Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree

Extremely underrated game, though I understand why. It's easy to come to it with the wrong expectations, but once you understand what the game is trying to do it's both very fun and surprisingly moving. Here are a few points to convince you to give it a shot, and to enjoy it more if you do: - Don't think of it as "anime Hades". Think of it as "Legend of Mana, except with really good combat". You are building a little world and watching it progress. - Don't skip the (well-acted) voiced cut scenes, even though they seem like pointless slice-of-life stuff. It'll be slow at first, I know. But: this game builds drama and pathos NOT from its plot (which is dead simple), but rather from getting to know its funny little characters' lives... and then watching those characters grow old, mature, and - more often than you'll expect - die. Maybe it's because I'm getting old myself, but I found this moving in a totally unique way. - Relatedly, on every run you get a chance to rest, and usually hear a chat between your two chosen characters. There are seemingly ENDLESS amounts of these, unique for every combination of characters, and they are fun. Finding characters you like (or hate!) a…

This game is way too easy. I literally never lost a run until the final boss which took only two tries. This is a big problem for a roguelike with heavy meta progression. The meta progression obviously feels like a total waste of time when I'm already doing winning so much and have no apparent means to increase difficulty. My decisions during runs also feel borderline irrelevant since I can easily win irrespective of what blessings I pick. The game is also way too short when you aren't having to redo any levels. Only a handful of enemies ever spawn at a time and they are all generally slow to move and attack. Just about every enemy attack is telegraphed with a big glowing mark that makes it trivial to avoid, especially since most characters start with multiple dashes and you can boost that number by up to 3 more with meta upgrades. Difficulty aside, the blessing system is not very good. The special effects they apply feel incredibly unimpressive and offer little in the way of developing a unique build. At best I was just stacking as much damage as possible onto one of my attacks and then just spamming that move repeatedly. Combat in general felt very spammy, despite the durabilit…

It's pretty good although the ending is super overwrought and drawn out for no payoff. Gameplay is simple but tolerable enough, what you're really here for is the characters and the town.

The game is fast & fun, but very story-based, so if you don't care for story it'll be a lot of in-game skipping, as you watch multiple generations play out in a village with time-skip and return of past villagers, as well as make decisions that ripple through the future of the village with multiple branching villager storylines. Actual gameplay is not difficult, and upgrades come in a multitude of options from self-crafted swords and upgrading staffs to changing and forcing blessings and raw stat upgrades. Rerolls for options, blessings, and stats are prevalent through basically all systems in the game, making it easy to make the game easy if you just keep rolling. Due to the vibrant damage indicators for all enemies, the only difficulty is when bosses have large aoe or two+ quick manouvers in succession, but even those can be avoided after recognizing their patterns.

ama makey sword dat not look like swordi ita binki shape but ama swipa an ita kil marackas

Traditional Japanese mythological stories settings slop