I flipped to a new page of my notebook and stared at the screen a while. The latest Request from the Cafe wanted a Puni Missile, so I figured it was a good time to replace my current Puni Missile with something better and sell the old one. I had over 1500 materials stashed, so putting the best traits possible onto it should be a snap. Combining enough materials to make Ultimate Destruction and One-Hit KO traits was easy, but the Evil Soul trait proved problematic: it only appeared on one type of material, a Gem-type material. The Puni Missile used Gunpowder components. And none of my current Gunpowder recipes used a Gem.
Traits like Evil Soul can be transferred from an ingredient to the resulting product, so I could still theoretically transfer it from Gem to Gunpowder... I just needed to figure out the crafting chain to get it from A to B. I opened the in-game encyclopedia and began flipping through it. My recipes that used Gem ingredients were slim... and none of them resulted in ingredients for Gunpowder. I sighed and leaned back in my chair; was it impossible? Or was I just missing something? I opened up the Gem's details page and reread it. It was also a Poison-type component as well as a Gem-type... perhaps I could find a chain from Poison to Gunpowder instead? I flipped through the encyclopedia again. A moment later, I had my eureka: Natural Yeast required a Poison-type ingredient and counted as Gunpowder.
I quickly crafted it and tossed it into the mix with the others, spending several minutes figuring out how to place them on the board to squeeze the maximum Effect points out of them and thus make it as powerful as possible. A few attempts later, I hit a snag: one of the effects was 30 points short of maximum. Was actually maxing them out impossible? Or was I missing somethi- oh, wait, the Natural Yeast is a Green-color item. The others were Red & Blue. Effect points get a bonus if their color covers the most spaces on the board. If I could replace the Green Yeast with a Red Gunpowder and give them equal space on the board, I'd get bonuses on both... I went back to the encyclopedia and started scribbling down notes. Natural Yeast was an ingredient in Flame Powder, a Red-type Gunpowder that also provided a hefty boost to Effect points. With a bit of tweaking, I produced a properly-sized Flame Powder and promptly tossed it into the Puni Missile mix. Once the Red & Blue spaces were equal, the bonus was enough to max out every Effect. I hit Confirm; a few moments later, my maxed-out auto-activating insta-killing life-draining Puni Missile popped out. I smiled as I replaced my old Missile with the new & improved one and shipped the old one off to the Cafe. Total time spent planning, preparing, and tweaking: 90 minutes.
If this sounds intriguing at all to you, this is your game. If not, just close the review now and find something else to play, because this type of obsessive preparation is 80% of the game. The actual RPG part is just a means of gathering materials and testing out your new gear; the heart of the game is the crafting itself. There's no way you can ignore it: the game progression is tied to how many recipes you craft, you can only get advanced equipment/items by crafting them, and you hit maximum level 2/3rds through the game so you can't just level high enough to slaughter everything either. If you're going to survive this game, you need to craft a lot, and you need to be thoughtful about how you craft it. Even consumables have to be crafted with care; rather than the poor substitutes for spells they are in other RPGs, here they are your main source of healing and the biggest attacks available to you. Traits, Effects, and Quality are the difference between a sword that just hits things and a sword which gives you +25 to all stats and blinds & lifedrains enemies with each swing, or a puny missile attack and the behemoth I crafted above.
Fortunately, the crafting system is more robust than most. It's not just about choosing the best materials to craft an item with; it's making sure they have the right traits, choosing the best cauldron for the job, and figuring out which order to lay the ingredients in to maximize Effect points. The best traits require merging 4-8 different traits together, some of which are quite rare, and figuring out how to chain your crafting together to gather them all can get mindbending. Even tweaking the ingredient setups for maximum Effect points can involve 10-15 minutes of removing ingredients, repositioning them, trying new ingredients, or even brewing your own ingredients to fill the gaps properly. Between that and planning which traits I wanted to put on which items, I stayed up late several nights simply jotting down notes, experimenting with new recipes, and heading out to gather more materials just so I can continue crafting. It's one of the best crafting systems I've ever played in a game.
That doesn't mean the RPG mechanics are barebones as a result, though. The unique mechanic here is Offensive/Defensive stances and the ChainLink system. The premise is simple: characters in Offensive Stance will follow-up allies' attacks with attacks of their own, while characters in Defense Stance will soak up blows for their teammates. Once the ChainLink % gets high enough, your party can do a massive Attack or Guard combo, depending on which stance most of them are in. Meanwhile, enemies have a Burst meter that fills up about every 3 turns; once it fills up (and sometimes it starts full), they unleash a massive attack, forcing you to alternate between an all-out assault and hunkering down to weather the storm. Finally, both allies and enemies have a Break meter that is filled up by getting attacked; once it's full, they're stunned for a turn and every hit against them is a critical hit. A large part of the boss fights is rotating defenders to prevent their Break meters from filling up and taking advantage of the boss's Breaks to wail on it. While you can steamroll the first half of the game easily enough to ignore the nuances of it, even the random encounters later on can crush you if you play reckless and don't learn the systems. The boss fights in particular test your knowledge of it, as they throw curveballs that require exploiting the system to win. For instance, there's one boss you can only damage when he Breaks, while another boss heals each time he Breaks (forcing you to limit yourself to high-power, low-Break attacks just to make any progress). The only RPG I've played in the past decade that required more thought & care in its combats was Divinity: Original Sin.
Unfortunately, while the mechanics are polished to a fine sheen, the plot itself feels dead in the water. It starts with a young alchemist trying to help a talking book regain its memories and ends with a (standard) fight to save the world, but few of the characters grow, change, or even react to what's happening around them. Although the time mechanics have a Week/Day structure and imply months passing by, most of the NPCs only change dialogue once or twice throughout the game. The Generic Medieval Fantasy Town it's based in has none of the liveliness or character of Persona 4 or Stardew Valley. Even your allies' sideplots feel lightweight and inconsequential. Regardless, even if it's not meaty it goes down easily enough, so you can enjoy a few bits of it and quickly forget the rest...
...Except for the borderline ecchi. Let's discuss that a moment.
It feels like some of the developers wanted to sexy up the game and the rest of them tried to keep it to a minimum. I knew I was in for something when the intro video focused on the protagonist's skirt and boob physics occurred 10 minutes into the game, but hours later I realized there's only 2 characters in the game that have boob physics: a girl with one of the smaller chests in the game, and the chubby guy. And despite there being no flirting or innuendo (well, barely any) or usual sexy hijinx, two of the characters getting skimpier clothing is treated as a plot point (one of whom isn't old enough to drink), customizing one of the characters' stats involves changing her clothes, and several of the cutscenes have a camera angle subtly looking up skirts. I ended up just putting the one gal in her standard alchemist jacket and finding an outfit for the other that looked like she was actually wearing clothes. It all felt like it was haphazardly shoved into a game they really don't belong in, and I found myself uncomfortably trying to shoo it off so I could get back to the crafting.
Still, it's worth ignoring that and tolerating the plot to enjoy the meaty crafting and combat. Not only have I beaten the game after 70 hours (when I usually abandon RPGs after the 20-hr mark), but I am eagerly gearing up for the bonus bosses and looking forward to the sequel coming out in March. It's been a while since an RPG hooked me this hard, and while it definitely won't be for everyone, it's great for people who want to spend just as much time preparing as they do fighting.
Bug Note: Although they've patched out the CPU-maxing bug as of 2/17/17, currently the game still slows to a crawl in crafting menus, averaging anywhere from 10-15 FPS despite running a solid 30+ elsewhere. It's not a gamebreaker, but it's irritating.
Current Price on Steam: $30
Time Played: 70 hours
Favorite Characters: Harol, Oskar