Recent reviews by Prof Allister

This game isn't perfect. In fact, there are several issues, and, if you're paying attention, it becomes painfully clear when they started running out of time and money. This was developed through Kickstarter promising a spiritual successor to a series of games that are revered and near-mythical. Many are upset because, in several respects, this failed to reach those heights.

But speaking as someone who plays roughly 50-100 JRPGs in a year: This is something special and it's most definitely worth your time.

I'll get my two biggest complaints out of the way right off:
The game is rated E for everyone, meaning a lot of the darker and more intense elements are completely offscreen. This feels rather inappropriate, and provides something of a tonal dissonance.
Additionally, the modern disdain for "missable content" had so impacted the development that there is a near-comical lack of consequences for various story developments, further undermining the tone and the sense that the world politics are a big deal in the grand scheme of things.

Both these decisions are somewhat reasonable in the goal of reaching a broad audience, but they do somewhat cheapen the final product.

Additionally, tying in to the previous comments of budget and time constraints, there are several design elements which feel poorly calibrated. Not enough to ruin the experience, but enough to elicit a sigh of regret.

All the complaints out of the way, what makes it good, even special?

The visuals speak for themselves, as the designers have accomplished a pleasing blend of hand-drawn pixel art characters on rendered backgrounds.

I consider myself a poor judge of music quality, but this is a rare game where I chose to play unmuted, granted that this was in no small part due to an excellent case of voice actors. And the voice acting is definitely a place where you can clearly see a dedicated budget, as nearly every interaction beyond conversing with random NPCs is fully voiced, to include "peanut gallery comments" from party members otherwise uninvolved in the event.

Character customisation is a generally pleasing blend of limited freedom with enough restrictions to give each character their own distinct identity. A particularly nice touch is the unique skills held by some characters, as well as "union attacks" performed by characters who have some special relationship. Even when such skills aren't especially useful, they serve to convey a lot of personality, to the point where you begin to love and care for a significant portion of your loads and loads of characters.

Which brings up the roster. You recruit over 100 special people to contribute in your effort, be they farmers, merchants, or soldiers. Around 80 of them can serve some sort of combat role, as well. Not all fighters are created equally, but the game is generous enough that you can probably have a viable team by choosing the folks you like the most (no one likes a game where you have 100 options, but 95 are unusable).

You gather people to your side. You build a town. Your people spend down time together, playing card games or discussing beard grooming. It's a wonderfully cozy environment where you won't think twice about spending hours making your most socially awkward friends perform a train wreck of "Romeo and Juliet".

It's not the best game I've ever played, or even the best game I've played this year. But I can guarantee that it's one I'll remember for a long time, and likely revisit.

(Note: Playtime may be inflated due to leaving the game idled on pause)

Have you ever found yourself playing a metroidvania, reaching the end, and thinking "is that all?"

Afterimage has a *massive* map, multiple interwoven story threads, multiple endings, beautiful and visually distinct scenery (such that you can tell the location of any screenshot at a glance), encounters, and animations, fully voice acted, and lovely music.

Mechanically, it's the relatively standard blend of "stock" exploration abilities (double jump, break special walls, etc.), and is most distinguished by the ability to simultaneously use two primary weapons and one secondary. Difficulty is somewhat on the easy end, but the "Boss Rush" challenge mode presents everything you'd care to have in that regard.

Overall, very worth your time.

Gameplay that hearkens back to classic point and click adventure games, a lovely aesthetic, and Nordic folklore, wrapped up in a classic fairy tale presentation. A lovely experience, if a bit intense at times as it wrestles with themes of loss and depression.

This game vexes me.

The visuals are wonderful - clean designs, lots of character to the animations, and everything tends to be quite smooth. Most NPCs are unique and have their own personality, making the classic game of "find the story-relevant character" that much harder (which is a good thing). Enemies are a little more generic, but no less lovely, and the backgrounds and environment are also lovingly crafted, with elegant transitions between region.

The combat system is also well-designed, with each recruitable character having a unique play/fighting style, and several enemies which force you to mix things up. Finally, the guard/parry system and its interaction with the iddhi bar allows for some surprising strategic depth.

The platforming is... serviceable. It is mostly clean and smooth, but there are occasional hiccups and annoyances. Many "quality of life" abilities come far too late, which can cause players to drop the game early simply due to platforming frustrations.

Similarly, for as lovingly crafted as the combat it, it, much like platforming in principle, is afflicted with the fact that the difficulty is keyed to a particular player skill level in a very unfortunate way. If the player lacks the coordination to reach the minimum skill threshold, the game is unplayable at worst and a tedious slog at best. If the player has a higher skill level than the keyed difficulty, the game becomes boring and its own sort of tedious due to the lack of challenge. While not perfect, an HP/damage difficulty slider would at least have mitigated the issue.

Finally, there's the issue of the game's development. While the final product we have is, strictly speaking, complete, there are many features and aspects which were initially promised, but eventually dropped not because of feasibility or resources per se, but more due to internal developer politics, power struggle, etc. I'm not going to take a side or go into detail on the "how we got where we are", but the end result is that the game we got isn't everything that was promised due to pettiness and greed, which is just kind of sad.

Overall, a solid game, particularly for those with the requisite platforming, action RPG, and fighting game skills to properly engage, But still so much less than it could have been.

This is a very pretty game.

The combat is serviceable. The main storyline is serviceable.

I absolutely love the world, the environment, and the side stories.

Gacha rates are poor, mechanics are needlessly obfuscated excessive power creep, and a system built for obscene amounts of grinding to get anywhere.

Lovely visuals, a decent story, and fun crossover events, though.

Yeah, it's pretty much Castlevania. So much so that I often forget it's not Castlevania.

Some people dislike the graphics, but YMMV. As above, the visuals feel sufficiently Castlevania-ey to me.

I first got and played through the game for free, back when Aeon Genesis did a translation. I have since (voluntarily) bought it somewhere between 7 and 10 times.

After spending hours trying to find the upgrade that made the gameplay fun and interesting, and combing through a walkthrough, I was dismayed to learn no such upgrade exists.

I gave this game way too many opportunities to redeem itself, and it never did. I saw it in the store, and it looked nice. A friend got it and played it. Told me it wasn't worth my money. So that wouls have been the end of it, but I think I ended up with a copy froma Humble Bundle or something. It sat in my library for about a year, until, bored one day, I fired it up.

It starts out in the standard manner for this sort of game - you start with one direction of movement, then unlock the others. Cheesy, but the earliest games were reestricted to lateral movement and the like, so I was game. Up until you pick up the transition from grayscale to 16 colors. The grayscale setup was a bit of a stretch, since graphics never really worked that way for early games (not counting handhelds), but I was being lenient. 16 color made it clear that the designers had never really looked at the graphics for anyhting earlier than Playstation era. Even if the system could handle so many colors on a single sprite, it means the main character permanently occupies half the available pallette of the world. (Fun fact: Mega Man had to be composed of two sprites to support his whopping total of 5 colors).

Clearly, the developers were aware of how much they messed up 16 colors, because they jumped to 256 colors almost immediately. As noted above, though, they never did the same for the gameplay. In fact, they actively made the gameplay worse than the old games they claim to emulate - as part of a cheap gimmick, you get an upgrade that unbinds you from the grid. While that should be a good thing, it means you're out of alignment with enemies more often than not. And 95% of the game still uses a grid, so you're not getting much benefit from it. Up to and including gaps between trees like the cute barrier they put in place for you to bypass - nearly indistinguishable from the normal grid barriers, and exceedingly rare.

Problems like this pop up so often that it becomes clear that the immediate jump from 16 colors to 256 wasn't any sort of self-awareness; they want the game to be "pretty" as fast as possible. They take way too long to add a health bar to progress beyong 1 hit = death. They add a "Loading" screen that costs 5000 GP to get rid of - from random fights that drop 100-200 GP each (not that there's much worthwhile to spend your money on, but it's still a stupid aproach).

Things start to get some hope when they drop you into a Diablo-style section, but that's msotly padding and an excuse for cheap jokes - back to the status quo after that. With one exception - you get a combo chain ability (because we all know that Diablo invented the combo chain).

All in all, it starts off with some promise, but the hope for it to get better gradually fades. On top of that, 2/3 of the way through the game, you've unlocked pretty much eveything, and from that point on, it may as well be called "Spinal Clam SE: Heaven". Except that still gives too much credit to the story writing.

Goat Simulator would be genius if the gameplay were a bit more polished. I understand that being rough and buggy etc. are features, but it's the approach that bugs me.

The Journey of Discovery is a popular style for many players, and I respect that. More power to you. On the other hand, there's a reason that Minecraft and Terraria both eventually caved and set up some sort of tutorial mechanics for newcomers.

As it is, it's essentially a rough attempt to be Tony Hawk: Goat Edition. Which is great. But it would be better if someone new to the game could have a little hand-holding so they can begin to understand how to Nollie 360 Lick the Statue of Liberty Manual You're Not My Real Dad FREEEM!