Get In The Car, Loser! is waiting for you to get in the car!

[Fyonn]

This game by Christine Love was released as hell! It's a roadtrip JRPG about a disaster lesbian and her friends trying to stop the resurrection of the Machine Devil. Part visual novel, part Valkyrie Profile-with-a-stagger gauge. Oh yeah, it's free and finished unlike a certain other indie JRPG. It's so finished it has a day-one DLC beach episode that costs like $9. I haven't played it yet, don't have anything to say about it really, but I didn't want this game to get lost in recent releases.

 

[YangusKhan]

So I played through the tutorial tonight. The gameplay is very much a love letter to FFXIII, with a dash of combo systems from stuff like Valkyrie Profile.

The writing is... fine. I've never played her other games before, so I'm not exactly the target audience for this I don't think. But I also have some idiosyncratic opinions about indie RPGs that are pastiches of RPGs, and so far this is straddling the line of what I find funny vs eye-rolling, but also it was just the tutorial part so I imagine the writing is kind of front-loaded with that stuff.

 

[FelixSH]

Yeah, I'll play it as soon as I'm done with Deltarune. Considering that I loved all her previous games (except for the last one, which just wasn't for me, due to the topic), I expect to really enjoy this.

 

[Fyonn]

I've now played through the first boss.
This game kicks ass. The writing is good, the characters are good, the combat seems really straight-forward and basic as the game slowly lowers you into "actually you best not be fucking around or you will find out" territory. Very excited about the new options available with a full party, and absolutely loving how it refines FFXIII's combat into something with more choice, more control in-the-moment, and far faster. Really big fan of how healing magic only grants temporary HP, it's very clever way to balance an MP-less combat system and solidifies healing as a preventative measure only, while also making it absolutely vital to long-term success.

The metaphor on display here feels a little on the nose, but honestly it's nice to have a game that tackles these themes.

 

[Fyonn]

PSA since it came up elsewhere that the game never explicitly tells you this: characters increase in rank when they are equipped with a full set of + trinkets. When your whole party is equipped with + trinkets, you are allowed to buy the next rank of items from the shops. The maximum item rank available is affected by plot progression as well, so the game absolutely expects you to max out your character ranks before each boss fight.

 

[SabreCat]

The negative reviews showing up mostly complain about there being too many/too repetitive trash encounters and that the combats keep interrupting the flow of the conversation. Not been a problem in your experience?

 

[Fyonn]

Short answer: No, but it's definitely not going to hit that way for everyone.

Long answer:
Combat is quick enough that it has yet to be an actual problem for me, but I could see that being different for someone who doesn't enjoy the puzzle the combat presents. So far I have been delighted by interrupting the conversation at every available opportunity, even when it doesn't make any sense whatsoever. On occasion the start of a battle has even had incredible comedic timing for me. I think the context that the game doesn't have traditional navigation outside of rest stops is important here; combat interrupting conversations is the equivalent to combat interrupting dungeon or map exploration in a traditional JRPG. It's also possible to not be in the same lane as the nearest encounter - you always know how many kilometers/dialogue boxes each of the next things in each lane is away from you and what that thing is whether it's 2 rank I enemies or 1 rank IV enemy or a gas station. You can't avoid encounters forever though, because some do take up all three lanes. Not to mention skipping out on fights might make the party's rank lag behind the enemies if you're playing on Normal. Even when I made a beeline for ranking up my party, the enemies kept pace pretty well, but there may be some kind of enemy scaling accomplishing that. The game also has multiple difficulty levels you can swap between at any point: Story, Casual, and Normal, with the addition of the Devil Clock adding extra challenges to fights if you opt into them on a per-fight basis after the first boss. So at the very least, it should be possible to make fights completely trivial if you're not interested in that part of the game.

Here's an example of how the game shows what's coming up next and also what rest stops look like because I've been screenshotting this game every five seconds and have a ton of them:

Here's one that features the dialogue choice system but also the first boss so I'm putting it behind a spoiler:

Spoiler: First boss dialogue choice

For the record, yes, Flustered and Rowdy Sam are always horny. The rest are only frequently horny.
Tired: tops, bottoms, and switches
Wired: Rowdy and/or Flustered

Oh! On that note! If you're not at least low-key horny, maybe this game isn't for you? The main character is wearing what amounts to like, one piece of fabric, and one of the party members in your final crew is never not in bondage gear. Not like "ha ha ha this fantasy armor is more like bondage gear than armor." Literally a collar and leather straps with those ring bindings - you know the ones. I mean I assume you know the ones.

 

[Fyonn]

I've been very loud about this game, and everywhere I've posted about it, I'm also posting a content warning (which means some of you might be seeing this warning two or even three different times), because there is not one in game for any of this (it has since been pointed out to me that there is a content warning on the store page):

GITCL has gotten extremely honest and real in a deeply personal way; the Act 2 boss and Act 3 feature deadnaming, misgendering, gaslighting, guilt over surviving abuse, stalking, imposter syndrome wrt gender, sexuality, and queerness, and a painfully real depiction of an anxiety attack. If you are not in a good space mentally at the moment, you should not play this game until you are.

 

[FelixSH]

Played through what the game seems to consider a tutorial, still before the first boss, totally love it. The atmosphere is beautiful, I love the artstyle, the music and that this is basically a road trip during summer. Also, without really knowing anything, the setting kind-of seems dystopian (the holy order, or whatever it's name is, seems dubious) and everything seems to fall into chaos, or something (this isn't much of a spoiler, you learn this basically at the start), and we are still in a super chill mood. Also, I haven't enjoyed music this much since The World Ends With You - lyrics really make a giant difference for me, and it reminds me of the pop punk (I think, I don't get music genres) that I listened to in 2010, during my first summer semester at university.

The systems still confuse me - I just use up whatever to upgrade my stuff, no idea what anything really does. And I'm just slowly getting the hang of how battles work, and I'm a bit scared that I might learn to slow, maybe? No big deal at the moment, we'll see how it develops.

Also, I think the very start is a bit misleading - while the writing has bascally the same mood afterwards, there isn't nearly as much, uh, terminology afterwards. It's a bit much for the very first scene.

In short, great game, love it, reminds me of summer, which is perfect now that summer has ended. Feels good, to play something from Christine Love again.

 

[Fyonn]

The systems still confuse me - I just use up whatever to upgrade my stuff, no idea what anything really does. And I'm just slowly getting the hang of how battles work, and I'm a bit scared that I might learn to slow, maybe? No big deal at the moment, we'll see how it develops.

I feel like the game does a bad job explaining itself, and kind of expects you to import knowledge of the combat system from another game that a large number of people did not like. The basis is FFXIII's combat system: use Ravage-type abilities to build enemy stagger gauge, which, when full, multiples the damage they take from Attack and Destruction-type abilities and serves as a state-change for some enemy types. Different enemy types require different amounts of stagger gauge to actually stagger, and even once staggered, Ravage-type abilities can push the damage multiplier higher.

I think the game is really all about being confused by and then figuring out how to use the current rank of items in combat. While abilities do repeat across different ranks, things other than Attack and Ravage usually don't repeat across consecutive ranks after Act I, so if you don't want to be taking extra damage and dealing reduced damage, you really have to make whatever stuff is in the highest rank you have access to work.

 

[Sprite]

I've been very loud about this game, and everywhere I've posted about it, I'm also posting a content warning (which means some of you might be seeing this warning two or even three different times), because there is not one in game for any of this (it has since been pointed out to me that there is a content warning on the store page):

GITCL has gotten extremely honest and real in a deeply personal way; the Act 2 boss and Act 3 feature deadnaming, misgendering, gaslighting, guilt over surviving abuse, stalking, imposter syndrome wrt gender, sexuality, and queerness, and a painfully real depiction of an anxiety attack. If you are not in a good space mentally at the moment, you should not play this game until you are.

Yeah, emotional abuse is the Christine Love brand. The one-two punch of Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus is one of the cruelest gaming experiences I've ever had. Hate Plus in particular made me furious.

I mean all that as a compliment, mind. When you're in the right headspace Love's games are very cathartic. She's a brilliant designer. But she is not your friend.

 

[gorha]

I started playing this intending to just go through the tutorial and see what it was like, and ended up playing for like 5 hours and smiling the whole time. It's pretty great. I wasn't quite sold on the art style or writing style from screenshots, but they both fit the game well. The characters have been fairly straightforward so far (I'm a bit into act 2), but they play off each other really well and the whole party is extremely endearing. The combat's great. I especially like the take on paradigm shifting: you have to cycle through ability sets in a fixed order and cycling back to the beginning obligates you to use the legendary sword, which deals a ton of stagger but no damage, and puts all your abilities on a longer than normal cooldown. At first I was just cycling as fast as possible, but now I'm seeing more value in sticking with one set for a while, especially if the alternative is using the sword on something that's almost dead.

The negative reviews showing up mostly complain about there being too many/too repetitive trash encounters and that the combats keep interrupting the flow of the conversation. Not been a problem in your experience?

Outside of a minor but annoying bug, this is the only thing I don't love. There are a lot of opportunities to fight and relatively few enemy types. Most of them are skippable, but there's no way to backtrack if you ever feel the need to grind before a required fight, so I've been continuing to fight nearly every possible battle even after fully upgrading my stuff and figuring out a good approach to all the enemies in each area, just in case... there's a sudden difficulty spike right after a new tier of items becomes available, I guess? Gotta keep getting money so I can buy them right away? I was able to jump up two ranks at the start of act 2, and have been finishing most fights with no loss of HP since then, but there's also been almost no opportunity to rest since then, so maybe that's just the way this part of the game is balanced. The difficulty has been fairly low so far, but the penalty for being even one rank below the enemies is dealing half damage and taking double, so falling behind the curve would be pretty bad. All the individual fights have been fast and fun enough that I don't mind doing a lot of them, and it seems like the game isn't going to be too long, so I don't think I'll get tired of them before the end. But I can see how it would turn some people off. It's kind of weird that battles interrupt dialogue, but there's a log, so it's easy to refresh your memory of what the conversation was about. Incidentally: more RPGs should have a log. I guess it's a feature you get when a visual novel writer makes an RPG.

Oh, and there is that bug: if a battle ends while you're picking a target for a support ability, the target selection window stays open until you return to the road, and can cover up text boxes. I missed a bit of the tutorial text in one of the early battles and a bit of dialogue after the act 1 boss because of this.

 

[Fyonn]

Yeah, emotional abuse is the Christine Love brand. The one-two punch of Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus is one of the cruelest gaming experiences I've ever had. Hate Plus in particular made me furious.

I haven't played Christine Love's other games and I have not yet finished the game, but I wouldn't call this game cruel, but rather honest about the ways shit is messy and complicated and fucking sucks sometimes.

 

[FelixSH]

I feel like the game does a bad job explaining itself, and kind of expects you to import knowledge of the combat system from another game that a large number of people did not like. The basis is FFXIII's combat system: use Ravage-type abilities to build enemy stagger gauge, which, when full, multiples the damage they take from Attack and Destruction-type abilities and serves as a state-change for some enemy types. Different enemy types require different amounts of stagger gauge to actually stagger, and even once staggered, Ravage-type abilities can push the damage multiplier higher.

I think the game is really all about being confused by and then figuring out how to use the current rank of items in combat. While abilities do repeat across different ranks, things other than Attack and Ravage usually don't repeat across consecutive ranks after Act I, so if you don't want to be taking extra damage and dealing reduced damage, you really have to make whatever stuff is in the highest rank you have access to work.

I did really enjoy FF XIII, but it's a few years since I played it, and at the start, I was just overwhelmed with these new abilities, and everything going so fast in battle. That's mainly the problem, I don't have time to think in combat, because everything is so hectic. In FF XIII, they took half the game to slowly ease you into the battle system, so when you finally got the ability to choose your party and have everything open to you, you knew how to deal with everything, and use all your abilities. Here, you are just thrown in. Which makes it even harder to actually try out your new abilities, and see what they do. Experimenting is really hard for me here.

I just have a hard time with fast-paced combat. See also FF X-2, which I had to try four times before it worked, because the battle system, great as it is, was just too fast for me. And the same seems to be happening here. I just wished I could turn the speed down, at least a bit. We'll see how it works out. If I can't get it to work, I'll just turn down the difficulty, no big deal.

 

[FelixSH]

Well, made it to the end of chapter 1, I stopped before entering the diner. At this point, I only have one gripe, and that's the lack of different monsters. Dunno, it's fine, the battles are fun, but they do repeat a bit often. Maybe I'm not supposed to fight everything? I felt a bit overpowered at the end, especially against the boss, who couldn't really hurt me.

Everything aside from that is great, though. Fun dialogue, well written characters, great artstyle, and I enjoy the social commentary. Yeah, it's not subtle, I don't care.

Also, found out how to activate Wait-mode, so that battles would stop while I chose a target for healing. That definitely helped.

 

[Fyonn]

For folks that are finding the regular encounters tedious, I would recommend doing the DLC ASAP. You get a new sword for Grace in it, Zantetsuken, that allows you to instantly kill one enemy per fight. Useless for bosses, but tears through regular fights. There are some request battles that I would have loved to have this thing for.

 

[Fyonn]

Beat the game. It's incredible. Fucking loved it. My favorite JRPG of 2021. Ya'll don't know shit about how little subtlety it has yet. Played the whole game with the Devil Clock on, and made a build so immaculate for survival and offense that I got a 333 hit combo on the Machine Devil and did not die even once.

 

[FelixSH]

Congrats. I just played a bit of chapter 2, and realized that there are now elemental affinities, which the game might have mentioned, but it's fine. I slowly understand how the system works, and get better at it, even if with "slow" I might mean "very, very slow". Don't want to skip battles, considering how many items I already need to upgrade stuff. But I do get the hang of equipping things.
I tried the Devil Clock for one battle, but considering that hte difficulty just increased (less stops for praying), I'm not sure how much I will use it.

Oh, there was some equipment like the Rusted Mirror and Burnt Pan, which give Half Attack, and some elemental affinity, I guess? Or what? What do these things do?

Also, if you enjoyed this game, maybe try more of Christine Loves games. I mean, even with all the battles, this here is already at least half a Visual Novel. Especially Analogue and Hate Plus are excellent, even if they really only (well, mainly) consist of reading data logs. But if you enjoyed the writing in this game, I would be surprised if you didn't like these too.

Yeah, emotional abuse is the Christine Love brand. The one-two punch of Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus is one of the cruelest gaming experiences I've ever had. Hate Plus in particular made me furious.

I mean all that as a compliment, mind. When you're in the right headspace Love's games are very cathartic. She's a brilliant designer. But she is not your friend.

I wouldn't use the word cruel, but I know what you mean. She is just deeply honest, in a very direct and brutal way. But yeah, good lord, Hate Plus is so deeply grim, and both games have absolutely horrifying stuff happen in them.

 

[Fyonn]

Half-Attack, much like Half-Life, is half as effective and has half as long a cooldown. Act 2 Half-Attack is the first instance of passive abilities attached to trinkets - [element] Add adds that elemental property to all of that character's actions, which can be tremendously dangerous, since hitting an enemy with its element heals it. I think you'll also see Fast and Auto-Heal as passives before too long.

When equipping trinkets, hit right shoulder / bumper / r1 to go to the ability description screen which is really good at breaking down what everything does. Some stuff like Rust, Smite, Fixed Point, etc are going to be very hard to figure out just by trial and error. There were several times where I thought I knew what something did and then I had to reread it after using it to actually figure it out. The DLC gear in particular tends towards being very effective in exchange for being very technical or situational.

PS the start of Act 2 is very rude to you on purpose
the pay off is worth it

EDIT: For people who might still be on the fence, or are curious about the game's themes but don't have time to actually play it, I wrote a blog post about the game. It does have spoilers, so if that matters to you, you should definitely go play the game first so you, too, can holler about it from the top of buildings.

 

[FelixSH]

Yeah, the pay off was pretty fun. Great dialogue, but that's a given.

Thanks for the explanation, I just skipped over the details of a weapon, going straight for the upgrading every time. Dunno, this game makes me rush stuff when I'm not reading dialogue, I guess due to it's fast pace in all other aspects?

Also, beat the DLC, and yeah the reward is great. It was really fun (except for the encounter rate, which might be the worst I have ever experienced, and I played Breath of Fire II twice), but damn, that boss fight took FOREVER. I guess I really need to take more care of staggering, and stuff like that. But I'm growing into the battle system, and start to get its nuances, slowly but steadily. Or, let's say, I can work out how to equip myself better, if I get into trouble.

 

[Fyonn]

When I did that boss fight I was rank IX / X depending on character, and it's still an absolute slog. I ultimately was only able to win thanks to a late-game inventory item, A Knife. Otherwise it would have been an eternal stalemate.

 

[SabreCat]

Picked up the DLC with some birthday money. Similar to Felix, I'll queue this up for when I've finished Deltarune chapter 2!

 

[FelixSH]

Damn, I think I need to stop playing this for some time. I already took a break for two days, but it didn't seem to help.

It's not anything in the game, but, and maybe that's my PC in general, I get technical problems while playing. Sometimes the game would just get stuck, one time I got a Blue Screen, and my PC didn't recognize my mouse and my keyboard for a few horrfiying minutes, and just now my whole PC got stuck with this awful, mechanical noise that wouldn't stop, until I forced a reset. No idea why, until I downloaded the DLC, it worked flawlessly. But now, the best thing to expect is that the game gets stuck after a few minutes.

I would love to continue, but I start to get scared for my PC. My laptop, years ago, started to get really slow, because it got stuck while doing some switching between full screen and window mode of an emulator. It still works, but takes forever for everything. Not gonna risk it here. I mean, I hope it's just the game, and not the whole machine.

 

[gorha]

I finished the game tonight. Act 3 was quite a difficulty spike, both in terms of enemies getting a lot tougher and the story getting harder to take. It took a few days to get through it, but once I did, I played through act 4 and the DLC pretty quickly. The rank IX and DLC items were powerful enough to let me breeze through the late game; I didn't even need to use Tank abilities anymore because it was quicker to go all offense with the passive on Sam that heals everyone whenever she uses a Ravage attack. The DLC sword did a lot of work, too.

Anyway, it's a rare game that can make a deez nuts joke not five minutes before the final boss and still give that fight its proper gravitas. Loved it.

 

[Beowulf]

I'm really torn about this game. I'm most of the way through Chapter 2, and I love the characters and the writing...but I hate pretty much all of the mechanics. The encounter rate is too high; the battle system is FF13 but doesn't work as well; the equipment-based, capped leveling is unpleasant. I want to see where the plot goes but I'm not actually enjoying playing the game.

 

[Beowulf]

Well, I made it through, and the emotional payoff was totally worth it, but I'm not going to buy the DLC. I managed the game systems, but I never really enjoyed the battles. (And always felt like there was something in the mechanics I was missing.) And yeah, I think this is the best representation of an anxiety attack I've ever seen in a video game.