(12/04/26) i finished my first play-through of the main story-line today! it was very fun, considering i don't usually play "fighting" games (or any stressful games that require quick reflexes etc).
but let's start with the cons - the story was very basic and the writing quite wonky. if it were a new game i'd suspect some of the narrated text was AI generated, the way the sentences were put together. there are also quite disturbing depictions of torture and animal cruelty, it's quite surprising how affecting a few pixels can be. also themes of child sacrifice.
now for the good things - basically everything else! i liked the pixel art style, the music, the dungeon designs. and the game-play itself. there's the main story-line, there are a few side-quests to encourage replaying dungeons. i like the different ways/areas of leveling up - number go up in many ways! i like how you're encouraged but not really forced to play the various types of characters. each one contributes to all other characters' improvement at various thresholds, so it's tempting to use that to maximize the effectiveness of your faves. even the individual characters have enough skills in their skill tree that you can't really develop all of them in one play-through, so it has some replayability in that sense, too - trying out different builds.
overall it had a cool old school dungeon feel and i was surprised how much i enjoyed those finite chunks of game-play. i can just pop in and do a few easier dungeons, or spend 40 minutes on a bigger one, and that's that. it's easy to pick up and walk away at any point.
one more "downside" - my game glitched out pretty badly during the final fight. the screen cut off for quite a bit between stages, making it a bit difficult to understand what's happening when it came back on. the sound glitched out and remained glitched out. but i think that's more to do with my old switch and not being plugged in. granted the game itself is also pretty old, so i'm not sure what would be the best, optimized way to play it. i imagine if i'd lost that fight due to the technical issues i'd have been royally miffed.
