EDIT 1: After writing this review I went and played it for another three hours, so... Maybe I was a little harsh. The good parts are so good. And not ALL the writing is terrible. Just... some of it. EDIT 2: Ok here I am post-Not A Hero DLC, 50 hours in, to say that a lot of the QoL issues with this game have been fixed, and while it is pretty simplistic... yeah, it's fun. I enjoyed it. I may have been slightly harsh in this review. But also, the latest DLC fixed a lot of annoying stuff and expanded the game in small but meaningful ways, like civic talents. Free visits to the Brothel, anyone? I'll leave the review as is, because the issues are the issues. But it's a fun time. I wish there was a sideways thumb for this game. At its core it is awesome, a fantastic evolution of the Legionary's Life concept. But it is written and presented like a fan-made visual novel. And not in a good way. If you see this game as a VN with gameplay, it's the best VN ever made. But it could be so much more than that and it left me disappointed. See below. Pros: - Some very fun gameplay. Combat is easy to learn, hard to master. Fights are tough, and winning one feels great. - Lots of possible directions for your story to go in, and roguelike scaling + permadeath mechanics, encourage replayability and careful decision-making. Some real "damned if you do, damned if you don't" story moments that make you stop and think. - The story and setting are immersive (mostly - see Cons) and unafraid to throw curveballs at you if you don't get your shit together. Shades of Darkest Dungeon in the sense of "if you're not ready for this fight/event, it's your fault for not preparing." Also, many waifus to assist and eventually seduce, an essential element of any good RPG. (Shame about the lack of male waifus, but, that's feudal Europe for you I suppose). - Hard enough on roguelike/permadeath difficulty that you can easily die, but quick enough (thanks to the classic VN Skip Text feature) to start a new run. The game doesn't hold your hand but it does explain itself well enough. Good at making you feel strong for one Act, then weak again in the next. Great diversity of weapons, armor, and items without being needlessly complicated. Cons: - The story outline, characters and decisions in this game are great. The line-by-line writing itself, however, is absolutely atrocious. It's hard to explain how bad it is. It's just really bad. Every single sentence is overlong, flowery prose, using ten words where two would do, while somehow describing the situation in the least artful way possible. There are also constant changes in tone and character behaviour. Characters will veer between formal, historically appropriate lingo and colloquial, quippy emotional outbursts, usually within the same conversation. This game, except for the combat, is almost entirely description and dialogue. About half of it is written to the approximate literary standard of fanfiction. I'm unsure what the developer's first language is, and thus unsure if this is just poor translation or lack of writing talent, but either way, it is poor quality for a game that cost me twenty bucks, and is otherwise so compelling. Whoever wrote the text in this game, quite frankly, should have paid someone else to do it. - The above is not helped by extremely poor text editing and proof-reading. Repeated misuse of pretty basic English (like "cease" and "seize" being confused in a key story moment). *Constant* misspellings and formatting mistakes, including regular changes in tense within the same sentence. I'm talking nearly every sentence has something obvious wrong with it. Even running the script through spellcheck a few times would have made some serious improvements. It's really distracting. - The obvious lack of professional-grade quality and attention is pretty much evident throughout the rest of the game. There is no voice acting whatsoever. There is not much sound design at all. The menus are a pain in the ass to navigate. The quest tracker is very. VERY basic and doesn't even track your progress through the quests... a lot of basic QoL stuff missing. I know that this is clearly a shoestring budget game, but literally zero voice acting at all makes it harder to get invested in the story. (some of this was fixed in the DLC) - While the story branches off a lot (like, a lot) in later chapters based on your successes, failures and decisions, the order of events within each Act is pretty much exactly the same every time, and this becomes frustrating when you're learning and playing the same Act 1 story beats 15-20 times. This game is only half a roguelike - you get upgrades for repeated runs, but very little RNG within the game itself besides passing/failing the same 10 narrative skill checks. (edit: if you get far enough into the game to breeze through the early fights with your metaprogression upgrades this becomes less of an issue. But the Act 1 and 2 grind is still lame.) In conclusion, a compelling labour of love in many ways with a lot of highlight moments, and a lot of genuinely tough fights and agonising story decisions. But almost everything about the design, writing and presentation feels amateur and careless and seriously detracts from an otherwise addictive, engrossing experience. A cathedral built out of cardboard and pipe cleaners. I understand that if the developer(s) see themselves as making VNs, not "proper" video games, then this might be acceptable. But they could and should have set themselves a higher standard for this game. It is one of the roughest diamonds you will ever see.
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