izigame.me

To preface this, I loved Zeboyd's earlier titles. Cthulhu Saves The World was great, and I enjoyed Breath of Death and the Rainslick games as well. But around that point onward I just feel like some of the spark's been lost. Cosmic Star Heroine lost me before I had finished half an hour. I love magical girls so I thought I'd give them another shot on this one, but I can't say it was worth it.
Right off the bat, I wasn't a fan of the battle system. Zeboyd games feel like they're trying way too hard to make battle systems that are innovative rather than ones that are good. There's a whole elaborate system about skills that recharge and hyper mode timers that are different for each character and can completely change what your abilities do. But rather than letting me feel powerful for using the system to my advantage, it just left me feeling like I had to jump through hoops in order to get what other games would consider basic functionality.
(As a side note - this game also follows that modern trend of refilling all your HP/skills/items after every fight. I hate this trend because it takes away a big part of what I enjoy about JRPGs, which is resource management. You don't have to ration out your MP dealing with smaller fights and save your big hitters for bosses, so every fight ends out playing very similar.)
At least the game has an Easy mode so you can steamroll the fights if you're not interested. But from what I've seen I don't feel like the story would be worth the time. The pacing is absurdly fast, meaning none of the characters get a chance to develop beyond one-dimensional tropes. You've got the main character, the nice one, the sporty one, and so on. Events like 'oops we got pulled into an alternate dimension' happen and are discarded never to be mentioned again. Anything that isn't combat gets cut down to the bare minimum and it's jarring to follow.
To make another comparison, I want to bring up Cthulhu Saves The World again. CSTW's cutscenes didn't have many moving parts for engine reasons, but to compensate it had comic book like cutins to show things happening. It was simple and barebones but it helped the plot come alive. TWML instead uses the gameplay sprites with zero animation, and panels that change ever so slightly each time you advance the dialogue box. It just makes the whole thing feel lifeless in comparison.
But Fiona, I hear you say! The plot doesn't have to make sense! It's a comedy game, remember? It just has to be funny!
Valid point, person that appears when I forget to take my meds. But this brings us to the biggest problem I have with TWML: A lot of it just plain isn't funny.
They make a big deal of the 'Ye Olde English -> Modern' translator, but it's mostly used in a predictable and childish manner. A lot of it isn't even used on actual text from Shakespeare plays, but made-up 'Ye Olde' prose by the devs that then gets some agonisingly sarcastic translation. "Poison met with Antigonus and he fared worse for the meeting" becomes "Poison poisoned Antigonus", for example.
The two original plays I got to see were similarly unfunny. A Comedy Of Errors gets boiled down to 'people get confused for other people' and then that joke gets turned into a nonsensical play about baseball (because there are errors in baseball, get it?) and an even more nonsensical play about computer programming.
Zeboyd has always tried to do tongue-in-cheek meta humour, but in my opinion it worked better in the old games which were very obviously based on NES-era RPGs. You knew the formula, so the meta joke was pointing that out or subverting it. Here you have the protagonist talking to the player/Bardolator/Thespian for no reason whatsoever, and whenever it happens the whole scene screeches to a halt while you answer actual questions about Shakespeare plays.
This isn't a game about JRPGs anymore. It's about Shakespeare and magical girls. Those two topics are rife with potential for meta humour. You could have multiple Shakespeares running around to reference the common theory that William Shakespeare was a penname used by multiple authors. You could point out that the drama club conveniently only has female members because a magical boy would mess with the formula. But instead we get only the most base level jokes about Shakespeare plays, and it feels like the devs don't respect the works they're supposedly inspired by.
I've rambled long enough, but what I'm trying to say is that Zeboyd feels like they're not aware of what they're good at. They did really well in the self-referential JRPG element, but spreading beyond that they still try to rely on jokes that no longer apply. They put a lot of effort into a complex battle system, but that just makes it feel like a hassle rather than something fun. And the technology hasn't advanced at all since CSTW ten years ago - if anything the cutscenes feel like a big step backward.
There IS the occasional joke that manages to land, but overall I can't recommend playing this. If Zeboyd wants their new games to hit the same spot CSTW did, I feel like they have to bring some new ideas to the table. In this world of endless isekai anime, making jokes about JRPG mechanics just doesn't cut it anymore.