izigame.me

full disclosure, i'm not done with this game yet. and this is my first review on steam because i have such intense complicated feelings about this game.
im a labyrinth of refrain super fan. i love everything about its plot and worldbuilding. its storytelling and dungeons are unforgettable to me. the pacing and characters are top notch (albeit overly cruel at times.) the gameplay is a bit difficult for me but i love it all the same. extremely carefully crafted locales, interesting enemy designs, great building of intrigue.
i was waiting for galleria for around 4-5 years. i have been following it since the day it was announced and ive stayed with it through BOTH if its delays. i wishlisted it the day it went up on steam and shilled it to all my friends. and now i have it, and i barely want to play it. why?
first off, the story basically blueballs you for 10-20 hours, depending on how fast you play. absolutely nothing interesting happens by NIS rpg standards. compared to the driving force of dronya (labyrinth of refrains protagonist) causing conflict, eureka and co (the characters of galleria) are basically anti-conflict, and basically nothing of consequence happens. eureka is very endearing, but i really do expect a bit more bite from nippon ichi software's witch rpgs, like Witch and Hundred Knight, a similarly dark game. only now has it started to get good (at Narthex revisit) but therein lies my next issue
the dungeon design is ATROCIOUS compared to refrain. there are very few interesting unique locales, everything blends together. in refrain, you had Astrom the gnome kingdom, the Towers of Umbra, Necropolis (all of which i know without even looking up). refrain told its story in a very interesting way, tying in its story of the characters on the surface with the ones living in the labyrinth. whenever one story felt a bit slow or meandering, the other half of the plot would still be able to hold my interest, not to mention just exploring cool, interesting looking places with enemies that fit the environment and told a story.
whereas Galleria is just "dungeon with red wall, dungeon with yellow wall" all with recycled hazards the game rarely uses in interesting ways and randomly thrown together enemy designs with no thematic cohesion to the world they're in. refrain had interesting places like a Bugs Life esque world where you shrunk down and fought giant bees, but galleria barely embraces its setting as a Art Labyrinth and just has a bunch of random pumpkins and fleas and monsters. gartan and wiccard (the only two dungeon inhabitants) are obnoxious hinderances rather than intriguing characters like the ones you meet in refrain who all have their own lives and stories for you to follow alongside the story on the surface.
Gooey Darkness (a recurring eldritch horror esque environment that drives your party mad if they take too much time exploring it) is about as exciting as it gets so far, and the novelty of that wears thin when they 1. paste it all over the place rather than using it sparingly 2. use the EXACT SAME gimmick for a different stage hazard thats much less exciting (you cant stay underwater too long or you'll drown!) and 3. has only three enemies roaming around it which you quickly outlevel
not to mention that later (since i read ahead in a guide) i have to BACKTRACK FOR HOURS looking for a bunch of stupid out of the way switches ive already passed but wasnt allowed to interact with, grind a bunch of arbitrary low drop rate items for hours to fufill quests the game tells you are optional to get the true ending of arc 1, AND THEN the next arc of the story has a hundred floor proceedurally generated dungeon with 4 enemy types? great...
the new mechanics overall give a sense like they make the game more accessible, but effectively make systems the game introduces as limitations or obstacles redundant. galleria and refrain both have dungeon hazards such as pitfalls which you can fall into, which will drop you to the floor below and damage your party. refrain basically didnt give you any tools to handle this besides forcing you to pay attention, but galleria has upgrades that warn you of pitfalls (that you can literally see right in front of you, they arent hidden) or in some cases save you from falling down... the fact that i have so much babying makes dungeon crawling feel less intentional as a whole. refrain also felt like it used these hazards more meaningfully since there was less handholding, whereas galleria feels justified in just spamming a million of them to make the backtracking it expects you to do even more tedious.
i feel like unit design is worse too; the selection of passive/active skills on the units you can create (every unit type has a skilltree they learn as they level up) is much worse than refrains, likely because galleria has more than twice the number of units due to the new unit subtypes. while im all for additional customization (i love the new color pallettes and nature customization), all it results in during the time BEFORE when youre able to transfer skills between classes is a bunch of mediocre units, because the good skills that synergize are spread across even more units than they were in refrain.
and pacts, the Labyrinth series's main gimmick, also feel like they are designed to have worse spells/attacks (called "donums") since now you can destroy pacts to move the donums to pacts with better passive effects or more slots.
units and pacts are now designed with said flexibility in mind, so they all just suck and are designed to be tediously combined with other things. which would be great if the game didnt make skill transferring between units not only just as cumbersome as refrains (using a reincarnation system where every time your reclass it becomes exponentially harder to level up) but also unlocks way too late into the game to where at that point so much opens up at once its overwhelming and daunting. and in the case of pacts, you get new ones at a very slow pace and rarely feel worth the trouble of levelling in order to transfer skills from them as you have to temporarily compromise your brigade setup.
other miscellanious things that disappoint me...
- theres VERY FEW songs. the same battle theme will repeat through the entire first arc and probably the rest of the game. all the dungeons have very slow, boring background tracks (all 2 of them...)
- as stated before, people cited the fact that Eureka (gallerias protagonist) is much nicer than Dronya the protag of Refrain, but i really do feel it has lead to a much more boring story, and dronyas meanness was definitely part of refrains appeal due to her uniqueness as a protag. eureka is only just starting to get interesting at the part of the story im at, but nachiroux (her more mean foil) doesnt have half the bite dronya does, nor does the Count or Madame Marta... so... they all feel much less memorable to me
- the monster manual is straight up machine translated; monster types dont have unique entries, and the entries that are there are written so stilted its hard to understand what theyre saying. as someone who was really excited for this feature, i was both disappointed by how barebones it was on top of how little effort was put into whats ACTUALLY there. (YOU CANT EVEN CHECK WHAT THEIR SKILLS DO, JUST THE SKILL NAMES?)
there are a few changes i like, but im honestly at a loss for how dissppointed i am, because most people seem to really enjoy the game and say you shouldnt even bother with refrain because of how much QOL it removes... i say the opposite. if you ever want to play both games, play this first THEN refrain so you have the correct expectations. otherwise, just play refrain.
if i get further into the game, ill be sure to update this with my thoughts/experiences, but honestly im really not having fun and it feels like a slog, so i might youtube the rest... im 30 hours in and this is looking like anywhere from 80 to 140 hours...