บทวิจารณ์ล่าสุดโดย bugfragged

The premise is that the protagonists must fight back against the political conspiracy of Count Vorakia Estuuban, and the leader of the party, Ellemine, must develop into a proper leader rather than remain an innocent princess forever. I really liked her growth throughout the game, since she becomes more confident and ruthless while also still retaining her sense of empathy.

The game does bring up some interesting thought experiments, such as the Erran ability to read minds and sense emotions. There's technology to defend one's mind against being read, but as Eryn points out, it can be scary that someone can figure out your insecurities and give you unwanted pity. It's also subtly implied that depending too much on mind-reading means one will be much worse at reading people without it, since Arcturo misread his "friend" Vorakia until it was too late.

That said, there is a pretty blatant use of writer's convenience at the start of the story. Eryn made the foolhardy decision to have Chad arrested simply for speaking out against Arcturo's charges. This seems like a risk not worth taking, since Chad had no evidence and is unlikely to significantly sway public opinion, plus Lady Marselva correctly points out that doing so will just make the other councilmembers suspicious. As a result, Vorakia is forced to accelerate his plans and lose the advantage of good publicity that would have otherwise made Ellemine's alliances impossible to form. While it's implied that Eryn's real reason for doing this is to gain hostages to use against Marselva, it still comes off as a blatant freebie for the good guys in the long run and it also seems like an overly convenient way for Chad to get involved in the plot. Additionally, it seems strange Vorakia and the rest of the conspiracy were surprisingly lenient about Eryn's mistake, and even stranger that Ellemine and Arcturo seem to hype Eryn's political wisdom so much. Personally, I would have preferred that Chad actually do something to warrant getting captured, since doing so would make him look more like a chad for taking initiative and make the enemies seem more competent.

On the other hand, if there's going to be a major screwup in the story, I definitely prefer it be on the antagonist side than the protagonist side. That way I can take some pride in playing as comparatively competent people.

As for the use of races in the game, there's a subtle aesop that one's environment contributes more to how one turns out than racial stereotypes. For example, the Farians on Kardel are known for using their hexes for crimes or at best, resorting to extreme measures to defend themselves against criminals in a dog-eat-dog planet that was ravaged by volcanic activity. In contrast, the Farians on Yurielle live peacefully due to being on a stable and pristine planet. Unfortunately, the Draconians and Gulanians/Granians get no individuality or nuance, since they're just generic conquerors and scientists respectively. While Zazir is a Draconian/Granian hybrid, he's a lab creation and is essentially an outsider to both races' societies, which to me comes off as a lazy way to technically have one of each race in the party without having to actually flesh out Draconian and Gulanian/Granian society. We really need to be able to visit their civilian zones somehow.

Finally, the script needs some proofreading. It's better than a machine translated game, but there are still some awkward word choices and grammar errors.


The game uses a RPS damage type system where physical attacks are advantageous against tech, tech is advantageous against ether, and ether is advantageous against physical, ensuring that AOEs won't be enough to wipe out sufficiently balanced enemy parties. Interestingly, most tech and ether skills function as "magic" under the hood and therefore can be reflected, but physical attacks buffed to deal ether or tech damage do not count as "magic" and therefore can ignore reflection. I don't know if this is actually mentioned anywhere in the game's dialogue though.

The game starts out fairly balanced, but the endgame starts getting weird. Since the characters have buffs and synergies that would be considered too OP in most games, the late game bosses start cheating the turn system like crazy. They tend to do things like AOE dispel, buff, and AOE debuff as sequential actions, and these can be triggered as HP threshold events or even at the start of rounds. As a result, combat gets really messy when you have use several turns to remove enemy buffs and set up your own, only for the bosses to reverse all that with what I refer to as their "boss combo."

Astral Mode is a really sloppy attempt at a survival horror minigame IMO. The idea is that Ellemine has to dodge Astral beasts while collecting powerups, but this isn't implemented well. For one thing, the powerups show up as glowing balls, which are easy to mistake for various lighting effects. Additionally, there's no indicator showing how many items are in each area, making it hard to tell if an area is fully looted. As for the Astral Beasts, damage from them persists into the next time you Astral dive and their positions don't seem to reset, so if you exited an Astral zone with several near the activation point, going back in will immediately result in damage.


7.5/10

The story and world building are ambitious, but some parts definitely needed a sanity check. The bosses do start to feel samey at the end, since they're all just spamming slightly different variations of the deadly "boss combo" just to keep up with the player's powerful skills.

This is an opinion, but personally, I prefer the pre-June update face portraits, since the AI-generated ones just feel more offputting than the RPG Maker style face portraits from before.

The game has two main plot threads, with the first being the tension between Zamaste and Halonia and the second being Astraea's lost memories. However, both leave some loose ends, since the queen's curse isn't adequately explained until Knight Bewitched 2 and Astraea's connection to Abbie has yet to be clarified. I'm hoping there will be a continuation of Timeline 1 someday, since while Timeline 2 is good, I still want to see how Timeline 1 leads to it.

Personally, I feel like the queen's death at the end of the game would have hit harder if we had more interactions with her. By the time the party reaches her in the endgame, she's already on death's door without us really affecting the outcome. It really didn't reach the previous game's high note of confronting Zamas and getting Abbie back against all odds.

IMO, the game should have spent more time fleshing out Zamaste, since it would be interesting to see how much the kingdom was affected by their worship of an antagonistic deity. It seems strange that in the ending, they reconciled so easily with Halonia. Additionally, Adalia Primrose didn't seem that bothered by the revelations about Zamas in the Depths.


The game is mechanically similar to the previous one, but there are some improvements, such as the wider resolution. This makes it easier to fit all of the party's buffs on the UI, though the UI still doesn't show enemy buffs and debuffs.

For equipment, characters still have a lot of freedom to equip whatever they want, but equipment types are more restricted to give the characters a bit more individuality. Though I still ended up putting the Ragnarok on Dylan because most of the other magic-based equipment was mediocre. However, I personally wish there was no distinction between spell and tech slots, since I felt like having more spell slots was better in the early stages of the game.

There's now a skill tree, where you can spend SP to unlock nodes containing stat boosts and passives. In practice, most players will concentrate on a character's best stat first to maximize their strengths before going for the next most useful stat. There's also the emblem system, where characters have to complete certain events and choose between two emblems, which unlocks different branches in their skill tree that leads to some character exclusive skills, which means they have a bit more individuality than in the previous game.


TBH, the story feels even more underdeveloped than Celestial Hearts, but I did appreciate the improvements to the combat system and UI, though I wish there were more character exclusive nodes on the skill trees.
6.5/10

2 years after the fall of the Black Tower, Abbie suddenly disappears, and Mari has to actually learn how to participate in combat in order to search for her. This isn't an easy task, since she'll have to travel all over Ambrose and explore both old and new locations. For the most part, it feels like going through old KB locations in monochrome is meant to evoke a sense of nostalgia, as well as loss because most of those locations got rekt by the rising sea levels. The sense of loss of locations is probably meant to be a parallel to how the party members are dealing with loss. Mari lost Abbie, Keller lost Morgoth, Stray lost Ruth and Gwen, and Malady lost Uno, and things haven't been the same for them. They also have to deal with their worst fears concerning their loved ones, though I wish the Tower of Trials also showed visions for the non-Mari party members, since those seem like they could be interesting.

Although it's somewhat brief, you get to confront the one manipulating Typhus, Lilith, and Morgoth, and it is indeed Zamas. I honestly didn't expect that we would be able to attack and dethrone (or at least temporarily inconvenience) God so soon, but it's finally happening despite this being the second-to-last game in Timeline 1. It seems strange that the series would peak in terms of villain threat level at this point in the timeline, but it's not like we can permanently defeat him anyways. Surprisingly, despite being a human-hating jerk with a name similar to another human-hating jerk in an anime, Zamas is shown to be a slightly tragic figure because he's miserable from the loss of his sister and tries to shift the blame for it. He even shows mercy to the protagonists because he senses his sister in them somehow, though we don't know how exactly the protagonists are related.


The game mostly does away with unique skills and instead has all skills come from equipment and skill orbs. Additionally, most equipment is no longer exclusive, giving a greater degree of customization, though some characters will obviously excel at certain roles. Personally, I would have preferred the characters having more unique and permanently learnable skills like in previous games, since I feel that this gives them more of an identity in combat.

The gameplay does get grindy at around the middle, and I feel like some enemies, such as the scorpions in the Underworld, were a bit too op. Additionally, I felt like magic builds were overall better, since physical damage strategies tend to burn through too much TP to sustain while magic damage strategies felt more sustainable in terms of both MP and TP.

The bide and calm mind skills can be useful for quickly bursting down a boss, but it'd be nice if they also buffed the accuracy of the next attack too, since a lot of time and resources go into buffing up the attack.

While the game does try to capture a retro aesthetic, the UI for showing player and enemy states wasn't good. You can't see enemy states at all and you can only see two player character states at a time. The next game does fix this by giving more room to show player states, but enemy states are still unreadable.


7.5/10

I like how the story shows the effects of the previous events on the returning characters and I'm looking forward to seeing how the heroes confront the main antagonist in Timeline 2. However, the UI could definitely use some work and I miss the characters having more unique skills related to their actual fighting styles.

The dialogue in this game is overall very light, due to the fact that all the party members are silent protagonists, even Abbie. They do have Mari, their nymph companion, doing most of the speaking though, and she has a connection to one of the antagonists. Personally, I prefer the other games having a set party of important characters who all have story relevance, rather than just having a bunch of random mercenaries. IMO, Keller should have been a playable character here due to his connection to Morgoth.

Strangely, the terminology and names used in this game isn't consistent with the rest of the series. For example, Halonia is called Halona and Zamas is called Zumasa, which is weird because they're named correctly in Finding Light. Maybe this was before the names were finalized?

As for how this fits into the plot of timeline 1, the game explains that humanity has a sort of chaotic energy in them that makes them prone to violence, and Zamas didn't like that, so he screwed up the balance of that energy even more to make them destroy themselves faster.

As for Morgoth, the final boss, he's supposed to be a decontruction of utilitarianism, since he saw a vision of humans destroying each other with chaos energy, so he believes absorbing that chaos energy into the Black Tower and killing humans is going to save the planet in the long run. Though it would have been more interesting to see more dilemmas where Morgoth had to try to apply that philosophy. It also would have been interesting if Keller debated Morgoth about this, though Mari does point out the flaws in Morgoth's logic.


This game is definitely more focused on gameplay than story, even compared to KB1. You have several classes to choose from and many ways to build your team. The first class you choose, which is for the main protagonist Abbie, is also the most important since Abbie will also get anti-Miasma skills no matter what class they pick, meaning you have to consider if it's wise to delegate both the anti-Miasma role and the chosen class's role to Abbie. Personally, I made them a Brewmaster because that class can avoid having to use too much TP to perform their role, allowing me to save that TP for anti-Miasma purposes.

Note that all characters have TP, but not MP, which means you have to pay attention to how you can regenerate TP for each class. If you use two healer characters, it might even be possible to sustain yourself in weaker areas without having to use items. In a way, I think this game partially inspired the combat system in Absinthia, where you're encouraged to use guard skills to recover a limited pool of MP rather than just having a large MP pool to burn through recklessly.

As for non-combat stuff, you're exploring a huge multifloor dungeon like in the Etrian series, and you have to constantly look for ways to unlock shortcuts. As long as you find all the shortcuts, you can make it to wherever you need to go quickly, but I still wish there was a more convenient quick-travel system at times.

The town has a day/night cycle that changes when you exit the dungeon or use the inn. While some stores are always around, some merchants are only around at night or only show up randomly. Sadly, there's no way to tell when certain merchants will appear, but there's no penalty for aimlessly advancing time, so you'll find what you need eventually.


7/10

The dialogue definitely isn't the selling point of the story, though Mari herself does get some good lines in the final boss cutscenes. There is some confusing lore about the miasma and humanity's chaos energy that's needed to understand what happens in some of the other games, as well as Typhus's motives in KB1. The gameplay is a bit more complex compared to the other games in the series due to the class choices, as well as how most of the classes aren't traditional RPG ones, but it's still fun to see how your chosen party synergizes despite their lack of traditional mages.

The game initially seems to set up the twist that the Cainites are the misunderstood ones and that the Idinites are being misled by false gods, and I thought they played their hand too early. Fortunately, it turns out there were still quite a few more twists and that the conflict isn't quite as black-and-white as it seemed. I enjoyed learning about the religious lore of both sides, and the game gives tangible EXP rewards for finding these events too. And there's also the implication that the Kenomans are connected to the Kosmokraters somehow, though that mystery will be saved for future games in the series.

Unfortunately, I'm not the biggest fan of the protagonist, Joshwa Asa. He's intended to be the naive and brash protagonist who is supposed to get wiser over time, but I feel like his idiot phase gets dragged out too long or is used inconsistently, especially in the endgame. When he finds that his uncle, Lamech, enacted a coup in the name of the Kosmokraters, Joshwa hands the Babel Code to the latter, despite all the prior events of the game indicating that the Kosmokraters are untrustworthy and that Lamech is sus. Hell, the Kosmokraters literally sent evil space rocks to kill the party in the previous dungeon and we had to fight at least two of their zealots as bosses. The worst part is that he knew that doing so would put his friends at risk, the same people that he spent the game travelling with, so I had a really hard time sympathizing with him and I'm baffled that his friends forgave him so easily. While Joshwa's mistake is supposed to ensure the bad guys get the code, I feel like there should have been a better way to do it, like having Nike/Anat pretend to help the party oppose Lamech, only to backstab them.

That said, I do love to hate the Kosmokraters, for being such petty villains that they would blow up a good chunk of Idin just to collectively punish everyone. The craziest part is that they could have just destroyed the Transmigrator and only the Transmigrator in order to protect their position, but they went the extra mile out of pure spite and they refuse to even promise a ceasefire between the races if the protagonists obey them. You really get the feeling that they're gods that you have to attack and dethrone, and hopefully we'll get that opportunity in a future game.

As for the ending, Joshwa ends up having to choose between two bad options. If he obeys the Kosmokraters, they spare Idin, but the Idinites will continue being used as cannon fodder in pointless wars. If not, the Idinites have a chance at being freed from the Kosmokraters, but there will be mass death from the infernos. At least, that's my interpretation of how it went down. Though I wonder how free the Idinites will really be if the Kosmokraters can still use holograms to manipulate them. It would suck if Joshwa's difficult choice did nothing to change the status quo on Idin. Also, I wish the player could actually make the choice and possibly get a bad ending for obeying the Kosmokraters.


The game uses NP and DP, which are analogous to MP and TP in other RPG Maker games. NP skills are standard single-target elemental mageia while DP skills are divine mageia, which all have powerful effects, but heavy drawbacks. However, the Frozen Waters skill doesn't have enough of a drawback, since the 4 turn cooldown doesn't matter if everyone in the party equips this skills. I actually stunlocked the final boss just by having my characters use Frozen Waters on rotation. If you want a well-balanced challenge for the endgame, only equip one Frozen Waters.

Strangely, the battle system gives your characters physical defense to use against enemy physical skills, but your characters can't use physical attacks at all. This is despite how everyone has their own weapon type and how Joshwa had to use a new weapon type in order to fight with only one arm. Worse yet, enemy Idinites are capable of using physical attacks, elemental mageia, and divine mageia, so why are only the player characters limited? IMO, it would have been more interesting if Joshwa had different physical skills depending on the state of his arm in the story, since it seems like losing an arm doesn't significantly affect his ability to spam mageia like everyone else.

Technically, there is a dueling system where Joshwa has to use physical attacks, but this is only used once in the beginning of the game and there's never a real story reason to use it again. I have no idea if this is going to be used again in future games.

The symbol encounters respawn only on demand, so you have complete control over how much you want to grind and you'll have a fairly easy time backtracking.

7/10
The gameplay is balanced if you don't use the Frozen Waters cheese strat and you actually have to consider when it's safe to use your offensive Divine Mageia. The world-building is good and keeps the player hooked for sequels, but I feel like the story tries to dumb down Joshwa in awkward ways just to advance the plot, which makes it baffling that it also treats him as worthy of being a king. Maybe he'll prove me wrong in future games?

In this entry in the Knights of Ambrose series, the player takes controls of Kayah, a forest guardian who meets an amnesiac angel, and they must team up with other party members to stop Lilith and the Gravehart family from kidnapping and draining innocent people. However, the stakes end up much higher than in the previous two games, since Lilith lifts the entire continent of Belume into the sky, and if it drops, you can say goodbye to the entire human race. Unfortunately, the game's plot has very fast-pacing, which makes it harder to fully convey the direness of the situation.

There are some interesting themes in the game, such as the dehumanization of certain jobs and the poor, which the villains take advantage of to discreetly gain more human sacrifices.

My favorite character would have to be Silnastra, who is hellbent on defeating Lilith, but at the same time, she laments that she spent so long as Lilith's brainwashed pawn and later fighting Lilith that she essentially lost most of her childhood and adulthood. She never gives up on revenge, but she does urge her son to live a more fulfilling life. Ironically, Lilith also feels robbed of her chance for a fulfilling life due to being a puppet of her creator, leading to the villainess we see in this game and in Absinthia.


Unlike other games in the second timeline, this one uses both MP and TP, with stronger skills requiring a lot of both. This is to prevent the player from abusing the stronger skills too much, but for boss battles, most people will accumulate TP ahead of time in order to cast their best group buffs right off the bat. However, some bosses specifically start the battle by nuking the party's TP, forcing the player to rely on MP skills for the first few turns.

Another major change is that the game uses an ATB system. Unlike most RPG Maker games that use this system, I feel like the bosses weren't super-fast compared to the party, especially when the party includes 5 members. This gave some room for error even on hard mode as long as the party has sufficient stats.

Enemy behavior seems more straightforward in this game, since they don't have the counterattacks or on-death attacks from the other games. There generally no need to worry about the enemy punishing the player for attacking too aggressively, so overall, this is probably the easiest game in the second timeline.


6.5/10

The pacing felt too fast, even compared to the first two games in the second timeline. While there weren't any obvious problems with the combat, it's still strange that the battle system is comparatively more simplistic than the earlier games. That said, Absinthia is a huge jump in quality compared to this game, so it still might be worth playing the game just to get caught up on the lore.

Unlike me, you should probably play Knight Bewitched 1, 2, and Celestial Hearts first so that you'll fully understand the story. I still enjoyed the story, but there were some plot details that I didn't have enough context for. Additionally, Absinthia is better written than the previous games, so it's easier to appreciate how far the writers have come if you play in the proper order.

Although Sera is the protagonist, it feels like Freya gets more story significance in the long run due to her connection to the game's main antagonist. This is most likely intentional in order to turn Freya's background and intentions into a plot twist, though the twist was kind of obvious from the start.

Compared to previous games, Absinthia focuses less on the trope of attacking and dethroning God and more about Freya's struggle to recover from a previous failed relationship and her escape from her current toxic relationship. Her relationships are definitely more complex and have more conflict than Ruth and Gwen's relationship, which makes for more interesting storytelling. At the same time, her ex and her new girlfriend are shown to have redeeming qualities, since the former wants to atone for hurting Freya (though she needs more screentime IMO) while the latter starts growing a conscience at the end of the game due to her coming to terms with her own newfound humanity. Freya herself ends up in her ex's shoes due to unintentionally hurting her new friends, which shows that people can hurt others in their pursuit of happiness or to escape their own pain.

Edit: In the 5/20/2023 update, the guest character gets a new sidequest to shine, and I really liked how the party members learned combination attacks with her. I hope she returns as a playable character in the next game in Timeline 2.


IMO, the game is a step up in difficulty compared to previous games, even on equivalent difficulty settings. The game overhauled the MP system so that everyone's base MP is fixed at 200 with no chance for growth, and all skills' MP costs are balanced around that. This means the player will have to guard a lot in order to save on potions, but at the same time, each character's guard action comes with other buffs that can be used strategically. Additionally, I feel like enemies in this game are more fond of using DOT effects, which means they can circumvent guard spamming to some extent. However, due to how quickly MP runs out, DPS check bosses can be a lot harder to deal with than usual, though they are still manageable depending on how well you prepared the party. That said, barriers are much easier to deal with than before and enemies can't spam them as often, making it easier to make visible progress in battle.

The game also features combination attacks, but they don't function quite like other RPG Maker games. Instead of consuming both characters' turns, these skills only consume one character's turn while requiring the other character to be in a state where they can use skills. This incentivizes the player to keep all characters alive and free of ailments in order to make the most of the party's skills.

The world maps looks nice, but there is one oddity about it. The game is supposed to take place in only one region of the series' overall setting, as shown by how Halonia cannot be found on the world map. Despite that, the world map also wraps as if it was a globe. While wrapping is convenient for the sake of travel, it still feels a bit immersion breaking if we're wrapping on only a region of the overall planet without having access to the entire planet.

9/10
The game is short, but it feels like mostly an improvement compared to its predecessors while still having balanced gameplay.

In a nutshell, the conflict of the game is caused by poor communication, leading to people who should be on the same side working against each other and almost dooming the world. One character in particular, Safina, ends up alienating many of her friends because she keeps too many secrets from them, regardless of her intentions, and much of the character interaction in the game is about trying to heal from these wounds.

Although the game is about going to a magic school, the school itself is in a state of emergencies and classes are suspended, so you the player aren't really introduced to magic concepts in a well-paced manner. Instead, the game is about exploring the mostly empty school as if it's a huge dungeon crawler with secrets and shortcuts to unlock.

There are some interesting character interactions here and there, but the pacing of the game makes it so that actual dialogue and character development are very sparse in comparison to the task of dungeon-crawling through the school. The writing is at its peak during the final boss events and you feel good for the characters when they finally get their happy ending, but the ending and epilogue feel like they skip a lot of important character development, like how Maritte progressed her relationships with Gilda and Pertisia. It feels like there's a skeleton of a good script in the game that just never got fully completed.



The game has a grid-based system where you have to position your characters and use AOEs efficiently, but the grid itself is a very narrow 3-tile tall corridor. Additionally, characters can only face left and right, which can affect how the AOE and range of your skills work. Additionally, player characters cannot move past each other, which means your own positioning can screw you over if you're not careful. While early enemies face this same restriction, later ones tend to fly and teleport, giving them an advanatage over player characters in terms of positioning.

The game also has a timed hit system where you have to press the confirm key/button when an attack lands, allowing you to maximize your damage while reducing damage from the enemy. There are 3 levels of hits: oops, nice, and great, and you obviously don't want to see the former. Fortunately, the game's difficulty setting allows you to guarantee nice or great hits if timing is too difficult. I personally went with the middle difficulty because I wanted to be rewarded for good timing without being too punished for bad timing. The game's damage overall feels balanced with the expectation that you're getting mostly nice hits, so the middle difficulty will still require you to be decent at the grid/tile system.


7/10

The gameplay is creative and well-balanced, but I personally thought the pacing of the story was off and that the game was too minimalistic with dialogue. It's a shame, since the story has a lot of potential and teaches an important lesson.

I played the IGMC version of the game, and while it had decent writing, the rushed nature of the contest and the need to keep the game under an hour meant it was hard to get emotionally invested in all of Konoe's friends who died. Fortunately, the full release has no such limitation, which means more cutscenes can be added to flesh out Konoe's old team. We still don't get the full story, since their past journey isn't playable, but it does give more weight to their sacrifice and provide comic relief. However, we are abruptly introduced to two new characters in the ending, likely to set up a sequel.

That said, I'm not sure where this game fits into the Sacred Earth timeline. I initially thought it was either a prequel or distant sequel, but the twist in the end makes it even less certain, since Konoe's world isn't the same one as Miltiades. The Celestial Tree at the end seems like it might be connected to the curse in Sacred Earth New Theory if it's a threat to the multiverse, but only time will tell.


The game doesn't have the combo system that Promise had, but it does have its own interesting Field Element mechanic. When the player character or enemies use elemental skills, an element shows up at the top of the screen, and up to three can be placed. These will grant buffs to both sides of the field and allow either side to consume elements to power up their EX Arts. This is pretty similar to how Seraphic Blue's element system works, but you only have one playable character and therefore can only consume wind, fire, and light. Personally, I feel like this battle system would have been more interesting with a party, since everyone would have different elements and arts to consume them. This may be intentional storywise, to show that Konoe is incomplete without her memories and friends.

Unlike Promise and New Theory, this game has item usage and the bosses seem to be balanced around it. The maximum of each item you can carry is limited and you can't farm money infinitely, but this is balanced by item usage not taking up a turn. I played the final battle suboptimally and still had a decent amount of items to spare, so the scarcity is still manageable.

You can spend AP to learn new skills, though like previous games, encounters are limited, so you need to spend your AP wisely. You can't go wrong by learning all the non-passives first, though IMO, Cleansing Burst should be a mandatory skill due to how important it is to keep the enemy from being buffed.

Balance-wise, since there is only one party member, the game is overall harder than its predecessors. Enemies will often set up field elements that they can consume, but you can't, making it disadvantageous to fight enemies that can use elements that Konoe is weak to. This can be mitigated somewhat with the Ether Gem system, but you would have to stack multiple ether gems of the same element to get around the enemy's empowered arts. That said, the final battle is very difficult even though the enemy uses the same elements as Konoe, as well as stronger versions of certain arts. You'll often have to make less DPS optimal decisions just to keep the enemy from consuming elements, and it can be difficult to outdamage their barrier ability. It's still statistically doable, but it can be very tricky to juggle offense and defense. While the game does show the status effects of both sides, it doesn't tell you how many actions each side has per round. Sometimes, Konoe will get more actions than usual and sometimes, the enemies will, making it unpredictable and hard to make good judgements on when to attack or defend.

There's this strange mechanic where enemies, including bosses, have a random chance to have a modifier before their names, which makes them stronger or weaker. Personally, I don't see the point of having this feature instead of a proper difficulty setting like in Promise, since it's basically just RNG. Though I wonder if beating the Mighty versions of all the bosses is even possible.


8/10

This definitely feels like a Gaiden Game in terms of story, since it feels like it's setting up future appearances for True Konoe and we don't really get the same amount of plot as Promise. While the additional flashback scenes help a bit in fleshing out Konoe's world, it feels like this game really needs a prequel where we play as Konoe's original party in their quest to oppose Kagura. In terms of gameplay, the whole battle system is fine in concept, but it really feels like it was meant for a whole party rather than a solo protagonist, since there's a limit to how much Konoe can exploit the battle system alone.

You play as a group of 5 students in Class C of Kazuri High, where they learn about Flow abilities and how to use them to maintain the world's order. However, the game page's description states that they'll eventually learn some grim truth about this world, as well as get tied up in political conflicts. We definitely get examples of the latter, and it's surprisingly not a black-and-white conflict once we learn about the terrorists' backgrounds. For the former, we get some vague hints that the world might be a simulation, but there's nothing conclusive in the first episode.

We get a decent amount of character development for the main party for the first episode, but Elysion is abruptly killed off with only a short statement about her background and before the player can really get emotionally invested in her. It's implied she might resurface again in later episodes, but it does seem like her character should have been handled better for this episode to make her sacrifice have more impact. We do get to meet some of the other classmates, but I wonder if the later parts of the game will have enough time to give them proper spotlight too, even as NPCs.

For some reason, the game locks behind parts of the story behind the difficulty setting. I played the demo on both difficulties and I found that Astral mode is just True mode with bits and pieces cut off, so I'm not sure Astral mode is worth my time compared to True mode. I ended up playing the main game on True mode only, so I'm not sure if Astral mode will have anything unique to it in the long run.


This game uses a combo system that requires you to memorize inputs to activate stronger techniques, or you can just write them down on a piece of paper. However, you have to accumulate SG to activate techniques, so the beginning of each fight consists of your character awkwardly spamming their low attacks until they can use proper combos, since low attacks are the most efficient at generating SG while saving FP. Still, it's very satisfying when you do get to enact the techniques and watch the party members turn the enemies into ragdolls.

The game features a type advantage system, and you eventually get to control one character of each type. Not only is there a significant difference in damage, a character won't lose stance if they're hit by an attribute they resist. This means when you have the full party, you'll have to tailor the three-person team to match whatever boss you're fighting.

Speaking of stances, allies and enemies have a certain number of hits they can take before they enter a break state for two turns. This decreases their defenses drastically, making it so that even tanky characters like Miyu can get completely steamrolled in the break state. This does make it so that multihit-using enemies like the Vile are disproportionately more dangerous than their single-hit brethren, at least in the beginning of the game.

For character customization, you get three gear slots, but each piece of gear has a certain number of mod slots you can use to further fine tune the characters' stats. In earlier versions of the game, certain mods were more useful than others, but now the numbers are more carefully balanced so that every choice isn't as one-sided. Unfortunately, before the patch, I used exploits that netted me some late-game mods, making me slightly stronger than I should've been.

For the most part, the game starts out very difficult due to you only having 2 characters with fairly weak armor, meaning you'll be at the mercy of the break system. After the first dungeon, you'll be able to buy much better gear and have more people in your party, making it easier to finish off the enemy before getting broken. That said, I didn't see that much of a difference between Astral and True mode in terms of difficulty, at least for the demo. You need to have a decent understanding of the battle system and farm resources if you want to survive the early game of either difficulty.

The game's economy is very strict if you're relying solely on enemy drops and mission rewards. If you want to get decent upgrades, you'll have to take advantage of the casino minigames to accumulate wealth quickly. However, the game gives you a wallet limit to keep you from hoarding too much money at once, which is designed to lock you out of the more OP lategame stuff.

The mapping in this game mainly consists of narrow corridors, which is fine on their own, but due to how narrow they are and how fast enemies move, it can be very hard to actually avoid encounters. IMO, this defeats the purpose of having touch encounters in the first place if they're going to be as unavoidable as random encounters. This had the unintentional side effect of making my characters hit the soft level cap of every story segment, since I had to fight a lot of unavoidable encounters.

As for leveling, the EXP rate is fair, but reserve party members don't seem to get EXP, which is unfortunate because a healer like Miyu is pretty much a staple in the party and it could be hard to make sure everyone is leveled evenly. Make sure you pair one multihit specialist character with a character who deals fewer hits, just to keep some semblance of team balance.

Edit: The updated party system shares EXP properly now.

Some consumables are only sold in limited quantities, but I noticed that even at the end of the chapter, pretty much nothing restocks unless they were infinite to begin with. Unfortunately, that means more limited items like the Repellant cannot really be farmed. This is balanced by the fact that the party fully heals automatically between fights, meaning the player is unlikely to run out of healing items. I hope the next chapter restocks everything, especially the arcade's utility items. Personally, I think it would have been better to have the stores restock items after a certain number of battles, just to reduce the chances of players using up the entire continent's stock of rare consumables.


9/10

For the first episode, the game is well-written and has fun gameplay with a neat resource system. It also has a good pixel art aesthetic that surprisingly doesn't clash with the occasional RTP usage. There are a few questionable design decisions though, such as locking bits of the story behind the difficulty setting and having nigh-undodgeable touch encounters. Additionally, the game has a very ambitious cast size that possibly rivals the Trails series, and I hope future episodes can flesh them out to a decent degree.