Rise of the Third Power

A really, really good jrpg! Great story and characters. The game uses post WW1 Germany as inspiration for it's villain country, and the game kind of goes from there. For a JRPG fantasy game it's fairly grounded, and the story is more on the political side which I really liked, as it was so different from most games. As mentioned above the characters are all good, with a few stand outs, the princess actually being probably the best and often funniest intentionally, or unintentionally. The music is also terrific. Combat is fairly basic but good, and does feature character swapping, though you are limited in how many times you can do it each fight which is an neat twist. I do wish the game had bit more system/mini game wise, but it is pretty much just combat/story. There is a "crafting system" but it's just upgrading your fixed set of gear as you progress through the game. Loot is money, potions, or resources to upgrade gear and is usually uninteresting. Those are the only weaknesses in an otherwise terrific game. Also, and I thank the devs for this, you can pet most of the dogs and cats in the game, I loved that!

https://youtu.be/ckyvv3T-pOo Delivering on some interesting combat mechanics that builds synergies and unique feeling characters go a long way for a pixel art RPG.

Great game. Excellent story and characters. Gameplay is good, but too easy. Even on the highest difficulty. One thing I did not like was spending a lot of time in caves/ sewers with the exact same tile set. Made some of the dungeons feel samey. The other thing I didn't like was [spoiler] the forced split of the party at the end of the game. And the fact that the final boss was still using the same abilities as in the previous couple of battles we fought. [/spoiler] I am exited to play any future games this dev comes up with.

666

Excellent writing especially for an indie RPG. Art is decent enough, some of the character portraits in dialogue are not great but the portraits are at least expressive and change during dialogue to fit the lines. No voice acting, and the music is good but there just aren't that many tracks, and the battle music is forgettable. The combat and character building are very similar to chained echoes, each character can pretty much be used 1 way and the skill trees are not going to leave you pondering the best path at all, it's very linear. Boss battles have decent variety and are challenging enough to make you at least think a bit, but the trash mobs in each area are repetitive and limited to about 5 enemy types per area, so by the end of an area it's just going through the motions of what always works for each enemy type. Gearing is almost nonexistant, you craft items and they're permanent upgrades and there's no choice about who wears what and every piece of equipment is just stacking stats....they might as well have just not done crafting or equipment. If you get the game on sale it will be under 10 dollars and for that price it's an absolutely amazing game. The combat is …

I just finished the game, and what a satisfying adventure it was. The writing was fantastic and kept me fully invested in the main thread while also endearing me to each of the characters. Combat was satisfying, and the exhaustion mechanic did a good job of encouraging me to learn the strengths of each different character and experiment with different combos and strategies. My one minor complaint is that I wish there were more interesting things to find in chests. Due to how the equipment works more as upgrades most of the chests had either a healing item or an item you sell for money.