Demon General Kirsten

At first I didn't have high expectations. The character art is pretty picky, quite niche, not something most people can accept. At first glance it's easy to mistake it for having only surface appeal, but after playing more I found it has some substance. Combat is traditional turn based and needs a bit of thought. You can't just mindlessly push through. Early on it put some pressure on me and I got tense now and then. Luckily the difficulty can be lowered. If you really can't win, dropping it down lets you keep progressing, so you won't truly get stuck. That's pretty friendly. The story is fairly linear with not many branches. The tone jumps back and forth between silly and serious. Some parts made me laugh out loud, others suddenly became heavy. The switches aren't always smooth, but it's not boring. The protagonist isn't set as a young girl. She has a tired yet stubborn feel, and I really like that. She's sometimes a mess, sometimes dignified, and that makes her more memorable to me than many characters who are overpowered from the start. The map design still has some heart. The cliff and sea of trees sections really create a bit of atmosphere. Walking through them made me pause a little, not just rush along. And with teleport crystals around, running back and forth doesn't feel tiring. It takes a lot of the burden off. There are flaws too. The middle and later parts get noticeably repetitive, and the pacing drags. It gets tiring after a while. There's a lot of content spread out, but much of it doesn't blend deeply with the main story. It feels like separate pieces rather than one cohesive whole, which is a bit of a shame to me. Overall, it's not a work so polished that you can't find fault with it. It's very uneven, and there are plenty of rough spots. But if you can accept this niche aesthetic, like traditional turn based combat, and are willing to watch a female general who is no longer young make her way along a path of revenge, it will always have something that moves you