can spend more resources to change a node to something else.

Enemies can inflict debuffs on you to slow down your resource production and they will also take up tiles on the map. Worse yet, they can attack your population, causing a game over if your population is wiped out. Because of this, you may want to store up some offensive cards while lowering the enemy spawn rate in the study menu. However, you still need some enemies to show up if you want to farm money for the shop. As for the bosses, which appear every 30 weeks, they have a lot of HP, clear all your resources, and deal massive population damage, but if you win, you get to pick a powerful relic to add a strong passive for the rest of the run.

You can gain EXP and manipulate your alignment score to evolve Fatima into her next form. I'm not sure how this affects gameplay outside of aesthetics though. I think some transformations increase the number of card slots, which can help with stockpiling offensive cards. Evolution also unlocks the game animation speed setting in the options menu, but it feels wrong to hide such a feature behind game progress.


7/10

Once you get a hang of the mechanics, a casual run is fairly well-balanced, though the beginning of the game will be the hardest due to your lack of EP and card slots. Towards the end, you should have so many resources and passive buffs that you actually will feel like a goddess. Unfortunately, the game doesn't have much of a story and the translation is terrible, which makes it harder to learn from the tutorials and in-game manual. Maybe this would be better as a phone game considering how the gameplay loop works.

The premise of the game is that there's an organization of magic, or Ley users who fight to keep the peace of the world of Orphania. Unfortunately, the leader's ex-wife, Soraya, succumbed to her lust for power and is now part of an evil cult of Ley sensitives who want to sell out the world to godhood-seeking Ley users from alternate universes. This is an interesting multiverse plot with a lot of potential, but the plot feels like an incomplete outline at times. The developer did add some new cutscenes and changes to existing cutscenes to fill in the gaps and fix inconsistencies, but some noticeable remaining gaps include:
- Hyusai suddenly learning the Symbol of the Order. This would make more sense if there was a cutscene where the party or Kiki informed the Doridenna monks of the Symbol, presumably as a backup plan in case the Leyans kill Devan.
- Vanja's romance with Devan would work better if they had more scenes prior to the Realm at War arc.
- On a similar note, Vanja being elected as queen of Siegburg feels somewhat forced, since she doesn't interact much with Siegburg after pitching the election idea. You could argue that the people would probably respect her for giving them a chance to vote unlike their previous tyrannical leader, but they don't really know her that well either.
- Belion is clearly a grifter who is manipulating Parcus and Soraya with his promise for a better world, but I think he should list more specifics about what problems he wants to fix like the price of eggs.

That said, I really like the post-credits scene that is obtained by doing all the sidequests and superbosses, since it implies that the party may have been unwitting pawns of Udur's villainous rival, who seemingly absorbs Udur's lingering power. I have a feeling this guy is going to be a tricky villain to overcome, since he knows how to play every faction to his advantage.


The combat system has you chain basic skills together in a long combo, and certain combinations will result in a powerful finisher, which often come with buffs and debuffs so that your character can multitask. You also have non-combo skills that simply cost ley, with some of them giving you an extra turn after everyone else's (and some enemies can use those too). However, you also have to be mindful of resources and plan around that. The list of finisher combinations can be rather long, so I wrote them down in a Google Doc for myself in case my characters are inflicted with berserk. For the most part, the game is balanced as long as you take advantage of the crafting system and update your gear as new recipes appear, which is also the primary way to learn new skills. The commercial version of the skill system makes it so that you don't learn all your skills at once and you must instead spend SP to learn them, which you only get upon leveling up. To compensate, the EXP rate in this version is higher, and you should be able to reach the level cap and learn every skill through normal leveling.

As for character meta, Devan and Gado are my favorites. Devan has good healing abilities and a powerful stat debuff finisher. Plus, you are kind of required to use him due to the Symbol of the Order. Gado has decent attack options, lots of HP, and has chain finishers that apply group buffs, causing him to powercreep Leon. It's definitely a good thing Gado didn't follow his former friends in becoming a Leyan, or Orphania would be screwed.

The game has some block/ball pushing puzzles, and they can get pretty complicated towards the end of the game, to the point where they rival the Mystic Cave puzzles from Shadows of Adam. It got to the point where I found the superboss of the game to be a victory lap after beating the puzzle that guarded him. However, the commercial version of the game removed that puzzle, so that should make it easier to reach the superboss.

There is a collectible card game that I never completed due to the sheer difficulty of the tournament. Fortunately, it doesn't affect the story or combat, so if you're not into card games, you aren't required to play it.


7.7/10

The combo system is very satisfying and engaging, since you have to consider the secondary effects of basic skills in addition to the chain finisher. However, some parts of the story, even with the improvements, fall into "outline syndrome" where some plot developments feel like they need more prior cutscenes to justify the outcome.

The first part of the game takes place at the same time as the previous disc, but from Chip's perspective. This adds a lot of context for his strained relationship with his family, where he can never please his father Swed no matter how hard he tries or even when he actually brings good results. It also shows that while he was hostile towards Sai in the previous game, his true feelings are a mix of admiration and jealousy. In the second half of the game, we get to see how he and the main villain, Axis, have a lot in common. As confident as they act, their desire for purpose works against them and makes them confused as to what they should be doing with their life. Axis himself seems like a generic destroyer villain at first, but if you beat all the Eater bosses, you get to see certain events from his perspective, showing that he couldn't deal with his inner conflict and had to separate his own memories to cope with it. Sai also gets an extended character arc where he has to go into his dreams and reexamine his relationships with his loved ones, including his dad, the previous game's final boss.


You start the game with Chip's team of agents, who feel weaker in many ways than the previous team because their abilities have fewer cheese strategies, though they still have some decent multis, and Chip/Ania's multis can quickly kill some of the endgame bosses with enough setup. However, Disc 2 didn't add as many new multis as I had hoped, and the rare spells and high-tier commands still don't have many multis to support them. As a result, I ended up cheesing the endgame and postgame with the Disc 1 team's tried-and-true breaker spam strat, which is even stronger than before thanks to Sai's new Cosmic trait. On the plus side, some of the new spells Oli can learn have good enough secondary effects that they don't need multis to be useful, especially the Vacuum spells that can stack with her stat down debuffs.

One thing that this game did rectify is giving the player a better way to avoid enemy encounters. If the player recruits Kwadle, they can give him the Repellant accessory to completely cancel random encounters, making it easier to search for secrets in old dungeons. This is definitely necessary because some of Solar Light puzzles can be very tricky unless you're good at recognizing circles.

For some reason, cutscenes will have everyone in the party present, but you can only swap out party members by talking to Joshua, which seems like strange design. It's probably to make team building more challenging when going into dungeons that require different tool skills, but it still seems odd. Maybe there should be a consumable item that allows you to change out party members without returning to Joshua, or allow swapping at vending machines?

The game has some collectibles based on the IRL date, including teachers for spells that Oli may have missed in Disc 1. Usually, I'm not too fond of overly complex calendar systems, but this is solely based on the days of the week, so it's not as overwhelming as a full year-long calendar full of specific events while still giving the player a reason to play a bit every day until they collect all the rewards.

8/10
I like Disc 2's character writing more, though my complaint about the redundancy of commands still stands, since there still aren't that many multis and the Disc 1 team's original meta strat is even more meta than before.

For the most part, the story plays out like Exodus or that one animated film retelling of Exodus. There are some key differences, such as powerful Archon bosses that Moshe has to recruit, who perform the plagues instead of the Abrahamic god. Additionally, the Misru, the Egyptian equivalents, have their own gods or rather technologically advanced immortal humans backing them up, giving them an advantage that the Egyptians never had. This leads to tragedy when Moshe sacrifices himself to save his people from the Demiurge's laser. Still, I did like Moshe's growth from a fence-sitter to a true deliverer for his people. IMO, he earned his chosen one status in a more convincing way than Joshwa, who had more inconsistent character development.

There are some odd parts of the story, such as Ramses not recognizing Zipporah. My interpretation is that he looks down on the Simru so much that he can't even be bothered to remember if he ordered their executions at one point. It's also odd that we only get to fight one demigod (basically a golem-like construct) when enough time should have passed for the Misru to make more, but it's also possible the Archons destroyed most of the demigods before Ramses and Adun killed them, leaving only one to serve as the penultimate boss. Finally, Moshe seems to have received some divine power as the deliverer, but this doesn't translate into gameplay, since he's mostly a physical-based character anyways. Am I supposed to believe he used his muscles to hold back the Demiurge's death laser?


No, you cannot cheese the game with Frozen Waters anymore, lol. You actually have to use all your skills the way they were intended. For the most part, I found that all six Styles were useful and well-balanced, since they resemble traditional JRPG classes, though it is fairly obvious who the best candidates for each one is. I wonder if anyone tried to do a challenge run where they equip the Styles onto their least suitable wielders? The only really hairy battle was the one on the second map where Moshe has to fight two guards by himself, but everything afterwards gives you at least 2 party members, giving you more of a turn advantage.

The previous game had good mapping and collectibles, but this game has a more minimalistic mapping style where you travel along nodes on a parallax map. It's a bit of a shame, since it's hard to get a sense of what ancient Kenoma looks like compared to Idin. Maybe the next Kenoma game, Son of Man, will allow us to learn more about the planet.

8/10
The gameplay is more balanced and less centralized around a meta skill and I like Moshe's version of the Moses story. However, I wish we could properly explore full dungeon maps and city maps to give more life to the world of Kenoma.

The protagonist, Oli, is the chosen one of the legendary sword Durend, which allows her to learn spells that are used on her. However, the sword causes pain to her if she gets separated from it, and she wants to learn why the sword chose her and subjected her to this. All she knows is that the sword bonded to her in Astral Point, the HQ of Stardust City's ruling organization, the Agency. She soon meets Sai and Amara, two people who are on the run from the agency. While Amara has amnesia, Sai fakes amnesia and has something to hide.

Oli's character arc mainly consists of her realizing that her purpose with Durend doesn't actually exist, causing her to realize that if she isn't tied down to a purpose, she's better off helping her friends with their own Agency-related problems. IMO, it feels like she accepted her lack of destiny a bit too quickly. Sai's character develop concerns his bad habit of wanting to take the easy way out or give up easily, which ties into how he hid his identity from his friends, since he didn't have the courage to tell them until his identity is revealed at the worst possible time. I enjoyed seeing him overcome his guilt and cowardice and seeing him stand up to Chip and Mayor Swed, though it makes it me wonder if he's the real protagonist of this game and not Oli due to how much focus he gets. Amara was intended to be a living weapon for the Agency, but due to how Overflow works, it becomes clear that she decided her path in life very early on when she goes into this state to protect her friends from Lux. However, she seems to have an archenemy in Omegaxis, who is her opposite in how they want to use their freedom from the Agency, which means she will likely get an expanded character arc in the next game alongside her foe.

The Agency is supposed to be a corrupt police state that everyone sees as oppressors rather than heroes. The people of Slate City certainly have reason to despise the Agency, since the Agency kills their leader and destroys their home for the "crime" of being an anarchist commune. However, we don't see much direct oppression of the people of Stardust City and other towns under the Agency's control. At best, we know that they persecute the homeless (according to the NPC in the cathedral), they are secretly repsonsible for asxpawn monsters being everywhere, and they experimented on at least one criminal, but we don't see much reason for the average citizens to despise the agency. On the other hand, Stardust City is implied to have a lot of wealth inequality, the mayor holds the poor in contempt, and Astral Point is basically a gated community for the upper class, so one could argue that the Agency is creating their own crime problem in the first place, which would then lead to more people being experimented on and essentially enslaved, thus rendering Swed's "tough on crime" rhetoric hollow.


The game's main gimmick is that your characters can only equip 8 commands, though some equipment grants special commands that don't take up space, forcing you to consider your builds carefully. The game also has way more commands than you will ever need, which should supposedly lead to interesting builds on paper, but in practice, I ended up just using low cost skills that have multis because it's more damage efficient than the higher-end skills. Higher-end skills cost a ton of MP but have no multis, so I felt no incentive to use them over their cheaper counterparts. TBH, it feels like the large command pool was meant more for the enemies than the player.

Oli is supposed to be a blue mage character who can learn spells, but her version of this mechanic feel overengineered. For one thing, you need to use up a turn to use a collection-type command instead of learning the new spell in a more natural manner. Additionally, you need to have a high C stat to increase the chances of learning certain skills, which means in the early game, you will have to make compromises in your equipment setup. You will also have to have Collect, Conduct, and Coerce at minimum in your command list if you want to learn rarer spells, which is a lot when there are only 8 slots. This normally wouldn't be too bad, but what really breaks the camel's back is that many enemies have large learnable skill pools, which can add a very thick layer of RNG to learning spells. You can somewhat influence the spells they use by using Mana Taunt and Coerce, but it isn't that reliable. The sad part is that as I mentioned earlier, the game's meta means you probably won't even use most of the spells Oli learns outside of the ones that trigger cost-efficient multis.

Speaking of multis, they are actions that require 2 or more specific commands to be used by the party, which will cause all involved characters to use up their turn to perform the action. These can deal damage comparable to higher-end skills for the cost of two low or mid tier skills, which makes them very efficient. The elemental Breaker series of multis as especially powerful when combined with Sai's Exploit special, which adds elemental weaknesses. These are satisfying to pull off, but I really wish there were multis for higher tier skills and extra elemental skills. It's possible they exist, but they're not listed in the Gamefaqs guide or the Handbook on itch.

On the field, each character has an exploration ability: Oli can create ice boats to travel across water or create a bridge across 1-tile gaps/obstacles, Sai can push boxes, and Amara can activate springboards. However, Sai and Amara's abilities require you to confirm their use if you activate them after a map transition. It's a minor nitpick though and most of the puzzles are fair.

As for enemy balancing, most of them are fair, but some enemy commands' damage formulas can feel really OP compared to others of the same tier. Spinel difficulty feels like it was meant for players who accidentally overleveled in the process of farming Eater Eyes or teaching Oli spells, so I would recommend the lower difficulties for a non-grinding playthrough.

The equipment system isn't about linear upgrades, since everything has a percentage-based trade-off. As a result, levels matter much more than gear, but it can still be worth considering each piece of equipment's attached commands and non-statistical properties. Generally, you'll want to focus on further increasing the characters' strong stats.

One thing I think the game needs is either a setting for enemy encounter rate or a much higher cap for Invisibility Sprays, since the default encounter rate is very high. This becomes more apparent in big and open maps where navigating is difficult. I guess if you don't feel a need to hoard money, you can also just run from battle and accept the dropped change.


7.5/10

The story is fine for the most part and I enjoyed Sai's character development, but I think Swed and the Agency have some missing potential as villains. The gameplay is mostly balanced, but there are so many redundant commands that it doesn't feel worth it to buy all of Amara's Eater Eye commands or learn all of Oli's spells. Maybe it would help if those higher-end skills had multis too?

As someone who wrote a controversial Dustborn review, this game is almost exactly what I was hoping Dustborn would have been in terms of its political narrative. While Dustborn has a largely "tell, don't show" approach to its politics because it wants to focus on the relationship building aspect of the story, Neofeud will tell and show in equally large measures, since it will give you lots of text about the dystopian political situation while showing visceral cutscenes of state violence, giving it way more bite than Dustborn. While there are dark moments, there are some over-the-top parodies of capitalism and rich hedonism to balance it out, like the smart meter having three different weapons built into it in order to kill those who try to steal power. The only downside is that the political monologues can get a bit long-winded, but I think it's preferable to keeping the player in the dark about the worldbuilding.

My favorite protagonist is Sybil Clington-Busch, who is part of the ruling class, but seeks to bring about equality for the poor and the non-humans who suffer from specieist discrimination. The other protagonists wonder if she's truly sincere in her political convictions, but she does prove to be genuine, since she used a backup robot body to directly experience underclass life and is willing to subject herself to doing so again in her Egalite policy in the ending. At the same time, the game makes it clear that despite her efforts, her privilege still blinds her to the fact that her allies are more at risk than her. which costs her an alliance with Noah Goertzel because she failed to realize how constrained he felt under protective house arrest in the landfill. She also has the advantage of being able to survive her death in backup bodies due to consciousness uploading, but that also means she doesn't fully grasp that her allies are more mortal than her, which is implied to be the reason she came up with an overly risky plan to test Karl at the start of the game. Her strained relationship with Noah Goertzel also provides some nuance to the idea of "eating the rich," since it acknowledges that Goertzel's plan to kill all Neofeudals is foolish because he's alienating potential allies. To a lesser extent, I also enjoyed Karl and Proto-J's character development, with Karl trying to find a way to atone for his past as a corrupt cop and Proto-J learning that the high life he sought isn't worth it if it means exploiting others.

Warren Clington-Busch is probably one of the best antifa story antagonists, since while he has plenty over over-the-top moments of power abuse and hedonism, he remains a competent threat and manages to argue his own philosophy. He states that the reason he wants to maintain the status-quo of the 1% having disproportionately more wealth and power than the 99% is because if he tried to uplift the underclass, he would have less resources allocated to fighting against his Neofeudal rivals, rendering egalitarian efforts self-defeating. It's a realistic, albeit extremely cynical and anti-social philosophy that ultimately results in him seeking godhood like a classic JRPG villain, but he's definitely a bit more complex than similar greedy and bigoted villains.This also indicates that despite being the biggest villain, he's still a symptom of civilization's dog-eat-dog tendencies than the root cause of it, which is something Sybil has to contend with when she takes power in the ending. Though it's subtly implied that a world where the 99% are trapped in a financial death spiral also causes stagnation, since people like Goertzel and Gen won't have the resources they need to make their own innovations, which counters Warren's argument about ROI. I like that he's able to challenge Sybil's philosophy as well as Sybil's resolve to fight back against his cynicism in favor of doing what she thinks is right.

However, the plot itself has some noticeable plot holes, loose ends, and things that need more elaboration.

• When Karl first receives a call from Shuffler, the dialogue makes it sound like he met Proto-J in the past, but he doesn't recognize Proto-J in the present or even knows which apartment room is his. The only explanation that makes sense is that Proto-J used ESP to wipe Karl's memory in an earlier encounter.
  
• The Steam and Itch descriptions state Karl got fired for refusing to shoot a robot, but the game itself confirms he actually did shoot the robot on his superiors' orders. This sounds like a RETCON and you should update the Steam, Itch, and other site descriptions to reflect that. On that note, I think the twist should be supplemented with scenes or even nightmares where he ponders his guilt.
  
• There's no follow-up for Shuffler and Princess. While Shuffler is probably fine due to Sybil's deal, Princess's fate is unknown despite how worried Proto-J was for her. Also, what happened to Suzette? Does she ever reunite with her children?
  
• Did Borges survive his battle against Proto-J? The game implies there's a stable time loop in Goertzel's lab, but Borges took a heavy dose of mythium and an ESP attack. Maybe he'll show up in the sequel?
  
• Aleph needs more characterization and not just get killed off so suddenly. Maybe he should get a notepad to write down his thoughts and explain his origin story?
  
• Even if you refuse to surrender to Warren during the hostage situation with Karl's family, the game treats it as if you did surrender.
  
• The game never really explains why Warren needed to keep Karl alive as a prisoner.

The gameplay is simple point-and-click for the most part, with well-thought out puzzles. However, the shootout in the arcade has too many extra buttons and moving parts for how time-sensitive it is, making it the most difficult and jank portion of the game. The shooting/cover mechanic also feels very jank and you don't get a lot of time to master it. It's so much harder than the final action sequence that I consider it the actual final boss of the game, lol.

The game has a lot of voiced and unvoiced dialogue, but it's easy to accidentally click through them. IMO, the game really needs a text log like in the Trails series that also allows you to replay voice clips.


7.9/10

I really like the dynamic between Sybil versus Warren as well as how the game doesn't shy away from showing the more brutal aspects of capitalism and racism, but the game's story needs more proofreading to fix plot holes and address some forgotten plot threads.

Johan is a village boy whose village was destroyed by the mad Aeon cult, with one of the leaders being his extremely divorced father. Now he has to team up with Aiden and Crysta, who also fear the Aeon threat, but the flashfoward prologue sets up Johan as turning to the dark side. As a result, Aiden has an almost equal role as the protagonist by the endgame in his quest to bring Johan back to his senses.

The beginning of the game is crafted to leave a strong first impression, especially with the severity of the destruction of Vereta and the murder of Johan's mother. I also liked seeing the corruption within the Kingdom of Alexandria and how it's an empire in decline with an incredibly insular upper class, which can feel relatable in these dark times. However, due to deadline and financial issues, the endgame had a lot of cut content and rushed scenes, making it so that there's a lot of loose ends, such as what exactly the rapture is supposed to do to Alexandria, what is King Zelos's role in all this, Zach getting a proper reconciliation and/or condemnation from Johan, Rachel getting a more detailed resolution with Aldus, and more details about Crysta's background and home country. I've played plenty of games with rushed endings, but most of them are at least able to properly NAME their final boss and give them bits of dialogue, unlike this one. The game also has some awkward scenes in the second half, like Naomi being spared by Johan for no reason even though she's his mother's killer, Isolde surviving the castle's destruction despite falling unconscious and the Aeons wanting her head, and Drago not putting up a fight against Isolde. It's like the game couldn't decide how to kill or defeat them.. There's supposed to be future DLC to address the loose ends, but it still seems like an incredibly bad idea to leave so many questions unanswered and the game seems more like an early access game than a full release as a result.

I really liked Isolde as a villain due to how blatantly corrupt she is and how she cares more about crushing Lance and his commoner friends than actually doing anything about the Aeons. The fact that she's a former commoner who now hates commoners is a hint that she's a product of the kingdom's prior corruption rather than its cause, and that she just made a bad regime worse. IMO, the final chapter should have made either Lance or Evil Johan duel her one last time before the Aeons capture her, just to wipe the look off her smug face.


The combat system uses RPG Maker 2003's ATB system, which is unfortunate because RM2K3 implemented it in a really jank way. The game did try to implement a full wait mode, but it has a seemingly unfixable softlock, so it's recommended to use Active mode, which at least still pauses once a character is selected. Additionally, it looks like buff durations are based on all turns rather than the user's turns, though to the game's credit, it tries to mitigate this by making the duration longer than most games to compensate.

In this game's resource system, characters can accumulate up to three relica bars by using normal attacks or spells, which allows them to pull off a special skill with their weapon. Additionally, a percentage of MP is restored upon initiating a normal attack, whether or not the attack connects, which is a good way to ensure even misses aren't wasted turns. Guarding recovers HP (and MP in Crysta's case due to her lack of attack command), making it a way to save on items once your HP is higher. Meanwhile, consumable items scale well to HP and MP, but don't grant relica bars, which balances them and rewards the playing for not relying too much on items.

After leveling up, characters gain Bonus Points that can be allocated to stats, but I personally don't like this implementation compared to Ara Fell's. For one thing, Bonus Points must all be spent upon leveling up, which means if a character gains levels offscreen due to story reasons or joins late in the story, they won't get to benefit from Bonus Points. Also, the way it's implemented grants a bonus stat point if you concentrate all four points into a single stat, which is not explained in the game. Finally, there's no way to reallocate Bonus Points for the sake of experimentation. The good news is that even if the player spends Bonus Points poorly, the game is still beatable, but it does beg the question of whether or not this feature was even worth implementing. Also, this is just my opinion, but I think agility should be exempt from this system, since agility is extremely OP in an ATB system and investing only in speed over the course of the game makes early joiners incredibly strong compared to later characters.

As for character balancing, Johan is a physical glass cannon, Crysta is a standard mage, and Aiden is just really good in every stat for some reason, along with having really strong dark spells that makes him a better mage than Crysta as long as the enemy doesn't resist that element. It seems odd for Aiden to be so OP, but I take it as a sign that he is in some ways the true protagonist of the game rather than Johan, who gets privileges that other characters don't. However, Lance and Karuka are guest characters who have decent physical attack and HP, but mediocre speed and magic, and they don't have access to Ethrel weapon upgrades. Karuka at least has the advantage of having the only attack/defense buff in the game, but Lance has a really luck-based unique skill instead. IMO, these two need some kind of weapon upgrade event that puts them on par with the main characters' level 5 weapons for the sake of balance.

Outside of battle, you can interact with the environment in various ways, like finding clean ledges to jump from, picking up various plants as consumable items, and grabbing spare change. The maps look very complex and large, though most encounters don't respawn, giving you the sense of slowly conquering each vast region and allowing you to appreciate the old school aesthetics.

The game has many missables and points of no return, so I definitely recommend using Firefly's guide from the very start.

7.2/10
This game does a lot of interesting things that push the limits of its engine, even though I'm RPG Maker 2003's biggest hater, so I can respect the effort put into that. Though that does make me wonder what this game would be like in a newer engine with a better ATB system. As for the story, the first half knows how to keep the player engaged, but the ending dropped the ball so hard because of the deadline. I'll update my review once I play the future DLC.

If you've played other games in the series, you'll find the story confusing at first because Sally and Lily already graduated college, which should contradict the events of the previous game, "Case 03: True Cannibal Boy." This does build on a previous plot point in that game, namely that the elder gods can end the world at any time. We actually get to see the process here with Nya planting a seed inside women that grows into an evil baby Lovecraftian being, which summons Nya's real body into the physical world so that Nya can reset the universe. Although Sally manages to stop this plan, Nya still tricks her into initiating a time rewind to befriend Lily for real, which is a clever way of setting up the main timeline where Marty becomes one of Nya's playthings, as well as setting up Sally and Lily's horrible fate in Case 03. It also follows the pattern of how if the protagonists chose the seemingly harder path and accept losing their loved ones, they could avoid further tragedy in the future.

For the horror aspect, the idea of Nya's son bursting through the abdomen is terrifying, and I'd really like to see a proper CG of this. If this series ever gets a better budget, I think a lot of horror scenes like this should get a really terrifying CG from a skilled artist, even if it prevent me from sleeping for the rest of my life. Additionally, I wish we had more detail on Nya's final attack on the world in the bad ending, since it's not exactly clear what the powder will do. Will it kill people or transform them into monsters? Maybe we'll find out in a later game when Nya gets bored of the world again.

The inclusion of Shadow as a villain protagonist is quite good and we get to see Sally have a ruthless side as well when it comes to Nya. It drives home that despite Shadow being the evil version of Sally, she's still based on Sally's emotions and the two aren't that different deep down. Though it makes me wonder who the fourth portrait is in the old timeline, since Shadow never gave up on serial killing in this timeline.

The game has a lot of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure references, with Seer Nye looking just like Enrico Pucci while handing out discs and talking about fated encounters. The antagonist, Nya's son, can use time stop and the only way to defeat him is to use another of Nya's sons to see through the stopped time. The entire plot of the game is trying to prevent a universal reset, and Pucci's goal in Stone Ocean is to cause a reset. Then there's the true ending's name, which is Made in Heaven, the name of Pucci's ultimate Stand. There's probably a lot of other references that I missed, and I think the references flow very well with the story. Also, it would be very in-character for Nya to be a JoJo fan and take Pucci's form as Nye Arlat just for fun.


8.5/10

The game is short, but the story is good and it's also isolated enough that you don't need to play the other games first. However, playing the other games first does make the ending more significant and it gives us a glimpse of why Jade fears Nya so much.