I am debating abandoning this game. I decided I would use this as an outlet to vent and through that venting process I would figure out if I wanted to quit playing this game.
Visually, this game is excellent! It's made as a mix of the aesthetics of Paper Mario and Hollow Knight, so paper bugs! It's very colorful and the creators did an excellent job of keeping with a cutesy design that's still very poignant. I really love how this game looks, I can't gush enough.
Aurally, this game is also quite good! I think the creators were trying to bring in some nostalgia for the older Paper Mario titles and I think that invites the comparison to those games. Which is fine in the visual category, but doesn't help the game when it comes to music. The music is good, but not as good as the music in the Paper Mario games. To be fair, that would be a very high bar to overcome!
Plot: The plot here is fine? The player's party are explorers that are on a quest to help the ant queen by finding some hidden relics. It does feel a bit weird though because the player's party are often called weak, but apparently we are the only ones who are able to find these relics? There's not any reason given for the party's ability to find these hidden relics. No Macguffin. It does seem like they are setting the queen up to betray the party at some point, but I'm not all that far in.
The gameplay is what gets me. Exploring the world is neat! The platforming is a little janky due to the fixed camera angles and the aesthetic of the game, but it's pretty forgivable. It's not like they are throwing platforming gauntlets at the player or anything. The part that gets me is the battle system. The game is a turn based RPG with timing mechanics, so you get bonuses for timely inputs for attacking and defending. My only issue here is that it feels like the game is set up so it's only doable if you nail all of these inputs. Your characters don't really get stronger but the enemies sure do. You get more skills, but you have to choose how you level your characters so carefully that you won't be able to use them as often as you'd like. So the battles tend to be drudgery in my honest opinion. I like the mechanics, and timing for emphasis is great fun! (See my review on Ikenfell!) But the lack of growth here is unfortunate. It's bad when you feel like you have to grind through the entire game and that's really what it feels like to me right now.
The things that it seems like they forgot to copy over from Paper Mario are the little Heart/Flower drops after the battle that refill some of your precious resources and also you never seem to get stronger attacks. Reddit says you get some late in the game, but I don't think I'll make it that far in.
Maybe I'll finish this game someday, but for now I am putting it down. It feels like a turn based Dark Souls, like if Darkest Dungeon had TP for the characters so you had to rely on their worst skills for 90% of the game. Maybe I'm being too picky here, but I'm not enjoying it so I shouldn't keep hitting my head against a wall.
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