izigame.me

Pretty fun for about 2 hours, and then once the main story is complete, it's a great, mindless grind for about 10 hours to complete 100% of the achievements while listening to longform YouTube content. This one was much, much better than the first one, but even after completing 100% of all quests and buying every single item in the game, finding out that there was some other secret thing I need to do to unlock the final piece of furniture for the Brighthouse is totally out of reach for me because I'm just totally beyond done playing this game lol

The overall game design is pretty good, the controls feel tight and the in-game character animations are really good. The cutscene animations are garbage. No lip sync, the characters don't actually interact with each other, and the hilariously short draw distance has characters reacting to scenes that we can't even see lol Also, on my 7700XT, the magic and streetlights were glowing in squares which was really strange, and it just looked like trash the entire playthrough. I've looked up gameplay on YouTube by other people and they didn't seem to have this artifact. Not sure what caused it for me, but it's consistent every time I open the game.

It takes about an hour after the main story being completed to understand how everything works. A lack of handholding (hoofholding?) makes the collection of maps pretty confusing at first. You have to keep track of your progress and the location of quest givers yourself since there are no waypoints which means that you need to actually learn your way around the maps which is, honestly, a welcome change from the genre of semi-open-world adventure games.

The formula is simple: Each map has 5 quest givers. Explore the entire map to find the totems, find all 5 quest givers, and complete their objectives when they're available. You have to complete the quests in a specific order to unlock emojis which will allow you to progress in other quests, and the game does not tell you the order. You must simply walk to each of the 5 quest givers to see if they have an interaction available for you. If you get stuck on an interaction with an emoji that you don't currently have, simply fast travel to another map and try all of those quest givers. It took me about 10 hours of map hopping to get to 100%, and if you hit all the money prompts for each character as you see them in your travels, you should have enough cash at the very end of the game to buy everything from the stores to customize your ponies and the Brighthouse for ~7,000 Stars or "Magic Bits". KEEP IN MIND: There are distinct play areas that exist only in the story, and the game will let you travel to them over and over, but there are no quest givers in these areas. If you cannot fast travel to that area, rather you travel there via one of those magic circles on the ground, you are wasting your precious, finite time.

Overall, easy 5/10 game. Aggressively mid, but it performs well without any game-breaking bugs.