Tempest of the Heavens and Earth

玩着玩着会卡顿，要重新再来，小众游戏bug真多

Amazing. Combat feels great, movement is fine. The level design sometimes feels a bit ♥♥♥♥ and can be a little aggravating, though it's mostly good; the boss fights, however, are incredible. Handedly worth the money.

Tempest of the Heavens and Earth is a fangame I wish people talked about more often, it's not the best out there, but still a hidden gem. We control Tenshi Hinanawi in this journey, and her arsenal is so much fun to play around with, the variety is crazy honestly! For combat, you can do multiple close ranged attacks with her rocks, use different shot types that you can change at any time (which are all very useful), use a couple of different Spellcards (your best bet against bosses) and also use her mighty sword. The movement doesn't fall behind either, it's not as in depth but the ability to double jump and dashing to avoid attacks or just for platforming is great, and the best part is that all of those skills can be expanded upon with the upgrade system, it's awesome! If you dodge an attack and follow up with your sword you get to change the weather according to the enemy's nature, it's genius and a really fun mechanic for puzzles! Considering how in depth the gameplay is and the amount of good ideas it has, it's only natural to expect it to have good level design to accommodate all of this, however... That really is far from being the case, the levels range from mediocre to horrible, there are only 6 stages and from start to finish they are non-cohesive and filled to the brim with bottomless pits, on top of broken puzzles with the weather mechanic, sometimes the required enemies won't appear or won't do the necessary action to trigger the weather change, it's really frustrating. I specially wanted to mention stage 5, it was totally miserable due to an auto scroller section with a log floating on a river... Tenshi can't swim so it's instant death if you fall, and of course they shoved the broken weather change puzzles during this part. To make matters worse, once you finally manage to brute force out of this part you are met with a section just as bad with multiple corridors filled with fire, with no sight of an enemy that could help you cease them, all of it ended up taking me 35 minutes which is insane! It's crazy how poorly designed the stages were in this game and it really saddens me. Like mentioned previously, I still consider it to be good despite the terrible levels, because at the end of each one there is a really nice surprise waiting, the boss fights! Each being better then the last, they have really varied Spellcards that really require all of your combos and shots, these are unironically some of the most fun boss fights I ever seen in a game, each of them took me multiple attempts but it was a really rewarding learning curve. They show a really nice interpretation of how the girls could fight while still using bullets, and it's always fun to analyze the patterns and determine if you should keep your distance or go straight for clobbering, it's specially fun when you are already used to all of your moves and I can't wait to fight all of them again sometime! Truly wish the game was longer just so i could fight more bosses. The cast chosen for this game is phenomenal, being full of faces that often get overlooked by other fanworks, which I find to be pretty cool. When I first saw this game in 2023 it was responsible for introducing me to characters like Iku Nagae, Mononobe no Futo and Houjuu Nue, they make for a really refreshing experience that really stands out to me. All of the girls are all represented pretty well with some extremely adorable pixel art and drawn portraits for their Spellcards, whoever did the art for this game was really passionate about it and it shows, even the "Small fries" (like Tenshi calls the regular enemies) have a lot of charm and cute animations. Overall, it's a bit of a weird experience due to the crappy level design, but the gameplay is simply fantastic and so are the boss fights, with a great art direction as the cherry on top. I still recommend this game and have a lot of admiration for it, makes me wish for a remake of a spiritual successor that brings all of it's good aspect to a better structured experience.