Recent reviews by The Messiah

a fair deal at normal price and an amazing deal at 9 dollars, don't expect the world but it's plenty fun, took me about 8 hours to beat it on normal doing all the side quests.

(spoilers about story near the bottom)

play time for the average person is about 10 hours

its kind of weird of enjoying your time within a game and not being able to recommend it to other people, i bought this game for around 18 dollars as it was on sale for the launch of the game and mostly just on a whim as i had no other games in my backlog to play so i just scrolled through the steam new release page and found this.

this game is very pretty and stylized however the main mechanics of the game is lackluster at best.

i will be using terms like magic in place of whatever the game says it is because this game is effectively a rpgmaker game with a coat of paint, which there is nothing wrong with but it makes these terms interchangeable to me and makes me compare to all other rpgmaker games.

for overworld exploration there is only 1 major hub area and a couple of areas you unlock to spend maybe 15 to 45 minutes in depending if its a sidequest location or mainquest location. a majority of side quests in this game give you an item for another sidequest to complete a chain and at the end of the chain you get a piece of equipment that serves as a direct upgrade. all shops in this game sell the exact same gear the only thing stopping you from buying the best items in the game is being level locked with the highest level item being 20 (the game expects you to be around level 21 for the finale).

in these overworld areas you encounter npcs that have different dialogue based on what part of the game youre on, having little side stories like having a hacker friend who hates the big bad but ends up doing contracts for them to earn some money or a mafia member that is cold to you at first and then warms up to you and other things of that nature.

you are given the choice to reduce,increase, or turn off random battles which helps later on to prevent overleveling and if youre like me getting stuck on simple puzzles because you ran around not thinking.

there is also a more hidden option (read:in the options menu as opposed to the esc menu) that lets you instantly win any battle, however this requires you to still enter the battle which in my opinion makes it kind of useless as if your in a battle that you can one hit all the enemies (which would be the main reason i would use a feature like this: to avoid the fight entirely and just get the xp or whatever) the difference in time would be within 5 to 10 seconds.

there is in addition to both of these options, on death, you will be able to either return to title screen or respawn in the room entrance at the cost of 25% of your xp bar, so the game makes it very clear its suppose to be extremely easy and not at all a challenge that you have to pour hours into grinding, simply playing the game at normal or even reduced battle spawns will have you on pace as long as you arent dodging every fight which to me is a worthy trade off as i rather just not avoid any fights to be on level rather than grind some trash mobs just pad playtime.
combat is flashy animation wise but boring and repetitive with the same old boring physical vs magic, triangle of rock paper scissors with some enemies occasionally being a physical type being weak to magic. there are abilities called jack moves which are effectively ultimates.
after getting hit by an enemy for 5-10 turns depending on your equipped items gives you a board wipe effect for normal enemies and major damage to bosses you get 1 jack move per type of damage, 4 in total. you can skip a turn and defend which gives you a 3 turn defense bonus which stacks with the normal bonuses you can give to yourself, which dont fade away unless an enemy does something that specifically removes it so if you equip an item that boosts damage for every magic ability at the start of the battle you will probably just deal bonus damage forever as most enemies dont even debuff.

(spoilers)
the main story is kind of like cyberpunk 2077 boiled down oddly enough, a criminal and his partner get wrapped up in a battle with a giant corp that everyone hates, that want tech that makes you immortal except not really because all it does is create a copy of your memories as an ai at first and then later on at the end of the game they upgrade so it can upload your conscious to your computer all to save the ceos daughters life who ends up not wanting to kill you and instead fixing everything her mother did.

the characters have quirky ways of speaking in game with slang and dialect that doesnt seem to far fetched for the time period but are all technology related like calling things chrome instead of cool.

15 dollars for a 10ish hour experience isnt to bad in my eyes however the fact that story isnt amazing and neither is the combat made me put down the game a few times to go do something else like watch a youtube video from someone i like instead for about 30 minutes then come back to it or play it while the video is in the background, not the most gripping experience obviously but it is what it is.

not every game has to be a 50 hour epic magnum opus that you will talk about for eons and that is one of the better points of this game, if we had more shorter experiences like this one that didnt drag themselves out for too long with forced grinding or money farming or whatever the world would be a better place and games would be better, the fact that i completed it in 7 hours with 1 to 2 of them being afk means that it doesnt have to be perfect world with extremely intricate worldbuilding and backstory and lore and forcing the player to know about what happened in the war of 2007 despite it being 2102- none of that matters as i was only going to be there for a little bit.

i can really only recommend this game if you enjoy the pretty animations and the cyberpunk setting as it doesnt really have much else going on as i stated previously the mainstory and combat is weak but how the characters interact with each other and the personalities given to the npcs are slightly better but most people i reckon wont care and just rush through and ignore most of the dialogue. however if you are a fan of rpgmaker-esque games with short stories youd have a good chance of enjoying this.

43/100- wouldnt have bought the game if it didnt look they way that it did praise art designer they carried me through the game

very good game very difficult not combat wise but logically.

ok ig

its ok i guess

move fast shoot fast die fast spawn fast

its about as good as tripping on your shoelaces then falling through time, going to back to elemantary school and having to relive your whole life and that is my review on untunred