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.

I wanted to like this game. The artstyle is awesome, the battle animations are super cool, and the ideas at play are wonderful. Having items be set in a loadout pre-battle is an interesting take that makes items feel much more strategic since you can't access them freely, and games that don't neglect the basic attack are always interesting. The story is alright, a bit scattered at times and does leave me lost but brought enough interest to drive about 14 hours of playtime. But execution is what fails this game, especially in pacing. The game's areas are large. There are many times where you have to go back and forth between different parts of an area. This isn't a bad thing in isolation, but what turns this from a quirk of the game to a genuine issue is the fact that to my knowledge, the game has no sprint function. For a game so heavy on puzzles and exploration, a sprint function is a must! On top of this, the enemies usually spawn only after your first visit to a particular part of the map, making backtracking, something you're expected to do, feel unnecessarily slow and punishing. Also, a bit of a nitpick, but it nags me when games have a field encounter system but don't l…

Picked this up to get a sense of what to expect from the upcoming :Spirit. It's obviously a Xenogears in gameplay and premise, but the style and writing sensibilities remind me a lot of those old newgrounds fighting animations in that it's evoking a certain teenage-boy-who-likes-shonen-anime aesthetic, now with r@pe threats and gore. I think the ideas on display are interesting enough for me to be hyped for :Spirit, but this title has some pacing and polish problems and I had a lot of issues with crashes, so I can't really recommend this game.

I don't care if there's cringe, I don't care if I'M cringe, Miyu's my oshi and I'll fight the world for her.

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…