izigame.me

Overall, I recommend it - it’s a 7/10 game with good vibes.

Positives:
Great art
Great music
Pretty fun stories overall, in particular the smaller side ones
Negatives:
Quite bland battle system
Bugs
Very bad UI
The abysmal:
No fishing game tutorial at all

To start with positives, the game is just gorgeous, the animations, sprites and the vibe in general is top notch. The visual side of this game is just very charming.

The music is great, I love the battle theme and most of the other tracks. I do however wish every boss had their own unique song. This game takes inspiration from Persona with its music choices, making the fight music very upbeat and high energy, and honestly it works for me.

The story isn’t complex or anything, but it writes about childhood in ways that kind of kicked me in the feels at times. The themes are pretty dark, but with plenty of jokes since it is viewed through a child’s eyes. It’s very ‘Persona meets Gravity Falls’, and leans into both of those inspirations and creates something very enjoyable.

Now the negatives. The battle system is a little undercooked, in particular the abilities sides of things. So, the damaging abilities are divided into 2 types. One causes a particular condition (like burning, poisoned etc) and one deals damage. Certain abilities combo with certain conditions dealing additional damage. On the surface? This sounds fun. In practice, you do not want any of them, because you need to capture demons to level up your own. How do you capture them? By knocking all of the opponents into a ‘downed’ condition and rolling dice on a skill. This isn’t a bad system, but it completely discourages using the conditions.

Worse, bosses seem to be completely immune to these conditions, meaning it’s just a game of out healing the damage. Makes the bosses the low point of the game which was sadly very underwhelming. The last boss in particular was just… not challenging, not nothing. I wish the game would incentivize using the conditions. For example make the boss only hit-able when they’re on fire or something. This is just a very bland fight system, and eventually I was just rolling with a team that had every type of elemental hit, ignoring status conditions entirely.

Bugs are… sadly quite plentiful. I had 2 crashes and one really bad crash that reset my steam deck. Besides that, every time I loaded in and clicked on a conversation menu with options, the options wouldn’t pop, and I’d be stuck without any option but to close the game. Later during the game, in chapter 2 onwards basically, every time I’d load into a new area the entire area would be white, and would load the sprites slowly one by one. Thankfully the game saves quite often, so I never lost much of the progress whenever these bugs occurred.

Now, the really bad part of this game is the UI. It is just fundamentally clunky and unpleasant to use, sadly. It’s unintuitive and can be very frustrating to use. There's also something ‘sticky’ about it - it feels sluggish to use, as if there was something of a delay to it working.

First: there is no map? Rather, the map is tied to your objectives and it feels extremely awkward to use. It also leads to a problem where in chapter 2 you literally can be locked out of being able to see the map to the ‘other side’, because your objective is nowhere inside of it (or worse your objective is the ‘entire map’ making this big (???) graphic cover the entire map making it hard to read. Frustrating, as it leaves you completely blind. Since the camera is zoomed in pretty close, it turns into a trial and error to find the right path through a somewhat maze-like area with no rel logic in its design.
The save and load menus are really bad, there is no sorting by game time or hour of save, they all seem to be just scattered in random ways. It’s terribly inconvenient.
The demon menu is puzzling. In particular I never found a way to check the abilities of your main guardian? I have no idea how to do it still, even though I spent a while looking.
The equipment menu is very clunky as you have to select the character every time, rather than letting you see everyone’s weapons, armor etc. Very inconvenient. Also when you pick up a new weapon or armor type, the game doesn’t prompt to equip it, unless you buy it in the shop.

When you pick up something new from a chest, this item isn’t in any way marked as new there is no ‘new items’ section or something, so when you pick something up, you have to manually check everything you have and try to figure out what was it that you picked up. If you didn’t remember the name of it, tough luck.

Not every thing or character you can talk to/interact with is in any way marked. It’s easy to miss dialogue when it’s missing. Not sure if bug or on purpose, but it made me miss a few quest-dialogues.


The absolutely awful:

The fishing minigame has no tutorial and I had absolutely no damn idea how to fish. I still don’t, and since I don’t plan to going back to the game anymore, at this point this knowledge is completely useless to me, but I do hope the devs add a tutorial for others in the future.


So, all in all, there are some downsides here. But, in my opinion, the story and the visual/audio side of things make up for the bad enough, that I walk away having a positive experience with it.