Quoted By:
>The Bad
The big issue is when the game's formula doesn't work, and...for a decent chunk of the runtime, it was just not that fun to play.
There's just a lot of small decisions here that really annoyed the fuck out of me in certain areas, I mean fuck the ice minecart puzzle, but I'm talking moreso about things like how wild Pokemon just seem constantly over your levels and are thus unable to be repelled (and grinding off them is slow), and the amount of times where I was backtracking or going through an annoying fucking area just to look for something.
So much of this game is built on engaging with its secrets and side content, and thus so much of the game is spent trying to navigate maps that would be fine if you just went through them once, but I found myself traversing places like the forest or mountain several times (with rewards that were not worth running around the bullshit), or maybe going through maps multiple times with the enemy mons too high level. This meant in some cases redoing the puzzles in those places to just get around, and constantly clicking past HM obstacles. No Fly is also a major son of a bitch, expensive one way fast traveling in some towns can also go fuck itself.
I can see what the creator was going for, like a Metroidvania-lite thing especially with the shortcuts that open up later in the game, but it's just not done in an engaging way.
Also, Hard mode. I'm not going to bitch about this too hard, given the warning at the start says to specifically play it unless you've beaten the game once, but again I just found this more annoying than actually difficult. The backtracking issue up above gets WAY worse when you have to backtrack to heal, and if you forget to save once, you lose a ton of progress for no reason. I felt this a LOT harder than Saiph 2, even if this game wasn't really that hard.
