This Way Madness Lies Review (WildFennekin)
TL;DR: Very mixed game, but ultimately I have no problem recommending it. If you're more gameplay-minded than story-focused, and if you like at least two of the major themes involved (magical girls, lovecraftian horror, Shakespeare), I absolutely think it's worth playing.
Now to go on waaay longer.
The best thing about the game is the battles, so I'm gonna speak about them. They're very streamlined, and they all revolve around resource-management, but in a way where you don't have to re-grind resources every time. Items that would be consumables are forever with you, but you are just limited to using one of each per battle. Likewise, skills and dual skills ("unites") are also spent for the battle once you use them. All characters have a rest action to recover use of their skills... however, if you take too long, the enemies have a natural ramp of damage the longer the fight takes.
Even outside of battle, there's plenty to consider for it. You can only bring a certain number of skills to be used per battle, and up to 3 traits, which are passive effects for your characters. You can trigger a battle at any time with a button on the menu (you encounter them on the field too, but they don't respawn), and you heal up to full after every battle, which is convenient and helps there to be less downtime.
Despite all of this, it's not a cakewalk, and what keeps me the most engaged is when the battles are hard anyway. I beat it on Challenging at first (second highest difficulty), and once past the first stage and up to the end of the game, there was no battle where I felt I could be careless. More than once I did one mistake, like use the wrong skill on Miranda thinking I'm out of hyper, or lack a character's disarm (usually Beatrice) before a particularly AoE attack, and that was enough to get me wiped and have to reset- which, when it happens, it just takes you to the start of the fight again, so even that's streamlined. But out of the times where I wiped, 9 times out of 10 it felt like my fault, with the odd one out being an ally getting randomly focused down by multiple enemies and messing up the whole action economy. But that's one of the few ways RNG can screw you up in this game, since dodging doesn't exist and ailments are not random either.
Overall, I think the fights were great. That's not even touching how I like that different characters have specific gimmicks, like Miranda's completely changing her skill effects while hyper, or with Viola being able to be built as a skill combo master like no other.
The other point I was going to make before getting to the cons is about the music: it's really good, in my opinion. All the battle tracks were remarkable, there's a couple of different voiced tracks through the game, and there's a brief song for magical girl transformations with different variations and instrumentations fitting the personality of each one. It's nothing particularly incredible, but I'll definitely remember some of these.
Now, I do have a list of cons, and it's not short:
- The game sacrifices atmosphere, plot, story and characters greatly in order to make the pace very quick, and focuses on making individual scenes fun or funny at the expense of... way too much, in my opinion. You can definitely care for these to some degree, I personally found some characters fun, but don't go in for the story. A lot of things are left unexplained, what is explained is done so way too quickly, stuff seems to happen sporadically for the memes, the 4th wall legitimately does not exist, and so on. This is probably the biggest 'con' this game has for what I imagine would be most potential players.
- The game's critical path is basically all the content it has. No sidequests, no minigames, no super hard secret bosses, no lore-related journal entries, no dating sim element, etc. The closest it has to those is the occasional trivia questions about Shakespeare's works.
- After playing the battles a good bit, I feel like the Traits system would be improved if they were only passives instead of stat blocks as well. Occasionally I see a combination of passives I'd love to use, but because they come attached to a specific array of stats and the ones you unlock later have bigger stats, sometimes I am forced to choose a passive I don't want for the numbers instead of the combination of passives I think will work well. There are even points where you can unlock a trait with the exact same passive as a previous one, but higher stats, rendering the old one completely useless, and that just felt bad to see.
- You vastly don't have control of the party you can use except towards the end. Once you do get a feel for characters, it's a bit annoying that you can't use your favorites together for a long time.
- Now to the realm of nitpicking, I'm not sure about the audio on the voices during battle... I found it endearing (got a lot of enjoyment out of Imogen's "Let's go!", and annoyed a friend to hell and back with Beatrice's "Shocking, I know" one-liner), but for some reason it doesn't sound clear. It's not crunched, I don't think, but it feels like it could have been normalized a bit better. Like, the way Miranda's voice peaks with her "Oh, what's this!?" line was jarring the first time I heard it.
... And that's about it. Despite having more con points than pro points, I'd still recommend it, because it was worth its price 3 times over for me, for how fun, even if very vanilla, the battles are, It's the type of game I'd probably want to speedrun if I was inclined to do that sort of thing.