Doamari

3.2/10 | F I played this very shortly, and had a lot of problems, because I'm very weird. This will contain light spoilers, so if you'd like to play it for yourself, please do, and then come back to the more in-depth description below. Gameplay & Game Design -- Incredibly standard RPG Maker fare. Turn-based, MP that you need to manage, TP that regenerates over time- if you've played an RPG Maker game, you'll know what to expect here. The issue is, the combat is thoroughly uninteresting as opposed to some of the more stand-out hits like Hylics. You walk into an enemy that wanders aimlessly (meaning they're horribly easy to avoid, which may actually be a plus considering the sheer volume of them in nearly every area), attack, get hit, attack, get hit, attack, and then you win. Your special abilities might as well not exist until a boss fight happens. In that case, you will then attack, get hit, attack, get hit, use your special move, get hit, and then repeat until it dies. Your special moves are incredibly vague in their descriptions, the two that bothered me the most came down to "Double Turn" and "HARK!" which have "I wana go twice" and "Increases MP as if you used Guard, but increases DMG instead of DEF" as their descriptions, respectively. I had to use Double Turn at least 4 times before it became clear it was a move that used your basic attack twice on a single enemy, and... I don't know what the hell is going on with HARK! but it certainly isn't doing what it says it does. I used it at least 30 times on the [spoiler] "SUN" [/spoiler] boss [i] in a fucking row [/i] and it always dealt the same amount of damage. Tested [spoiler] Iris' [/spoiler] basic attack, and that didn't deal increased damage either. It certainly didn't act like Guarding- it was an attacking move. On top of it all, it costed MP to use, which, speaking of, Guarding does as well. This meaning that you can lose access to Guarding if you don't have enough MP, which feels incredibly wrong and backwards. Either this is a long series of actions that [i] do not at all function the way they should, [/i] it works perfectly as intended and it's just such a negligible increase that the built-in Damage Variance completely disguises it making it functionally useless, or... something. I don't even know anymore. As for the area design, it consists of incredibly large mazes with hallways that are far larger than they have any right to be. I had Auto-Run turned on in the settings (which it isn't on by default for some reason I do not understand) and even still I had roughly 7 or 8 second long stretches of just walking in a single uninterrupted direction with nothing to look at or do other than walk for no other reason than to get to the place where things actually are. I can imagine it may be intended to be a sort of surreal, supposed-to-be-uncomfortable and tension-building "walk of shame" but it's just irritating more than anything. Lastly, the bosses are all slogs. Due to the nature of combat, as described earlier in this section, bosses consist of you doing the same moves for no other reason than to make the enemy number lower than your good-guy number. There is no strategy, there is no thought, if you lost it was because your numbers didn't start high enough and you need to go blankly attack enemies until the game tells you your numbers are high enough. While I haven't played it, I hear OFF does a similar thing in order to make a thematic point about the "Purification" in that game being a bad, monotonous thing. I may be wrong about that, forgive me if I am, I haven't played it. Regardless, if that's what's being gone for here, then it isn't doing a good job. Story & Writing -- Speaking of tonal dissonance, it's never a bad thing. Some of the funniest jokes are funny because they're said in a horrible state of affairs. Some of the saddest moments are sad because they're surrounded by happiness. This does not do that. It's less like tonal dissonance and more-so hav