Elements: Soul of Fire

My soul was on fire suffering while playing this.

[b]Story:[/b] It's somewhat interesting, although it requires a fair amount of reading since I feel some conversations are unnecessarily long/verbose. [b]Visual:[/b] I quite like both the hand-drawn art and 8-bit texture. I also didn't notice any stock/stock-looking asset. [b]Audio:[/b] It does its job, but nothing special. [b]Gameplay:[/b] Based on both the store page description and my own experience, it seems the gameplay was intentionally made to be difficult. I was unable to win fight against the boss even with best gear and items I could buy, since I didn't bother to grind. Grinding seems to be necessary since I noticed the stats increase is rather big (about 50% max HP and 20% attribute increase from level 3 and 4). I don't really like grinding since you just need to spam attack against weaker enemies or keep using same strategy for stronger ones. I can see effort poured by the developer, but the combat aspect ruined my personal experience. The story isn't good enough to make me cheat total gold/character stats and continue playing the game either. Note that my actual gameplay is only about 1 hour.

cool game

like it

Elements: Soul of Fire is an RPG Maker game that genuinely surprised me with how much heart went into it — the story and characters are the clear highlights, with a large cast that actually gets meaningful development and a world that pulls you in despite the rough SNES-era sprites. The hand-drawn battle art is a quirky choice that takes some getting used to, and the enemy encounter design can be genuinely punishing with damage spikes that feel unfair rather than challenging. Navigating the world is often confusing with little direction, and I spent more time feeling lost than immersed, which undercut the emotional storytelling the game works so hard to build. If you can stomach the clunky combat and are willing to use a guide, there's a surprisingly earnest RPG here with memorable characters and music — but it asks a lot of patience for what it delivers.

So bad