This review is relatively spoiler-free, in part because I always kind of space out in Steam games when it comes to taking screenshots, especially when I’m playing with a controller. But it turns out I did take some in the early game, so there you go.
My Standard One Paragraph Review
I think this is a cute RPG with some fun systems…once you figure them out. The UX is noticeably wonky, I’m guessing as a consequence of being ported from mobile originally. The story is solid, although it gets a bit disjointed in places, and some of the final plotlines feel rushed slash forced. As the friend who recommended it to me warned, a lot of the “difficulty” for the harder bosses is just a big HP bar – there’s not really much combat strategy, but that also means you can’t really go wrong with whatever build you go for. The game is at its best when the main character is just aggressively making friends with people, and luckily, that’s most of the game. If Pieberry doesn’t immediately grab you, then you’re gonna have a bad time. Looking at my playtime, it took me 66 hours to reach credits, and that’s with me streaming, so I would expect a fairly thorough playthru of this to be around 50 hours.
What I Didn’t Like
I think the biggest issue with me not wanting to play the game at length is visuals – besides some general flashy spell effects, every time you exit combat there’s a sort of jump cut that happens, which definitely was on my mind when I was thinking about whether or not I was up for Witchspring Wednesday on any given week. The camera can also get a bit stuck in places, but not any more than usual for a fixed third-person camera RPG game.
Quest objectives, including sidequest and craft material farming, were also a bit strange. I don’t mind having to keep track of stuff – I’m firmly in the “is it even an RPG if you didn’t make a spreadsheet for it” camp. But the game does sort of have a shopping list system, as well as a way to keep track of quest objectives…but this system is visual to a fault, relying on icons of mats instead of textual descriptions, and doesn’t interface well with the map system. Teleport points are labeled on the…teleport map(?) but other individual areas aren’t, and many of the more dungeon-y type areas have split paths, so it’s a lot to keep in your head. Even worse if you put the game down for a bit and then have to remember what you were doing.
One of the many caves. There’s a lot of caves. Including caves in the caves.
That being said, I did accomplish a good amount of mat farming for the various sidequests and crafting, so there’s that. You can end up fairly overpowered fairly quickly by just exploring and doing side content, so there wasn’t too much motivation for me to do some of the real intense grinds. The most involved thing I did was track down most(?) of the optional pets.
Gold can be exchanged for extra stats and not really anything else,
which took me most of the playthrough to realize, since I didn’t really need extra stats.
I played with English dialog and Japanese voice-acting, if only to have something to talk about on stream. I think the localization from the original Korean is perfectly fine, especially given the skeleton crew involved. Anyone who watched my stream might remember the extensive critique I gave throughout, but that’s because I’m an editor. There’s some definite wonkiness that is common from the direction…I guess that’s maybe industry speak, uh. When you translate from certain types of languages and orthographies into others, there’s a consistent Pattern of Problems. With Korean → English, one that’s easy to grasp is character limits, resulting in some awkward cutoffs in dialog boxes. Word order is another big one, as it will change the order of information in complex sentences. But yeah, for every wonky dialog box, there were several others that I thought were handled very well, and this is a text-heavy game, so.
Lastly, without spoiling the story overmuch, there’s some real compulsive heteronormativity that rears its head towards the end a la Anne of Green Gables. (I guess that is a bit of a spoiler, as you’ll know it when you see it).
Uh-huh
It’s even more bizarre in light of just how much is going on in the plot at that point, with a lot of side characters just suddenly dumping quite a bit of backstory in the Final Act…but also now there’s a romance subplot? Given the overall Girl Power slash Power of Friendship vibe up until that point, it just really…is a creative decision that got made. The best way I can describe it is it’s like someone rewrote the last couple chapters with their ship in mind, which is fine for a fanfic, but…
I’m also admittedly a bit salty cuz the one boy who was my type gets shipped off to fantasy Australia fairly early on
Oh, I said lastly, but because I’m too lazy to re-organize, and this is very post-script-y, there is actually one more thing I had trouble with: the Training mini-games.
Multiple problems surfaced here, but the main one is the games are…wonky. (How many times am I going to use the word wonky in this review. Should I find and replace some with janky?) Some require very precise inputs and timing, others don’t. Some have very clear telegraphs, others don’t. And on top of it all, my controller inputs weren’t correctly recognized, so I had to translate the button presses in my head. I even re-mapped the inputs in Steam (the game consistently swapped my X and Y buttons), but this still meant that in the mini-game, and only in the mini-game, my A and B buttons were also swapped. This is with a Nintendo Switch Pro Controller that, by all indications, was recognized normally by Steam and the game itself. There is an option to just autoplay these mini-games, but this deprives you of a chance at a bonus, and I wanted to actually play the mini-games! There’s ten of them! This is probably the most poorly executed game mechanic, and I am taking the autoplay option as an admission of guilt from the developer.
Other Gameplay Things
You do sort of level up in this RPG, but it’s more about getting stronger gear, crafting stronger spells, and brainwashing stronger pets. Pets are out and about in the overworld along with enemy mobs, and are indicated by a nameplate above their heads.
Get revenge on the mental warfare of the feline species by…
just letting them live in your house and feeding them treats like you do in the real world
The problem with the pet mechanic, is that you need to whittle their health down and then successfully cast a mind control spell on them, which itself does damage. Think similar to like, catching a Pocket Monster. If you accidentally KO the pet, you’ll typically need to reload an earlier save and try again. But unlike Pocket Monster, these are all one-shots. Well, I guess Pocket Monster has those too. But you get what I mean.
An optional pet that I don’t think I ever used, on account of its ability being increasing gold that you don’t need
This means if you get overpowered for any given area (which can happen very quickly), it’s very difficult to get the pet to the target HP threshold. I ended up using the Mind Control spell itself to do the chip damage, which, is that why it does chip damage? However, by the end of the game, my MAG stat was so high that I more or less got one cast before the prospective pet was dead. I do think I managed to succeed on all these, maybe in part because my MAG stat was so high? Who knows.
There’s not really any random encounters, which I liked. There’s also an attempt at Quality of Life called Quick Hunt that I didn’t really feel was very successful, but hey, they tried.
The main clunkiness to combat, that I really felt in the finale, is the fact you have to constantly summon and re-summon your pets at the beginning of combat. There’s no idea of like, set teams. And if you have a pet summoned as a mount in the overworld, that pet is default summoned in battle…sometimes.
The combat is also pretty repetitive at points, since as I said earlier, there’s not much strategy for any given boss besides “smack it as hard as you can”. This, if anything, underscores the clunkiness of having to resummon all my pets at the beginning of battles, and I found myself in the late game encounters just…not.
There’s also some light puzzling in some of the dungeons, but a lot of these boil down to “gotta go fast”. There’s so little puzzling in fact, that I got to the end of this first draft and then remembered I, a puzzle game streamer, should maybe mention that somewhere.
Wrap-Up, I Guess
To make a sort of critique sandwich, or whatever the kids call it these days, this game has a lot of Charm Points. Pieberry is very cute, the pets are very cute, and her interactions with her straightman sidekick Black Joe are consistently amusing.
Me with a doctorate explaining academic research to the laypeople
There’s a pretty solid cast of supporting characters, and while sometimes I got whiplash from how the game darts back and forth between some of their storylines, at least it kept things interesting. There are a lot of cutscenes at times, but I was prepared for a story-heavy RPG. I didn’t always really know what was going on, but that is kind of the point, mostly, so.
kelp 