Bloomtown: A Different Story Review (Generally Break)
This is a game I very much wanted to love. I'd count the mainline Persona games as 6 games near the top of my favorite games of all time list, and I love Americana and pixel art styles, but I really can't recommend this game to anyone. There's several reasons, but I think the most core is: This is not a finished game.
Basically every system in this game is clearly incomplete and often lacks basic features.
There is no status screen on the menu. If you want to examine the party's skills, you have to enter combat and look at them in the skill menu. If you want to see how much experience you need to level up, you just have to wait until you do level up so you can see the experience for the next level, and then I guess write it down on a piece of paper and update it every battle.
There is a persona-like time management system, but there are no deadlines. Summer lasts until you clear the third dungeon. You can work the part time job as many times as you want to get unlimited money. You can go to the gym as many times as you want to hit the health cap before you clear the first dungeon. The first store that sells equipment sells endgame equipment right away, so you can just grind the job and get end game equipment instantly, and there's really no incentive not to.
A huge number of - maybe most - quests don't have rewards. You complete the listed task and it's checked off, and that's it. Nothing changes, to the point that NPCs don't even acknowledge that the quest was completed. This gets even more outrageous toward the end game where there will be dialog explaining puzzles, but then you're just given the rewards instantly.
There is a "social link" style system, but because you have unlimited time, you can basically do them all immediately. There are only 4 social links, and they're... eh. Hugo's has some cool ideas, but they're not really explored. Chester and Ramona have something of an arc, but they're pretty by the books. Ruth's just feels like filler. There is a gift system, but it does nothing except unlock like 2 lines of dialog.
The combat system feels extremely luck-based. This has a Persona 3-style one more system, but it's random. You knock down the enemy, and then maybe you get another turn. It makes it feels like there's no real planning to be done. The miss rate is also high enough to be honestly funny. I've seen runs of 10 consecutive misses on both sides. This is after the patch where they said they lowered miss rates, I can only imagine what the people who played this earlier sat through.
The combat system puts a lot of emphasis on status effects, which makes the coin-flippy nature even more severe. Only 1 party member learns direct damage spells, while 2 learn nothing but status effect spells. There is a system sort of like Persona 5's technical system, but it's much less developed. And bosses and elites are almost always immune to all status effects, and resistant to all magic, meaning those fights become nothing more than a punching match with healing as necessary.
The story feels... phoned in. This is a genre where deep themes and interesting character arcs are kind of expected, but the best this really gets is that there are funny lines. There are semblances of themes that feel more like they copied elements they saw in Persona games, and didn't recognize those reflect themes in those stories. There's a few moments toward the end of the game that seem like they're trying to have themes, but they are sort of 5 minute chunks that come out of nowhere, and then vanish completely. Only a few characters have arcs, and those are pretty typical. Chester learns bullying isn't cool, and Ramona's step father learns that sometimes you should talk to people if you want them to know what you think. That's basically it.
The 60s setting really doesn't play into things at all. Lots of anachronisms in both the world and the characters. There is a point where you get walkie-talkies with effecively unlimited range, because we can't have a game in 2024 without cell phones. The characters have very 2020s sensibilities, and show little understanding of 1960s culture beyond that Elvis and Bob Dylan existed.
This is all a shame because there's a lot of solid basis. The pixel art is pretty great, and the music is solid, if not really cohesive (why does a 1960s game have modern pop music?)
And I could go on a lot longer about things that are incomplete, but I'm running out of characters. This honestly feels like a cash grab trying to use nice art and a resemblance to better games to rope players in. The issues are deep enough and widespread enough that I don't hold much hope this will ever really be fixed. You're better off playing something else.
UPDATE:
I previously said the only way to save was to trigger an autosave; they added a manual save after I wrote this review. I do still find it concerning that it took 2 months after release for such a basic feature to be added, but it is a sign the game is moving in the right direction.