All right, time for my first post here. My backlog extends beyond Steam, so you might see me post about some…not necessarily obscure titles, but maybe unexpected ones. For example, just a couple days ago, I beat:

This isn’t your typical RPG. You see, rather than have a traditional turn based battle system, this game uses cards for attacking, defending, and healing (as a side note, many of the cards have funny descriptions). Also, battles aren’t triggered randomly; similar to Chrono Trigger/Cross, you can see the enemies on the field, so you can avoid them if you want (although, sometimes, they’ll block your way, meaning you have to fight them). At the start of battles, your deck is shuffled and you draw a set number of cards depending on your class level (and that’s all your class determines; this isn’t Final Fantasy [EDIT: okay, class also determines how many cards can be in your deck in the first place, but that’s it…for real this time]), and you either use defensive or offensive/healing cards depending on whether it’s your turn or the opponent’s turn, with a bonus being provided if you use the right combo (also, some cards can only be used by certain party members). This sounds neat in theory, but there were many times where I’d be attacked and not have any defensive cards in my hand, or it would be my turn to attack and I wouldn’t have any offensive cards in my hand, which was quite frustrating (this alone makes the game hard to recommend; if the game interests you, be prepared to deal with that a lot).

Another annoying thing about how the battle system works is that it’s timed. You might see an opportunity to continue your attack combo, but suddenly your character finishes the animation for his current attack and your turn ends before you can select the card. Similarly, it might be the start of an enemy’s turn, but even though you already had the cursor on a defense card and selected it as soon as you saw it was the enemy’s turn, the enemy gets an attack on you and the defense card is moved to its next attack. Or you have no defense cards at all and either have to discard a bunch of cards (which moves them onto enemy attacks anyway, ruining your combo and reducing the amount of defense cards you could’ve played) or sit there and watch as the enemy uses a combo on you.

Oh, and on top of all this, the amount of time you have to decide which card to use on your turn lowers as you play the game. It starts as infinite, then becomes thirty seconds, then slowly lowers until, by the end of the game, it’s around three seconds.

Now, you might think this would make the game too hard, but the game balances this issue out…by making the game a little too easy. You’ll win most battles on your first try (including bosses, and even the final boss), even if two of your three party members in battle were only able to use one or zero attack cards for 5-10 turns in a row, with the boss attacking the third party member, who has no defense cards in-hand (all despite everyone having a balanced deck), and you accidentally use opposing elements in a few of your combos, cancelling out the attack damage of the two opposing elements. I say most battles are won easily because there are a couple times where game makes you fight three bosses at once (Giacomo), and if you don’t focus on defeating the right one first (which may not be apparent until it’s too late), you WILL get your butt handed to you.

Also, rather than level up/class up when you get a set number of experience, you have to go to special save points where you can visit a church and “pray,” which opens a menu and lets you level up each character manually. Personally, I think this just added an unnecessary step to the leveling process.

Another part of the game that really frustrated me was in Zosma Tower. Basically, this part of the game makes you solve block puzzles to progress, and normally, I’m all for adding more gameplay to the non-battle parts of RPGs (heck, the Golden Sun games are some of my favorite RPGs because of this). When you enter, there’s a guy who explains the rules for how to progress (basically: push the red blocks into the green holes to make the grey blocks move and reveal the path forward), and for the most part, solving the puzzles isn’t too hard. However, once you reach the first basement floor and try to solve its puzzle, you might find that there’s one red block that, once it reaches a certain point, you won’t be able to push it again, meaning it won’t go into the last green hole, and you can’t seem to figure out any other place you’re supposed to push it. Well, I thought the same thing and eventually looked up a walkthrough. Well, it turns out that you need to push this block into the spot you got stuck the first time, except it has to be done before pushing another red block into its green hole, as this will trigger an extra grey block to move and let you continue to push the other red block. This is never even so much as hinted at to you in-game, as all the other puzzles have their triggers move all of their respective grey blocks no matter where the other red blocks are, and it’s never done since.

However, the game also does a lot of clever things that I haven’t seen done too often. For example, the game starts off with Kalas, the protagonist, coming across a guardian spirit. Kalas asks the spirit for its name, and then the game prompts you to enter your name (just don’t use a space, or it will be replaced with a zero). Yes, you are a character in the game, separate from the protagonist. Characters will even mention you by name, and you’ll even get dialogue choices (characters will react accordingly). I also really liked some of the game’s plot twists (Kalas, the protagonist, is the one who betrays the party; after this event, the player controls Xelha, another party member), though others could have been handled better (When Xelha escapes prison after Kalas’s betrayal, she’s rescued by previously unseen people who call her queen (this is the first time in-game Xelha is referred to as queen). After rescuing the other party members, you learn of a rumor that there’s a powerful queen in the lands of ice. Gee, I wonder who it could be?).

These plot twists are one of the reasons I don’t want to talk about the plot too much. Sure, you have the generic villan who needs the five End Maguffins to summon generic evil god to take over/destroy the world, but it does enough interesting things to keep the story from feeling too stale.

The game also has voice acting, but it can be hit-or-miss. Kalas’s voice actor is pretty good, but others, like Lyude’s voice actor, sound like almost every line of dialogue was just read from a paper. Now, you may be wondering, “If characters refer to the guardian spirit by whatever name I type in, how did they get the voice acting to work with it?” Simple: they didn’t. Whenever your name appears in spoken dialogue, the voice acting just goes silent, and it’s just as jarring as it sounds (“You can hear…’s voice?” - Kalas).

Another strange detail is that all of the characters have wings, or “wings of the heart” as the game calls them. And yes, people can fly. And yes, you never get to fly in-game, ever (flying is limited to attack animations and, like, one cut-scene near the beginning of the game). And it’s not like in Legend of Dragoon where they have an excuse for why you can’t fly outside of battle; there’s nothing. Probably the most notable example of this is when you reach Diadem and learn that the Lesser Celestial River has flooded and blocked Cloud Passage, the path to the capital. However, if you actually go to Cloud Passage while it’s still flooded, you’d see that not only is the entire flooded part just a few feet wide, but there’s even an overpass that lets you get a close-up look at the other side from maybe a couple feet away. But no, you can’t just use your wings to fly to the other side; you have to go to the Lesser Celestial River and find the source of the flooding. Admittedly, this is more of a nitpick, but it’s still a noticeable disconnect between plot and game-play.

And everyone loses their wings of the heart at the end, for some unexplained reason.

Overall, this game is hard to recommend, mainly because of the battle system. It’s fun when you can string together combos and get large bonuses, but as I repeated earlier, it’s really frustrating when you don’t have the right cards in your hand for the current situation. Plus, the limited time to use cards is also frustrating, and I didn’t even get into how unintuitive it is that Chrono and Wind are opposites (and if you use opposing elements in your combo, they cancel each other out).