I would leave my thoughts of this game as Netural if I could but since I can't, it would be unfair to anyone else interested in this game for me to leave this review as a positive one with caveats.
If you're anything like me you see this game and immediately think that you're looking at an RPGMaker project that is a turn-based Roguelike with classes, something like a modern Final Fantasy 5 and you'd be right but only to a point. This game does a good job skinwalking the concept on the surface but then absolutely goes out of its' way to make sure that none of the choices in design philosophy, player agency, and overall fun are there the further you push into the experience.
This obviously isn't an entirely negative experience and there is some fun to be had as the game is by far strongest at the beginning when you're starting out. The enemy artwork is decent, the music ranges from pretty good to serviceable, and the story is kind of there but not too boring nor too in your face. Learning enemy weaknesses and how to approach different biomes is different from the normal turn-based game on Steam which provides some good variety, but unfortunately, the fun doesn't last as you're inevitably going to be pushing against wall after wall with strongly diminishing returns to the "ah-ha!" factor the farther you progress.
Let's talk about some of the negatives:
- Difficulty jumps. As you move from biome to biome to progress, you would expect a jump in difficulty, but the farther you go there is less of a jump in difficulty and more of a cliff of difficulty that you need to climb. Get to a new area and you don't immediately know what a new enemy can do or what their weaknesses are? Sucks for you, time to get your ass beat with little to no recourse (since you didn't plan for what you couldn't possibly know) and then restart from the beginning.
Well that's a knowledge check, right? Sure, you can learn from that and attempt to anticipate...just to get funneled into a different biome at that point in the game instead and then run into an enemy that is an elite, has bonus stats, and goes multiple rounds per turn and just so happens to cast an AOE phys/magic attack that one-shots 2 or 3 of your party members on its first turn and then immediately follows up with the same attack to kill the remainder of your party. This is not a knowledge check and happens far more often than it should.
Runs are not short, either. This can happen an hour or two into every run you get into based upon what team you run and what biomes you find and every single time you're going back and manally creating a party from square one, all with the grating experience of buying initial equipment and manually assigning unlocked Active/Passive ability to each character.
This is just one of many examples, however. I could talk at length to having strong runs with good equipment where one or two unfortunately encountered enemies invalidate the strongest aspect of my main damage dealer and either end a run outright or cause one fight to stretch excruciatingly long but I think my point is more or less made. Simply put - there is too much that the game expects you to know without telling you or giving you any resources to understand immediately, especially mid-run and quickly at a glance without requiring you to pull up external resources or scour notes you took yourself after failing before.
- Class Unlocks/Meta Progression. JRoguePG has both class unlocks and meta-progession unlocks and while I initially liked both I eventually learned to hate both of them for different reasons.
Class Unlocks initially start pretty simply and the game does a good job telling you what you have to do to unlock classes initially. Where does this go wrong, you may ask? Class unlocks unfortunately become more involved with much more specific unlock requirements (specific abilities used x times in multiple battles, beating later biomes with specific classes, etc) and once you start a run you'd better have a guide pulled up to remember exactly what you have to do as they get more complicated because otherwise you can't see class unlock requirements again until before you start another run from scratch.
What about meta-progression? Well, starting out the unlocks are very slow to come by and may not seem to add up to much. Pushing through the game will give you more and more materials to unlock permanent bonuses like more chests, better items from chests, start with more consumables, and items that will let you choose for your next battle to be harder but give you an additional character level after winning it. As time goes on you start to see a major issue issue, that being that the majority of these unlocks are going to be mandatory to not have a miserable experience in later biomes.
Then the reality sets in - the grind for unlocks is a massive time sink and then right when you feel like you've had enough runs where you've saved enough materials for the important bits, the game throws an second unlock shop with even more expensive unlocks and no better way to achieve that grind. JRoguePG does not respect your time as a player.
So I've talked about both systems, and what do both of these have in common? As a normal player interested in playing this game, BOTH of the systems are absolutely mandatory to progress - which brings me to:
- You, as a player, are funneled to play certain party comps/playstyles.
If you want to play a fun game which sounds like it might be something like a Rogue-lite Final Fantasy 5 where you can pick your favorite team comp and have multiple ways to approach almost any scenario the game throws at you then hit the back button and find another game to play. This is not it.
The deeper you go into completion the more you realize that you are specifically going to be funneled into playing with certain party comps, most of which are going to necessitate going through numerous excruciatingly boring class unlock paths and saving enough meta-currency to make sure that each run provides your party with enough levels, equipment, and gold to fun what you weren't lucky enough to have drop for you during the run (if the right equipment even shows up at the special vendor).
Don't have the classes that can provide a barrier that reduces damage to your part by an absurd amount every turn or a DPS class that doesn't require ramp-up to function? Sounds like it's time for you to start from the beginning and maybe next time you'll be smart enough to spend another 10 - 15 hours going through the same places with the same enemies for the privilege to unlock more classes that, let's be honest, don't require you use your brain to overcome the previously mentioned mechanics and challenges, they instead just let you skip most of the challenge entirely.
But you may think to yourself - surely it can't be all that bad, right? Well, when you can go into the game discussions right now and see the dev say that (to paraphrase) "Half of the game is learning it" but bring up an example of literally one other person outside of themselves who "[...]knows the game well" and "[...]can beat it in just 3-4 runs" it's pretty obvious from this explanation that this is a design philosophy that misses the forest from the trees. Most players aren't going to want to learn every single nuance of every single enemy and fight composition for each biome and then commit all that to memory just to try and make it to the end of the game.
In summary: Contrary to this game skinwalking as something that should appeal to a very broad audience considering the games and concepts it borrows from, the more you look slightly beneath the surface while playing JRoguePG, the more you begin to realize that the overall package appeals to nearly no one. Chances are you aren't going to be the person that it will resonate with past the 2-hour refund window and I strongly advise you to go somewhere else to scratch your class-based RPG itch.
