Just like the terrible two part Idol Magical Girl Chiru Chiru Michiru visual novel that was licensed by Sekai Project (I might review that which I wasted money on and I cannot believe all of the favorable reviews it got), the trailer for this game promises far more thrills and excitement than what the game actually delivers, and this game obviously was put together as quickly as possible with a very low budget. And Good Lord, this game feels like it took the entirety of one whole weekend to program and put together with how much little effort that was put into it.
The only decent thing is the graphics and models (sans Corona's chest jiggles), and the cutscene stills of the characters. However, the latter is lacking as the cutscenes only have characters in one pose, and even some of enemy designs are stupid, with Nova's first form looking like some stupid Pokémon rip-off. Corona herself also looks like a rip-off of both Cure Heart and Cure Miracle from both Doki Doki and Mahou Tsukai Precure, respectfully.
Gameplay wise, it's a poorly done musou (Dynasty Warriors style game) where the gameplay is repetitive, you can't run nor jump bringing back flashbacks of Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue for the Nintendo 64, all the backgrounds/settings, whilst nicely detailed and rendered, are just generic forest/castle backgrounds that eventually take place indoors and look the same, there's not much in terms of the game, you just run forward, shoot, occasionally reload and press a button to do an ultimate special attack or use other buttons to summon minions, and the controls respond well, but once you know how to do it, it all becomes way, way way too easy to where you don't even need the amulet special attack, once I easily killed a dragon boss whilst summoning one of four minions you can summon (for defense, long range attacks, healing and close up attacks, with the Zodiac signs of Aries, Taurus, Gemini and Cancer meaning nothing) and I didn't even notice I had killed it. Leveling up doesn't mean anything in the long run as I did not die once at all as if you spawn enough healing minions you don't have to worry at all, and currency in the form of jewels is easy to come by. While the amulet attacks are OK, the whole thing with combining staffs, getting new ones and discarding unwanted old ones makes it too easy and doesn't even matter as most of the staffs play similar to one another and are just different jewel skins.
Also, each stage is over very quickly, when you'd rather a stage to last somewhat longer, maybe go to actually different places or trek across lands/stages with all sorts of obstacles and puzzles, like say, in The Hobbit game from 2003 or the first three Harry Potter games (speaking of that franchise, there's even Venomous Tentaculai here, though none as challenging or intimidating as the ones in the first two games in that series)! Those games are definitely old now, but still superior. I mean c'mon, give us a challenge here!
Enemies just consist of slimes which you'd expect to just be first level enemies, not all throughout, along with generic wolves, bees, and other monster enemies, all just in different colors. Even the final boss, the second form of Nova, is too pathetic of a challenge, because it just summons the same cookie cutter enemies you've fought and shoots a pattern of heat-seeking red lights...which you can easily avoid.
One such annoyance even shows how bad the quality of this game is. In the second level inside the castle when mostly invisible reaper enemies appear, I ended up running through the level in a way similar to how the great Angry Video Game Nerd described the level of Dracula's Castle in Castlevania II: Simon's Quest as I thought there were no enemies, and after like 5 minutes of slowly walking, I hit a dead end as I was supposed to kill the enemies. Naturally I reset the level so I wouldn't have to stagger back, but when I repeated it and found the enemies, it just stopped when I killed them, so what's the point of having the long level where you travel all the way through if you just have to kill the enemies? It might as well just take place in one spot, and shows a waste of graphics.
There's not much in terms of voice acting, characters only saying one word and not reading out their dialogue, and even story wise, it's not very well written nor done, the characters and story all having the quality of an unfinished 2-3 episode anime OVA from the 1980's-1990's, none of the concepts of a Jewelmaster or the things with Machina and minions, world building/lore, and ideas here are fully developed to where it's interesting, Corona is a bland Mary Sue who always just seems to be happy and could easily join the Care Bears Family, the history of her mother and Arcturus Noah are as murky as swamp water at best, the story is rushed with no sense of any real accomplishment or purpose, and despite it opening the door to a sequel, I don't see that happening, like how most of those 2-3 episode OVAs ended. It all ends up being one of the most shallow games I've ever played.
It's also way too short, I beat it in round about 3 hours in just two days, whilst another Youtuber beat it in only 107 minutes, for a game that cost US$17-18, can you say "rip-off" or "highway robbery?" It's not worth that amount of money at all, and it overally it's equal to what AVGN (mentioning him again) said about Bubsy 3D, it feels unfinished, like it was barely started at all, and more like a demo or prototype, not an actual finished game that got sold. That whole excuse with the "Oh, we had a micro budget so we can't make the game deep or great" doesn't work either, and this shovelware would be at best $1 or might as well not even cost anything.
So all in all, if you like magical girls/anime and manga, RPGs and such, don't bother with this. This is the second Sekai Project licensed game that has disappointed me greatly. And since I found out they also licensed the overrated Nekopara series (with creepy lolicon fanservice), I'm avoiding any future games from this publisher.
But there is another great thing: the short length actually isn't that bad, because you can return the game to the Steam store on the same day you buy it ;)
