TL;DR: JRPG-metroidvania-open world mashup that I’d recommend even if you don’t traditionally like one or two of those genres. It’s made by one developer and has the best turn based combat I’ve played.
This is one of my favorite games, and it’s made by just one person on a nonexistent marketing budget, so it’s mostly a word of mouth game.
Put simply, it’s an open world-JRPG-metroidvania mashup. It takes parts of each of those genres and makes something new with it. There’s little to no story, as it focuses entirely on exploring the world, platforming, unlocking new classes to mix and match, getting mounts, and turn based combat.
For the combat, it is literally the best turn based combat I’ve played. And I’ve played a lot of turn based games. This game tells you exactly what move the enemies will make, the hit and crit chances of all moves before you execute them, the damage formulas that go into attacks, and even which of your characters the enemies will attack.
The latter can be manipulated by raising / lowering characters’ ‘threat’ by strategically using different abilities. Generally, the more damage, healing etc a character does, the more threat they generate, and they’ll become the focus of enemy attacks. But lots of classes have ways of manipulating it further, such as the Assassin’s Neutralize which deals damage and erases all threat for all party members, and lots of tanks that boost the threat they accrue.
It’s also hard. The dev went on record saying he didn’t want there to be any trash mobs in the game— every enemy can kill you if you’re not properly fighting it. You’ll actually probably hit the level cap before you beat the game, which is an intentional choice to get you team building and strategizing instead of overpowering enemies via leveling.
Multiclassing is a big element of the game. You can swap any of your characters’ classes and subclasses out at any time, and whenever you learn new ‘passives’ on a class’ skill tree, that character keeps those passives.
It goes even further by there being a shop in the main hub that lets you de-level your characters, and level them in other classes. So you can have a mage with brawler abilities, with its levels split between Monk and Rogue. It’s pretty bonkers. There are 24 classes to find and fool around with.
The metroidvania element is executed wonderfully too. I’m generally really tired of these games where you see a red door, and you know you need to get the red power up later to go back and access that door.
Here, it’s all just jump distance and height, and half the time you think you’re locked out of a jump due to not having the right mounts, you can get there anyway if you go a different route. It really bleeds together what you think should be possible and impossible, which I find a lot more fun.
The music is also sublime. This guy just used royalty free music and I didn’t know it could slap so hard and fit the game’s environments so well.
Lastly, the modding community is pretty big, and even the switch version comes with some mods you can apply. Someone made a mod that adds 200 more pieces of equipment, for example, including new types of weapons (guns for example lol). The randomizer also makes for really fun replayability, as you could end up like me where only one of your starting classes has a healing ability, and it’s locked behind a long skill tree.
by LiquifiedSpam