Lie of Caelum

You can really see the Xenogears influence in the combat system. I greatly appreciate that, Xenogears deserved more love than it got. Also, what the hell are you doing? You removed every possible quality of life feature from Xenogears' combat system for the sake of originality and ended up making every fight triple in time because now you need to waste 2-3 turns setting up enough SG to actually play the game. Meanwhile, enemies get to unload on you with all their stuff. And why in the name of God would you make players LOSE A TURN just to check your non-standard, bespoke combo routes? Terrible design decisions mean I don't have the patience to play any further to see the rest of the story. Hope you fixed it for the sequel.

The writing is bland and stiff enough to cause headaches.

Reminds me a lot of Xenosaga 1 but in a school setting.

A gigantic love letter to JRPGs of the Playstation era, Xenogears in particular. At the same time, it doesn't simply copy the gems of olde, having quite a few compelling and unique mechanics of its own. There are a few areas where it could stand to be polished more, like not being able to check your combos in mid battle, but its hard to complain when its a free game. There's a ton of fiddly little secrets and minigames too. A clear labor of love that deserves to be recognized more than it is. My only gripes are that the difficulty is pretty uneven even on the easier Astral Mode (there is, in particular, a very nasty one on one boss fight in the mid game that I remain stuck on as of this writing), and that, frankly, I could really use a secrets guide. The latter point I can hardly blame on the dev though.

Very impressed by the overall package and polish of this game. Xenogears set in school is something that feels tailor made for me. Excited to see the sequel currently being worked on.

Edit: Game crashing bugs fixed. Didn't check if the achievements are fixed too, someone else can confirm. Plenty for finishing the game. This game is....a lot. It's a massive world being presented with far too little time and game to do it. It's 30% xenosaga I and 20% battle school anime. Now that doesn't add up to 100% because it's not REALLY a full game. On the other hand, xenosaga is absolutely massive so I can't really complain given how much smaller the team is. Large chunks of the game are shadowy foreshadowing and edgy adults beating up kids that are going to need future games for proper payoff. The gameplay does serve its purpose for such a runtime, but a full length game probably needs more variety in the kinds of techniques you can pull off so that there's more choice beyond filling special meter and not dying. It's got a lot of minigames. Probably too much. If the effort was focused onto just the card game, you'd have a better paced, smoother experience. But if you're experienced in RPGmaker subtleties, there's a few flaws here and there. Lack of explanation for some mechanics and some odd number balancing make high difficulty a bit of a pain. There's plenty sidegrad…