izigame.me

It's cute, it's funny, it's cool... and it's got a lot of heart. The devs are working hard to fix bugs that pop up and there's this weird feeling I get when playing as Muchacho Man that even though I know he's tough as nails, I also feel he's so sweet and adorkable that I don't want him to get hurt.
...is what my first review said. Now that I have more hours into the game, a lot of problems have come up that made me change my thumb from up to down. First off, all the things I said at the start still stand: I love the characters, the pixel art is cute and gorgeous... but the gameplay is bad. Really bad. The fights take forever to finish even if you turn auto-QTE on, because all enemies are bullet sponges, they start every fight by buffing their armor or evasion and then using long animations to deal chip damage. Whenever a fight starts, I groan, because I know it'll be several minutes to finish an encounter... and there are A LOT of encounters. At first it was okay when the fights were fast and I only had to pin the occasional enemy, but then I ended up in the military zone with the B-party, and for some reason I had to pin EVERY. SINGLE. ENEMY. And that was after chipping them down with scratch damage as there are no vendors or ways to improve my characters outside of finding loot chests. All of that would be okay if the gameplay was fluid, but the fight animations all take AGES to finish. They're soooo slooooow. Every enemy attack takes 5-10 seconds to finish. And you have to watch all of them over and over again while you wait for your turn to chip away at the enemy. If you try to finish fights faster with Gimmicks (spells) you run out of AP in one combat and then have to grind through battles on autoattack. And the areas are huuuuuuuuge. Like you think a dungeon is a coherent little dungeon? Nope. These areas are massive, on the level of most games' final dungeons, except they're mostly empty except for the same five assets copypasted over and over again. And the music is AWFUL! All the music apart from the Title screen music are bland 15 second loops that play over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over...
But then there's the worst part: instability. This game is, well, to put it nicely, badly coded. The game gets stuck or crashes right out of the blue. There's no quicksave, so if you don't manually save every minute, you'll be pushed back a long way if you die/crash/get stuck. I've gotten stuck on terrain several times. I've had the game crash when I was trying to read a tutorial during combat. And worst of all, I've gotten into solving a puzzle or fighting some enemies and forgotten to save, and BAM. 15 minutes, 30 minutes of gameplay lost. I came to write this when I'd been solving a puzzle dungeon where I had to split my party of three into one-man groups (yes, all of them had to fight against twin mobs over and over while the mobs healed each other and buffed up their defenses) until finally one of those battles dropped my character to 0hp. In every single battle before that, the enemy has tried to pin me and I've had to mash buttons to get up and continue, but for some reason, this time I just got a game over. And when I loaded my previous save? I was at the start of the dungeon. 30 minutes lost. Why there isn't a quicksave or autosave option, I don't understand. Even loading games is buggy, because when you re-start your game (can't load games inside the game, only from the title menu) and press continue, it loads the topmost savegame from your three slots instead of your most recent one, so then you alt-f4 (no way to quit the game inside the game), re-launch it, then pick load game.
And for some reason I can't dash diagonally up and left. I can walk and dash in every other direction. I can walk in that direction, but I can't dash.
I desperately want to like this game because it's got so much heart, but the execution is so very bad. In its current state, I can't suggest it to anyone. And this is doubly hurtful because a dev answered my original review and was happy about it, so I feel twice as awful for changing my review and writing something like this.