Frontier Hunter: Erza’s Wheel of Fortune

Fun metroidvania for a while, but it gets samey after a bit.

It delivers what you expect from a metroidvania game. Although the cutscenes animation are janky, it makes up for it by having great soundtracks and fun exploration.

This was an epic journey, but ultimately a lack of polish and what I think was an unsustainably massive scope knocked this down to where I can’t recommend it. I honestly do feel bad about giving this a thumbs down, but since neutral isn't an option I just can't give this a recommendation. This game did so much right: the graphics, music, gameplay mechanics, map, and so many other things are done well. This game plays like it was originally intended to be a procedurally generated world, but then it seems like they just picked a single random layout with very little playtesting. I think the massive scope and the size of the map really hurt this experience. I would much rather have seen a game that was half or even a third the size that felt like it was carefully crafted, which is not at all what the world here feels like. There are so many fantastic combat mechanics, and good variety as well with multiple characters, but ultimately, the combat just feels like an untested slog. By the end, the standard enemies were taking six or more full combos to kill. Did anyone test this out? Again, I think that this game is just so massive that it’s almost impossible to test properly. Why even …

It's decent. Bosses are too easy until the second half of the game, you can very easily juggle and stagger them so they can't even attack and you can do this with multiple weapons/moves so it's not like there's one cheese mechanic I was abusing. Second half the bosses can teleport around or ignore stagger and so you do have to dodge, the game is still very easy keep in mind (didn't die once) but at least for the second half bosses it's not mindless. Movement and combat are fun, feels similar to Bloodstained except you can juggle enemies for days. There isn't much in the way of exploration, you basically do one zone at a time and sometimes will have two paths that reconnect, but no coming back to zones hours later with a new upgrade to access some previously inaccessible area, once you kill the zone boss you're pretty much done unless you need materials or to check for breakable walls. Story and voice acting aren't great, cutscenes are very stiff but they're pretty lighthearted and have some charm. Localizers didn't do a great job, some of the wording was borderline nonsensical. The weapon types are pretty distinct in terms of combat style which is nice. Magic is pretty…

7.5 its okay

If you like metroidvanias buy this game immediately. I put it off for so long because it looked a little jank, and it is, but in the best way possible. You can tell actual passion was put into this game and the style makes me very nostalgic. Not to mention the RPG systems are great and deep enough to keep me engaged always improving, the story and cutscenes (yes, its a metroidvania with cutscenes) are very well done even if theres a few localization issues here and there. Im only 2 hours into the game but im already confident that this is a game worth playing.