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FOAMGaP pt 5: This Way Madness Lies
2 years ago
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i can also be found at:
https://www.deviantart.com/bardicdragoon
This is the latest game from indie Dev Zeboyd Games, a developer I am rather fond of due to them exclusively making retro style JRPGs that have mechanics that fell very ‘we love classic JRPGS but know the mechanical design can be a bit lacking so lets address that’ in their design. Honestly I would probably recommend pretty much any of their games if you have any interest in JRPGS, especially old 8 or 16 bit era ones. However, this game doesn’t seem to work on a conceptual level and I can’t Pin down why…
The basic idea is 90’s era anime magical girls mixed with Shakespeare. this bizarre mashup takes the form of a group of highschool(?) girls who are teleported into Shakespeare’s plays to defend them from monsters and such derailing the stores. a great example is the beginning of the game; a cold open to four of our heroines walking out of a portal into Romeo and Juliet and after the expected transformation sequences find man eating plants have overrun the city (leading to one of the most ‘I never knew I needed this’ with a partial rewrite of “Feed Me” from Little Shop of Horrors into Shakespearian English).
After the intro sequence the settles into a flow of the main characters (mostly) normal day to day lives and theater club shenanigans with trips into various altered Shakespeare plays popping up to act as gameplay sections. While on paper this isn’t bad in practice, the gameplay sections and the day-to-day life story stuff feel complete detached from each other with no real overlap beyond the main characters being in both parts. It does feel like there are some arguable attempts to add some connection with mysterious multiversal shenanigans and monsters from the Shakespeare play segments popping up in the real world every once in a while, but they often go nowhere.
Gameplay fares better in that it uses a tweaked version of the battle system used in Cosmic Star Heroine which is really the best that Zeboyd Games has come up with yet and just generally a well-designed system. Though it does feel like one step forward one step back with some changes they made; for example, you can now see an enemy’s ailment HP (the way status ailments work is that abilities that inflict ailments reduce an enemies HP for that ailment with the ailment being inflicted upon hitting 0 ailment HP) along with detailed elemental weakness/resistance details, however they have removed the visible turn order. In addition, they have removed equipment, instead having characters gain passive abilities as they level up which you can equip up to three of, a very cool design idea as these passives pretty much all have something more to offer than basic stat boosts. However one thing that is a little off putting is the fact that for most of the game you are give n a preformed team form the initial six playable characters, which is really only a problem as the team comps you get are weird leaving you with odd things like: 1 buff focused character, 1 debuff focused character, 1 multitarget focused damage dealer, and 1 highly random pseudo jack of all trades.
Really writing this I think I finally figured out what left me just not feeling this game: it’s a disparate selection of interesting and good ideas that never really coalesce together. I already mentioned the play based sections vs the slice of life stuff feeling detached from each other, but even the plays have a tendency to very quickly devolve into vaguely <insert play> themed dungeons above any really story (be it the play itself or original things revolving around what’s going wrong in the play’s world). And overall, the story feels like its trying to tell an actual narrative with occasional comedy (as opposed to the farcical absurdist comedy fests Zeyobd Games sometimes does) but never leaves room to flesh out its characters or original ideas. The combat works, but I’ve seen it in their prior two games (there are even some abilities that are all but directly lifted form said games) inn an arguably bettern handled state and the weak narrative doesn’t gave much incentive to play forward and get to that next story segment. I can’t really say this is a bad game, but it just feels almost incomplete, or at least like it could have used some more time in the oven before being released.
https://www.deviantart.com/bardicdragoon
This is the latest game from indie Dev Zeboyd Games, a developer I am rather fond of due to them exclusively making retro style JRPGs that have mechanics that fell very ‘we love classic JRPGS but know the mechanical design can be a bit lacking so lets address that’ in their design. Honestly I would probably recommend pretty much any of their games if you have any interest in JRPGS, especially old 8 or 16 bit era ones. However, this game doesn’t seem to work on a conceptual level and I can’t Pin down why…
The basic idea is 90’s era anime magical girls mixed with Shakespeare. this bizarre mashup takes the form of a group of highschool(?) girls who are teleported into Shakespeare’s plays to defend them from monsters and such derailing the stores. a great example is the beginning of the game; a cold open to four of our heroines walking out of a portal into Romeo and Juliet and after the expected transformation sequences find man eating plants have overrun the city (leading to one of the most ‘I never knew I needed this’ with a partial rewrite of “Feed Me” from Little Shop of Horrors into Shakespearian English).
After the intro sequence the settles into a flow of the main characters (mostly) normal day to day lives and theater club shenanigans with trips into various altered Shakespeare plays popping up to act as gameplay sections. While on paper this isn’t bad in practice, the gameplay sections and the day-to-day life story stuff feel complete detached from each other with no real overlap beyond the main characters being in both parts. It does feel like there are some arguable attempts to add some connection with mysterious multiversal shenanigans and monsters from the Shakespeare play segments popping up in the real world every once in a while, but they often go nowhere.
Gameplay fares better in that it uses a tweaked version of the battle system used in Cosmic Star Heroine which is really the best that Zeboyd Games has come up with yet and just generally a well-designed system. Though it does feel like one step forward one step back with some changes they made; for example, you can now see an enemy’s ailment HP (the way status ailments work is that abilities that inflict ailments reduce an enemies HP for that ailment with the ailment being inflicted upon hitting 0 ailment HP) along with detailed elemental weakness/resistance details, however they have removed the visible turn order. In addition, they have removed equipment, instead having characters gain passive abilities as they level up which you can equip up to three of, a very cool design idea as these passives pretty much all have something more to offer than basic stat boosts. However one thing that is a little off putting is the fact that for most of the game you are give n a preformed team form the initial six playable characters, which is really only a problem as the team comps you get are weird leaving you with odd things like: 1 buff focused character, 1 debuff focused character, 1 multitarget focused damage dealer, and 1 highly random pseudo jack of all trades.
Really writing this I think I finally figured out what left me just not feeling this game: it’s a disparate selection of interesting and good ideas that never really coalesce together. I already mentioned the play based sections vs the slice of life stuff feeling detached from each other, but even the plays have a tendency to very quickly devolve into vaguely <insert play> themed dungeons above any really story (be it the play itself or original things revolving around what’s going wrong in the play’s world). And overall, the story feels like its trying to tell an actual narrative with occasional comedy (as opposed to the farcical absurdist comedy fests Zeyobd Games sometimes does) but never leaves room to flesh out its characters or original ideas. The combat works, but I’ve seen it in their prior two games (there are even some abilities that are all but directly lifted form said games) inn an arguably bettern handled state and the weak narrative doesn’t gave much incentive to play forward and get to that next story segment. I can’t really say this is a bad game, but it just feels almost incomplete, or at least like it could have used some more time in the oven before being released.
