Infinite Mana

Maybe there's a good game under the extremely lackluster introduction, but I just couldn't bring myself to care about it. I figured at a first glance that it'd be something like Crystal Project, using old vibes for a fresh and interesting take on some classic gaming, but instead it really just feels like the sorts of "I just played Star Ocean"-RPGMaker projects that used to litter the internet from edge to edge. The writing is trite and tedious, at the same time generic and self-important, and I just do not give a damn about any single character I've encountered. The environments look neat, but I'm never allowed to go exploring without one of the idiots that have glommed on to me or a magic narrative voice telling me "nooooo! you have to follow the plot!!!" when I do not care about it and the plot just promises more mediocre dialogue I have to read that I would rather be shot with a nailgun than sit through another sentence of. The mechanics are simultaneously simple and overcomplicated. I never felt like I had to engage any mental gears for them, but at the same time the game drops multiple new classes and skillsets and crafting mechanics and fishing and stealing and infamy …

This game is a hidden gem. performance has improved greatly since buying the game a year ago. Runs on Linux very well with some minor tweaks. Story is engaging, exploration and environments scratch all the right itches. Lots of hidden things to find.

Contains troons, cleverly hidden until chapter 9. Avoid

Great game, a few bugs, but the dev is still updating it. Give it a try.

This game is just generally not very polished. Here are my gripes, as of time of review: There are a handful of typos strewn about. Personally, I don't think there should be text boxes that say "Dev note" in a finished game and there's one in the forest for some reason. There are half-baked features implemented like infamy and crafting. There's very little incentive to steal anything, as the rewards are pitiful and easily gathered in greater quantity elsewhere. NPCs that are killable feel like they have stunted writing compared to other NPCs. There's a "crafting level" feature that seems to do absolutely nothing, as everything craftable is available at lvl1. The Collectivum says fish need to be added in manually, but they apparently don't. Menu navigation is not standardized - some menus use back to exit, some use back+down for some reason, and some require navigating to an "exit" box. It feels janky and it's a big problem for menus in an rpg to be unpleasant. And require load times, for some reason. Opening and closing the Guise menu respawns enemies in the starting forest. Leads me to believe that the Guise menu is coded like its actually its own room or zone…

While Fun, game is horribly optimized with constant frame drops, inability to play in full screen with dropping to 5FPS, and constant infinite loading screens.