Familia

Note that this is just a review for Act 1. I will probably have to edit it when Act 2 comes out. [h1]A Testbed for Big Numbers[/h1] [h2]Story[/h2] The main story thus far is very simple and short, since it mainly consists of an evil empire whose motives we still don't really understand. Additionally, since this is just the first act, there's a lot of unresolved plot points, like Lono recovering his memory and Sero's backstory. Whatever dialogue is there is decently written, and I like the interactions between Poki and Koko during the tutorial. I also find it interesting that the family is accepting of Lono's amnesia, though I wish there was a segment where they try to help him get his memories back by visiting various Kalbi locations. Maybe this will be saved for Act 2 or when the war dies down? Also, are we going to get any character development for Bedge and Wicks, or are they just there for the headcount? [h2]Gameplay[/h2] The gameplay is extremely basic, at least by the standards of RPG Maker games that I play. Every character has a class that determines what kinds of skills they learn. The problem is that the majority of characters are either ninjas or monks, giving them all extremely similar movesets. They might have a few skills or passive abilities to set them apart, but the redundancy is still there. The only real exceptions so far are Sero (a guest character sage), Shogun (mighty glacier who has a random number of hits per normal attack), and Muffins (glass cannon berserker). For offensive skills, the monks get the majority of the good ones, since they have powerful defense ignoring attacks and decent AOEs. They overshadow the ninjas in almost every way, though ninjas have the slight advantage of being able to immediately use item-based skills instead of waiting for their Focus to build up. Shogun and Muffins have powerful normal attacks, but they don't ignore defense, so they'll struggle against enemies with high defensive stats. The game's support skills are very lacking IMO. Keeria and Koko have group healing skills, but they don't always scale well as characters gain levels. The only way to increase their healing output is to increase their magic-based stats, but it can be hard to do so without gaining their Master Class at level 50. The worst part is that there are barely any real buff/debuff options available to the player. At best, the ninjas can equip a weapon that lets them cast a counterattack buff and Muffins has a random chance to inflict poison. That means your options against statistically stronger foes feels a lot more limited. If you ever grind enough to reach level 50, you'll unlock a character's Master Class, which allows them to go to the reach and turn any new levels in their Master Class into stat points that they can manually allocate. This allows characters to grow infinitely and in whatever direction the player wants. Unfortunately, there is no shared EXP, so it can be tedious to get everyone strong enough for the endgame. The game's balance for a vanilla story run is fair and grinding shouldn't be necessary other than for some of the early optional bosses. However, there are some bonus bosses that require so much grinding that it feels like they were meant to be postponed until after Act 2 releases. One of them is at the freaking stat cap, requiring me to get lucky with both the counterattack buff and Muffin's poison skill to win. There's also achievements for the Reach, which randomly generates dungeons where you can set the difficulty to be anywhere from story mode tier to ridiculously inflated enemy stats. In general, this game takes a very bizarre approach to optional content. On one hand, the game seems to be going for episodic releases. On the other hand, the game tries to implement endgame worthy content, NG+, and statistically ridiculous bosses in what is supposed to be the first episode, even though such things are usually better reserved for the final episode so that the player doesn't become too OP for later acts. This game is basically trying to have things both ways, and it just doesn't feel right IMO. Finally, one thing I hope to see in Act 2 is additional tiers of healing items, specifically percentage based heals. Right now, normal healing items other than the revive one heal by flat amounts, which doesn't scale well to the high level combat. It would also be nice to get a better variety of ninja tools so that the ninjas can stand out more compared to their monk counterparts. [h2]Verdict[/h2] If you're just going for the main story, it's serviceable as a first episode due to the character interactions. However, the optional content is basically a big number grind that feels more appropriate as final episode content rather than first episode content. Additionally, the player character movesets feel very limited, making it hard for Familia to stand out compared to other RPG Maker games. 7/10