Recent reviews by Plumbus

EDIT 10/13/2024: This is a fatal graphics card crash for AMD after the fight with Typhon. Where you know who comes in and unleashes a spell. As far as I can tell there is only a workaround and that is to skip the cutscene and go watch it on Youtube.

So far I'm enjoying the title. It is linear but I don't mind that in a narrative game. The graphics are nice and the combat so far is fun.


ORIGINAL:

Jarring stutters even on the lowest possible settings without super resolution when using an RX 6800XT and Ryzen 9 5900X. Using an Xbox Series X controller and I have insane input lag in this game but not others.


If yall got troubleshooting advice please tell me lol.

EDIT: Fixed it. Like a noob I hadn't updated my graphics drivers in a while. I'm using 24.8.1 now and it's running smooth as butter! This seems to have fixed the controller problem as well. It was probably the game lagging but felt like input delay.

10/10. Nice retro experience that holds up today. The skill / esper system allows most characters to eventually be able to fill the role of any job with enough patience.

It's literally a souls game that is being intentionally marketed as not a souls game. No thanks.

It's really hard going from Trails to this. It's just so boring to me. If you're super into the genre then it's at least worth trying due to how lenient Steam's refund feature is.

Just finished this game for the first time. It is by far the best arc in all of Trails so far for me. I've completed Sky, Crossbell, and 3/4 of CS. If you play any of the Trails games, play the Crossbell arc, you will not regret it. Playing this after 3/4 of CS really makes you realize how much better the story telling was.

Game crashed twice when viewing a tutorial. Lost a good amount of progress.

I still think the game is sloppy and could use improvements but a lot of it can be overlooked. I'm enjoying the base advancement mechanics as well as exploring and finding new characters. Combat did not open up as I expected it to so if you're looking for challenging combat, look elsewhere.

To my knowledge, none of my issues stated below have been fixed.
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ORIGINAL

The game is just sloppy and rushed compared to similar products of equal or lower value.

Examples of sloppy:
- XP Gain boost item does not work
- Inconsistent language conventions "deal x damage to all enemies" and "applies x damage to all enemy". Just weird.
- There is a cutscene early on where a character joins your party and is also in the cutscene. The character appears in two different positions in the cutscene because of this. It can be avoided if you don't have her in your party.

Some other things that are missing QOL items:
- No battle speed changes
- Slow menus (super slow navigating)
- No smart menues, it should remember which screen I was on so I don't have to tab back over to the desired screen. Wouldnt be as big of a deal if it wasn't such a slog doing it.
- There's an animation when using consumables outside of battle and again, just a slog.
- Not enough auto battle options (but I just came from Unicorn Overlord so I might be spoiled)
- Can only change runes at towns (no reason for this, it's tedious to make me go back to a town for this IMO)
- No saving anywhere, only at save points (again, just wasting time / progress)

Some of these systems seem like fluff that is added to give artificial difficulty but it's really just added tedium.

I think there's a good game here but I'm having to overlook a lot of negatives to get there. I don't think I'd recommend it at this point in time. Hope I didn't come off as entitled in this review. Still going to finish the game, recruiting new characters and experimenting is fun for the time being. I'm hoping unlocking rune slots opens combat up more.

Maybe I was super unlucky but every time I attempted to play I couldn't connect to the severs. I was only ever able to complete the tutorial.

This is so wishy washy but whatever. The sudden exit from Early Access is odd, especially when it has been followed by updates being pushed almost daily (some without patch notes?). I don't think I'm coming back to this one but I acknowledge it's a solo dev.

OLD 2:

Modified since the dev has a good attitude and as a fellow software developer, I admire the drive to make the product better. Good luck!
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OLD:

I'm going to stick with it to see if this changes but right now this game feels horrible to play. Escaping from battles hasn't worked once yet nor was it explained. Everything seems to one shot me as well. You can enter a place, enter a dialog and then get attacked because you said the wrong thing, leading to a game over.

Aesthetically, the pixel art is nice but the idle / breathing "animations" that is put onto each character is clearly some sort of effect and is incredibly distracting / jarring.

The "Early Access Game" section says the dev is working on minor bug fixes but the slot machine minigame found all over the slums doesn't remove cash from my inventory and I randomly won $100,000. Nothing seems to make sense.

The player is also seemingly able to make moves in combat that make no sense / have no effect. Boosting and then using an item, for example, will still use the boost but doesn't seem to modify the behavior of the used item.

Best game I've played in a long time. Cried at the end but am sad that it's over.