izigame.me

TL;DR

A hack-and-slash game that can be relaxing on regular difficulties, or challenging enough on Expert. The story is aimed at a younger audience, but the game is still entertaining enough to buy at a discount and it is one of the better JRPGs out there.

Story

The story is linear and simplistic. You take on the role of a 13 y/o cat-human prince in an alternate world, whose father was poisoned by the country’s chancellor and who is then forced to flee the country with a president from a country on Earth who just so happened to be isekai’ed just as a coup broke out. The boy then sets out to found his own country and bring peace to the world. The story starts out relatively strong, but then it devolves into a cheesy formulaic routine: visit new country -> find out what kind of shit the local ruler is up to -> confront them and fight their guardian -> find out that it was all the plot of some devious mastermind behind the scenes -> the ruler gets excused for their misdeeds and signs a peace treaty. Repeat for each country. Then even the mastermind himself gets a pass, because he was just trying to get the love of his life back and was influenced by some bigger evil. The plot basically ends up being “cheesy speeches will get everyone to be friends!”. The characters don’t really get much in the way of development and motivations either – they just seem to be along for the ride. There are a lot of side quests, but most of them are just fetch X, or kill Y monster without much in the way of story.

Gameplay

The game has an open world map that you navigate in cutesy diorama fashion until you enter an area, then it changes back to regular exploration. If you touch a monster, you get transferred to a random battlefield to face them. World map navigation is pretty slow, until you unlock the zeppelin through story progress (you also get a boat, but it becomes utterly useless after two chapters when you get the zeppelin).
There are 6 playable characters in the game. You can pick any 3 of them to form your party. My experience with combat is based on the toughest (Expert) difficulty, which was challenging enough and required some grinding to keep up with the bosses. Combat offers melee, ranged, and magic options. Melee is just mindless hack-and-slash, but it’s the main way to get MP. Ranged attacks don’t deal much damage and consume MP (for shorter firing animations), but can be used without MP to avoid dealing with enemies that have AoE attacks up close. Magic and skills deal the best damage, but they need MP to trigger when there’s very few ways to get more MP aside from melee attacks, and there’s a very limited variety of spells and skills for each character. Healing options are also limited. Party member AI is pretty dumb – they’ll often rush towards an enemy when it’s clearly about to use an AoE one-hit kill attack and do other dumb stuff to get themselves killed. And you can't give them commands to ensure that the their tactics synergise with yours. Blocking is usually useless – the combat revolves around abusing invulnerability frames from dodging tough attacks instead.
The game also offers semi-optional kingdom-building (recruit citizens through completing favours and then spend money to upgrade stuff, without any freedom to choose the layout of your kingdom), procedural dungeons, tons of fetch quests, army battles on the world map, tainted monster (jacked-up-boss) fights, some simplistic crafting etc..

Overview

The Good
+Nice art and soundtrack
+Plenty of activities
+Expert difficulty offers a decent challenge
The Bad
-Childish story
-Few voiced lines
-Unskippable cutscenes
-Underdeveloped characters
-Tedious side quests
-Simplistic kingdom-building
-A lot of English names/terms don't match up with Japanese version
-No Japanese subs
-Boring procedurally generated dungeons
-Armour doesn’t actually change character appearance. Instead you have "outfits" that change appearance, but there's only a few outfits per character available
-Melee-centric gameplay
-Blocking useless
-Dumb party member AI
-No party commands
-Limited in-battle healing options
-Very limited in-battle MP restoration options
-Boss rushes
-Defaults on windowed mode