Fretless - The Wrath of Riffson

Nice game and Rob is a cool character, if only he was real

Amazing game A truly labor of love

Bare in mind this is a recommend vs not recommend, not necessarily if the game is good or not. I don't recommend this game simply because it frustrated me. Other reviewers will surely tell you this game's strengths, so let me instead focus on my complaints. I like the idea of a turn based rpg will realtime input based on rhythm, and with the theme of this game simply being 'music', you'd think it would fit better than it does. Battles have background music, but your attacks (and defends) do not necessarily line up to that rhythm. I'm not a trained musician, so to my casual ear it's as if there are (at least) two tracks. in order to hit your attacks/defends you need to ignore the background music and focus on the few beats of the 'attack' track (whether it be your attack or an enemy's). Though some moves don't have a beat you have to hit, these just succeed, for some reason. You do get a confirmation of a green flash around your character when executed properly, so I found myself just using visual cues instead of auditory, in a music themed game... I had numerous issues playing on my xbox controller. Typically it being the cursor dissapearing in menus (even the main menu!). Typically these dissapearances were rectified by backing out of the menu pressing 'B' and reopening, but the frequency of which this happened was annoying (everytime I opened the game, and maybe a quarter of the time I was using menus in game) The frequency of which I encountered glitches. Typically these were minor graphical things, like hitboxes of terrain background not aligning to sprite, 'ghost' enemies remaining after I had already defeated them in battle were the two ones I noticed a couple times in my playthrough. The particularily egregious one was the game locking up mid-cutscene in I believe the Tunedra area, getting the tennis ball dog. The game broke during the cutscene and everything stopped moving. I skipped cutscene after waiting a minute, and then I found myself unable to move my character, access menus, anything... had to reset the game. This game has been out for 360 days as of writing and the amount of bugs/issues definitely soured my experience On a comparable note to bugs, I locked myself out of a steam achievement because I left an area before grabbing an unlocked item. Upon returning to the area, the item is gone, but the triggers for spawning it are also gone (the game thinking I have it). The game only uses auto-save, so it's not like I can even re-load an earlier one. This particular item is in the final area of the game, and as someone who occasionally will go for 100%ing a game's achievements, this is extremely dissapointing. The final section is a forced stealth section. It's not fun. Enemies have a red grid representing their vision so you know what they can see and what they can't. HOWEVER, they can turn at 90 or 180 degrees instantly. if you get caught, you get sent back to either the beginning or midpoint of the section (the midpoint still being in a restricted area, making it feel like a band-aid solution, no reason for the player to end up there except for not having to do the first half again). How do you counteract the sometimes abrupt guard movements? By sitting and waiting, watching their movements, ensuring that they won't turn and spot you. Combat is non-optional here. Forced stealth sections with poor stealth mechanics are mid at best, having it be the interlude of the final few battles felt entirely out-of-place. It's not particularily difficult, just boring. I wanted to like Fretless - The Wrath of Riffson, and I still do (a little). but it's hard to recommend when there's so many scratches on my rose-tinted glasses.