At the core it's a fun game. If you're a Byond rat from back in the day, you would be right at home here - I'm sure it started there. It's improving and upgrading many of it's fundamentals over time in a good way - I at least can feel the devs are committed to improving the game. If you enjoy Naruto as an IP, you like pixel art graphics, and action but tactical paced combat, you should have fun here. The visuals and music do a good job carrying immersion. For this I will lean the review positive - the game asked me to write one at level 20, and I highly doubt the real meat of the game experience has happened yet, so unless something drastically changes for the worse, I assume it should be generally uphill from here. Now that I've gotten what I feel are reasonable positives for anyone interested in trying it out to the level I am at, I will speak on my criticisms.
Crafting and gathering is horribly paced, and the UI for it is anti-player slop. You are not allowed to click on things you cannot craft yet to see what materials they require or what to expect/plan for ahead. Because it is not a super popular game, you cannot easily find a third party resource to work around that. You can craft ingots for example, but only if you look up the crafting menu hidden in your inventory, because for some reason, it will not show up on a crafting table as an available recipe. Meanwhile, recipes that require a crafting table WILL show up when you open your inventory based crafting, except you cannot select those items because they require a crafting table. Then, when you DO access a crafting table, only THEN will it say you STILL cannot view the item because only at a crafting table does it tell you crafting rank requirement to select it.
Can you see how that is 1) ass, and 2) unintuitive and anti-player? You are already asking me to repeatedly grind a menial task, why are you griefing me with the UI to even properly plan/get involved with the mechanics YOU laid out for me to grind? Also, the experience amount required to rank up any crafting is genuinely retarded. There's just no way around stating that for what it is. You go from requiring rank 2 in forging (which would take an insane amount of crafting because before rank 2 all you can do is make ingots, tying back to the inventory only crafting recipes, and those ingots require x5 the ore and x1 coal, you get only 1 of a metal per node, each node can only be harvested once, and each node requires a minigame interaction to pop - except for stronger nodes that require like 5 minigame interactions to pop ONE ore) to requiring rank 10, just to make a metal box - then rank TWENTY FIVE to process the fancy 5 minigame ore.
To put this into perspective, after more than several hours of roaming and harvesting (you must use your weapon slot as a gathering tool, which is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, because if your build uses weapons you lose access to jutsu requiring them and even taijutsu using kick and punch jutsu somehow cannot be used when wielding a gathering weapon, meaning if you're an elemental jutsu type user, which is very common, you are privileged if forced into pvp or ambushed, and if you use weapons or melee builds you literally just die due to being unable to swap weapons since it takes like 3-4 uninterrupted seconds to swap weapons) I put together around 34-ish ingots. This got me to forging rank...2. So I can finally craft throwable shurikens/kunai/senbon needles myself, exclusively with iron. Yay! (they are limited ammo you either buy or source yourself.) What are the silver and gold ingots I farmed out of necessity along the way for? No idea, functionally they do nothing. Now compare to the earlier description of this process - I cannot make anything else until rank 10, and if the exp gains from getting here is any indication, I will not be getting much exp from making the only thing I can make - throwables.
There does not seem to be any passive benefits from ranking crafting - improved yield from gathering OR refining, faster gathering minigames, less interactions to produce the item, etc. Somehow you can process ore wherever you are from the inventory instead of needing a forge, but you can't see this at a crafting table. No ASMR sound effects for the crafting interactions, just eating time to eat time to force retention with zero dopamine return - you have to be intrinsically motivated to push yourself through old, crappy iterations of unfinished gathering crafting systems if you want to interact with this at all, and it's a bad time sink that doesn't feel good - even if you're a borderline WoW chinese farm bot when it comes to gathering habits. You aren't even allowed to use a pickaxe until LEVEL 18, for some reason.
This is ONE paired gathering profession. There is weaving - so far I haven't even hit high enough to be rank 5 in it to shred my leather - and leather is the only thing I can make at all, which is just a random drop from skinned animal mobs. There is no armor, or enhancements to armor, or accessories that would enhance my experience to craft with it (like a leather pouch to hold throwables, or toughening gear, or making harnesses that would speed up swapping weapons, etc) so it's just rng for rng sake for an indeterminable amount of time, just to further process what I already can process to make...nothing, yet. Just making cloth sheets out of thread silk found from bugs requires rank TEN. You can find cotton that can be made into bandages - but bandages are not healing items in this game, they only cure bleeding. I have not been bled once in the entire game yet, not by PvE and not by rare PvP (low level and new) for the record.
To prevent explaining how every category so far is just slop until far, far down the road when you can make actually useful things, yes, you can chop wood, after hitting level 16 to buy an axe for it. You wouldn't want to start doing it for a long, long time - it functionally does nothing for a very long time. Later it does furniture for housing (which is demanded in some form or another for you to even create or buy items that allow you to bank items, and your inventory is very tiny unless you want to pay cash to expand it, so you want to do this ASAP to prevent soft locking yourself from a full bag) and you can create arrows - but I've never seen how to obtain a bow anywhere, lol.
Generally, the review is positive - but I will say it's very much a work in progress as many features you would see in other MMOs or sandbox roaming games like this are DECADES ahead in terms of gathering/crafting, and the quality of life in the process - much less the power/reward/progression curve. Yes, even free to play games. Now, this is obviously a more indie crew and smaller game - but stick to what they are putting their effort into if you want an experience that feels like it even slightly respects your time. I understand play retention is good, but many aspects of it in this game are negative oriented on it's face, where it feels like active punishment for bothering rather than rewarding for investing. I recommend they steal popular ideas that are commonly implemented in various games that bother to do crafting and gathering and simply slap them onto here asap - anything would be better than where it is now. Stick to the parts of the game you enjoy - make it work for you, because you would likely become frustrated and uninterested FAST if you tried to work for the game instead. It's definitely early access - you have been warned.
