Geo Mythica

I've finished up the first continent and have basically done all I realistically could at this point, so I feel like I have a good understanding of the gameplay loop. I have absolutely fallen in love with this. The story itself is a fun fairly modern sci-fi take on a globe spanning adventure and has a sort of upbeat "let's go on an adventure!" feel that I dig. I've enjoyed the characters and overall presentation thus far and certainly feel the incentive to keep plugging away at this. The way combat works is in real-time, but you can pause it to issue commands to your party members. You can "set it and forget it" and just have them all attack the enemy your fighting at once, or disperse to different enemies, or to wait for your input before doing anything. I like to have my team either in assist mode or waiting for my orders by default, the auto attack I only use if I'm rerunning an area to do a little grinding (though the way this game is structured I'd say you can probably get by without it or without much of it). Gio's analyze ability gives you a lot of useful information about individual enemies and even suggestions on strategies to use against them, it's helpful as a starting point, but you can definitely blend in a lot of your own strategies with it to make things easier. Something this game does that I feel is uncommon in the genre is lets you, no matter where you are, rearrange the skill points of your units however you want, so sometimes I'll make my characters skills super magic focused or support oriented and other times i'll just focus on simple things like damage. Being able to constantly rebuild your characters on the fly is a great touch I really enjoy. This combat system is excellent and one of the strongest points of the game IMO. There are a number of cat merchants spread throughout the world that you can trade the "monster dust" you get for items and whatever the local currency is. So a typical example of the gameplay loop is something like this: A) You find a new town or city and explore it. B) You discover the problems people have there and go off to the dungeon or wherever you need to. C) You fight and defeat a bunch of enemies, maybe a boss. D) You exchange with the merchant cat for local currency or items. E) Repeat the above Generally that's the loop, pretty classic RPG stuff, though from time-to-time their may be a cat merchant in a dungeon. For completionist the game is really helpful. The Atlas marks off everything you need to fully "complete" exploration of a city and there are at least two characters that reward you for doing this sort of thing from what I've played so far. Overall I think the gameplay loop is really fun. Graphically and musically I feel like this comes off as a high end NES game which I think is probably what the devs were going for. The soundtrack really is quite good, but I''m definitely here more for the story and gameplay. Ultimately I feel like, after the first 6 hours or so, this game is pacing to be one of my favorite classic style RPG's of all time. It's very impressive in many ways, particularly its robust combat system. Easy recommendation for anyone who likes the genre.