So Kalir and turtle wouldn't stop talking about this and I ended up receiving it as a gift in a round about fashion, I'm playing my first Mario rpg since Legend of the Seven Stars. It's pretty good? It's pretty good!
You play as a team of bugs: Kabbu the knightly beetle, Vi the sarcastic bee with an axe to grind against her home town, and Leif the mysterious magical moth, as they form a new adventuring party and set forth to retrieve various artifacts on the order of the relatively newly crowned heir to the Ant Kingdom throne Queen Elizant II in order to find a way to obtain the Everlasting Sapling, a relic of supposedly immense power her mother the First was searching for.
It's a really charming and fun game so far; very much in what I understand the to be the vein of some old games featuring some kind of paper plumber? You have a variety of overworld abilites that you use to solve traversal puzzles and get first hits in on enemies, where you then go into combat with small numbers and something called timed hits, with a variety of different input commands for your abilites, and different badges that confer special abilites to the party or individual team members.
But what really makes it special is the sheer charm and personality of the characters and world. There are a ton of different characters with great personalities and motivations no matter how minor, all with unique art! There's drama and intrigue and comedy, and the setting of the world isn't taken for granted, there is what seems to be a fairly deep history and setting to the backstory of the world that ties in to the events of the present story, it doesn't just take the quirkiness of it's concept of a world of bug sized bugs in relation to the idea of humans for granted. But it also doesn't shove a ton of deeplore at you unless you want it, it's kinda like what if Hollow Knight also had a solid rpg story laid on top of it...sorry JBear.
I've been playing on the hard mode the game has via a badge unlocked from the beginning and it's been pretty tough! Not overly so but I've left every major boss fight or dungeon with an empty inventory because it pushed me to the edge but not been impossible; luckily the game has a crafting system in the form of cooking where you can either just refine basic ingredients into better versions or combine two specific items into a food with potentially very interesting properties like MP regen over 3 turns, all with no charge for the cooking itself. The only downside is you do have to spend time replenishing your stock every so often by clicking through menus and watching the cooking animations to not waste your money on weaker consumables.
Ultimately I have zero fondness for the series the game is clearly based on, because I've never played it weirdly enough, and I'm having a great time despite a few minor gripes here and there, I really think it's worth checking out either way, and I know there's some other folks here who can chime in on it as well.
You play as a team of bugs: Kabbu the knightly beetle, Vi the sarcastic bee with an axe to grind against her home town, and Leif the mysterious magical moth, as they form a new adventuring party and set forth to retrieve various artifacts on the order of the relatively newly crowned heir to the Ant Kingdom throne Queen Elizant II in order to find a way to obtain the Everlasting Sapling, a relic of supposedly immense power her mother the First was searching for.
It's a really charming and fun game so far; very much in what I understand the to be the vein of some old games featuring some kind of paper plumber? You have a variety of overworld abilites that you use to solve traversal puzzles and get first hits in on enemies, where you then go into combat with small numbers and something called timed hits, with a variety of different input commands for your abilites, and different badges that confer special abilites to the party or individual team members.
But what really makes it special is the sheer charm and personality of the characters and world. There are a ton of different characters with great personalities and motivations no matter how minor, all with unique art! There's drama and intrigue and comedy, and the setting of the world isn't taken for granted, there is what seems to be a fairly deep history and setting to the backstory of the world that ties in to the events of the present story, it doesn't just take the quirkiness of it's concept of a world of bug sized bugs in relation to the idea of humans for granted. But it also doesn't shove a ton of deeplore at you unless you want it, it's kinda like what if Hollow Knight also had a solid rpg story laid on top of it...sorry JBear.
I've been playing on the hard mode the game has via a badge unlocked from the beginning and it's been pretty tough! Not overly so but I've left every major boss fight or dungeon with an empty inventory because it pushed me to the edge but not been impossible; luckily the game has a crafting system in the form of cooking where you can either just refine basic ingredients into better versions or combine two specific items into a food with potentially very interesting properties like MP regen over 3 turns, all with no charge for the cooking itself. The only downside is you do have to spend time replenishing your stock every so often by clicking through menus and watching the cooking animations to not waste your money on weaker consumables.
Ultimately I have zero fondness for the series the game is clearly based on, because I've never played it weirdly enough, and I'm having a great time despite a few minor gripes here and there, I really think it's worth checking out either way, and I know there's some other folks here who can chime in on it as well.
