The Edge of Allegoria

Fun game for fans of old school pokemon games, the humor sadly falls off in the second half of the game, taking itself a little too serious. Still enjoyed my time in Allegoria, hope for a sequel.

Super interesting game. It's a sometimes hyper crass Earthbound like, with gameplay elements pulled from Riviera the Promised land, and presentation straight from Pokemon. The often extreme vulgarity will be a sticking point with some people, and I'll admit that I didn't always care for it. It does lighten up eventually, and expands the scope of the plot really well as it goes on. Allegoria is a really interesting setting with plenty of lore to dig into, and the ending is surprisingly emotional in a funny way. It can also be very funny at times, with genuinely funny lines of dialogue or situations. It balances the humor with some pretty intense real world elements, and despite the really simple presentation, the game can go to some surprisingly real places, as much of the story is miniature arcs about characters in the various towns that you meet. Unlike Earthbound, where whacky things like a cult that worships the color blue has invaded a small town, storylines here touch on a wide variety of pretty tough stuff, so it's worth knowing that going in. To the game's credit, I think it handles the heavier stuff in mostly pretty respectful ways. On top of all the weird plots, there's the larger mystery of what's going on in Allegoria, and just who your player character is. It's more involved than it seems at first, and has more than a few satisfying surprises. Presentation is excellent. The game uses a nice green based color pallet for the game that very much resembles the likes of Kanto and Johto. In a neat presentational detail, the pallet will change depending on what status ailment you have, and the music will warp too. It's small touches like eating shrooms to heal yourself completely, but also tripping balls immediately that give this game its weird charisma. It helps that the soundtrack is largely excellent. It's Gameboy music, but excellent Gameboy music through and through. I can't think of a single bad track. Gameplay is neat, with permanent stat upgrades mostly coming from mastering weapons and armor instead of leveling up. It sounds like it could be tedious, but for the most part it only takes a couple of battles to master a given piece of equipment, meaning that the more you explore and the more equipment you buy and find, the more consistently you'll be rewarded with permanent upgrades and new abilities. You can have up to five abilities equipped at a time. Early on, it can feel like you're underpowered, but at the end of the game, with proper exploration and attention given to side quests, you'll have a variety of build types at your disposal and a whole arsenal of weapons to wield. It can get a bit tedious clicking manually through the list of abilities when you want to change your build, and I will say that some status based builds were very clearly better than others (Bleed will carry you through most of the game). But it's a lot of fun to unlock new stuff and see how you can synergize a build. And it's worth noting that this is a JRPG in the style of Dragon Warrior. You're one guy, and every single fight is one on one. The constant flow of new abilities means you'll always have something new to try, and the fact that status ailments don't only work but are actually critical to succeeding in combat is really refreshing. There's a constant push and pull that's a lot of fun, and as long as you take the time to explore and find some extra items, you'll have more than enough healing items. The game's pace is really snappy despite the deliberate throwback presentation. I can already see ways the developer could expand on this world and the story. This was such a neat first entry, and even if we don't get anything else, it stands out as one of the better indie RPGs available. You do have to have a high tolerance for vulgarity and often times juvenile or gross humor to get to the really interesting stuff in both the gameplay and story, but it's pretty worth it. It does a good job of homaging tons of different RPG tropes while keeping the game distinct to itself. There are some UI issues here and there, but overall this game was surprising and worth checking out.

A very solid turn based rpg in Gameboy style graphics, with a pretty solid combat system that have more depth than you might think at first. There are not really any equipment choices, you want to have everything for their permanent stats anyway but there are a few different skill builds you can go for. But towards the end three are a few that are so ridiculously overpowered that you really don't need to use anything else, the guitar that get exponentially more powerful for each time you use it in a encounter and the cat summon that deals 50% of a enemys health (including bosses) are especially OP). The system consists of you having to master each item by using them in combat. For equipment it means that you add the items stats to you permanently and for items that you can do that combat move as one of your 5 skills. It could very easily have been grindy but usually you can do it in two or three battles, so it's no big deal. Lots of secret dungeons in the world to find, I do wish the game had a quest log, if you don't write things down you might lose track and forget who wanted the Poutine and who wanded the Nymph Leg, and where to find them. The humor is definitly not for everyone, it's very heavily relies on swearing, drug and alchohol and sex references, but there are also some very good jokes behind the swearing and "adult" content. Nothing is missable, but a few of the achievements especially the monster codex one get a bit grindy, it requires you runing around in one area and cursing everytime you find and have to battle of the nine monsters there you already seen but not the last one to fill out your codex, there are one or two monsters that only appear in one single area, and they are very rare (or I was just unlucky). After beating the final boss you can keep playing to finish everytihing up,

Really want to enjoy this, but the fact that grinding for mastery on every weapon / equipment and being one level higher than the first boss and still getting steamrolled by BS double swings, CRITS, and full health bar attacks while only being able to just constantly heal is really irritating. That's not intuitive combat, there is no lesson to learn or skill/ability to gain an edge when the boss is constantly faster than you, regardless of your equipment or stats. I'm not going to keep Grinding lvl 1-3 enemies for 3 hours just to beat one boss. PASS

One of my best friends gifted this to me. Holy crap am I glad he did. This scratches my Millennial stupid-comedy / GameBoy Pokemon-obsessed nostalgia itch so much while also adding an easy to understand but fun combat system. I can't stop playing this game.

I picked it up on sale. I did not think I would get looped so hard into playing it so long but it's crazy good for how simple it is. The game gets its bad jokes out early on. If you're gonna be mad over profanity and focus on purely that then I wouldn't even bother trying it. This isn't pokemon, you're just rampaging through and murdering everything you come across. The game has its moments and it's pretty funny at times but generally the combat is quick and it was just fun to power through to the end. It captures that pokemon red/blue aesthetic. The combat ends up being a lot faster than pokemon, and despite this clearly not being a pokemon game I still think this qualifies as another game that's better than gamefreak at their own game. Mastering equipment is perfect for getting invested in combat; you go through all the skills so I was setting up skills to do combinations and next thing I knew I was about halfway through the game just screwing around with all the equipment that gets tossed at you.

While I liked the humor, the game has some grind resembling the early pokemon games. And with attack effects not obviously stated "while fighting" you have to look them up out of fight and memorize them. Nope.