Verdict Guilty (PS4)

 For some reason, when I first saw this game, I assumed it was developed in Brazil, but it's actually Scottish! Also, it's set in future South Korea? Plus it's all very very purple. It takes from the classic western school of iterative game design as seen in Mortal Kombat and Kid Chameleon: it takes an existing game and says "but wouldn't it be cool if it had this and this and this?". Of course, the inspiration here is Street Fighter II, just like it was for Mortal Kombat all those many years ago.

 

Verdict Guilty has a lot of ideas in it, but the main one around which the game is built seems to be "what if the Guile handcuffs glitch was an actual mechanic that more characters could do?", and in fitting with that, the game's got a cops/agents versus criminals theme to it. It's also got an unusual five button control scheme because of this: two punch and kick buttons each, plus the fifth handcuff/throw button. You've got to be close to your opponent to use it, and depending on your character, successfully pulling it off might handcuff your opponent (making them unable to attack, not even kicks or other attacks that don't use the arms), or it might do something different, like strapping a time bomb to them.

 

There's more mechanical weirdness to enjoy, though. Each character seems to have a special that's executed by holding one of their attack buttons for a second and releasing. You can do the holding while being hit, while performing other moves, even before a round starts! Normal attacks all come out insanely quickly, and they do a lot of damage, too, so rounds tend to be short. The game attempts to stop spamming certain moves by having them use ammo, and doing the move when ammo's depleted wastes a little time reloading instead of doing the move. Looking the game up online, it seems that there's a glitch in the PC version that prevents player two from using certain specials if they're using a controller. Amazing.

 

Thematically and aesthetically, it's also a mixed bag. There's some weird stuff like a character being a secret agent with stretchy arms and electricity powers (no-one else in the game seems to have any powers at all). Another character is a seenteen year old boy with his job listed as "terrorist" and his likes listed as "bombs". Something I really like is that there's technically no mirror matches: if both players are the same character, player two will instead be a headswap with a different name! Similar stuff is done in Battle K-Road and Toshinden 3, but it's still unusual enough to be a cool oddity when it turns up. As mentioned (and as you can see in the screenshots), the game's very purple, and couple with the urban setting resulting in lots of nice cityscape backrounds, I really like the way it looks in general. Though having said that, the characters are a little ugly. The worst thing I can say in this section, though, is that only one of the eight characters (or two of sixteen if you want to be pedantic about it) is a woman, one of her specials is called "panty shot", and it involves her doing the splits upside down in midair. Tiresome, embarassing nonsense.

 

Verdict Guilty isn't a great game that you'll be having lots of exciting, tense battles in with your friends, but it is silly enough to be a bit of fun, and the insane strength of normal attacks might make it a game to play with those poor unfortunate freaks who never learned how to play fighting games. Definitely do what I did and wait for it to go on sale and pick it up for a pittance, though.

Super Zangyura (PS4)

 Also known as Maid-san wo Migi ni: Shooting Star, this is a game by doujin veterans Platine Dispositif! Which makes it all the more amazing that I played this via a standard edition physical release for a console in the PAL region!  What a time to be alive. Contrary to what you might expect from them, it's a platformer rather than a shooting game, though it does have a lot of their typical hallmarks: cute character designs, nice pixel art with beautiful colour palettes, brutally sadistic difficulty, and so on.

 

You play as a maid armed with a morning star, in a parody of/homage to classic-style linear Castlevania series, with the plot even having you storming the castle home of an evil immortal vampire. It's a little more puzzle-centric than Castlevania, though, with a lot of the game focussing on the acquisition of coloured keys for opening doors. As things proceed, just getting the keys won't be enough, since the game starts introducing elements like red herring doors that waste your keys, and while destructible walls appear early in the game, they actually become essential for progress later on. There's usually some contextual clues to look out for with regards to hidden stuff: invisible platforms will have torches on them, spikes that suddenly fall on unwitting players will have bloodstained floors beneath them, and the presence of destructible walls might be signified by a number of less clear clues, like oddly-placed enemies, suspiciously-shaped rooms, and so on. 

 

So while it's a difficult game, an observant player isn't subject to trial-and-error Rick Dangerous nonsense. And all of the above is just my describing the default game mode, the end of which reveals that you've actually been wasting you time storming the castle of the vampire lord's next door neighbour. But you've now unlocked overture mode, which is the actual vampire lord's castle, and it goes by the Super Mario Bros. 2jp principle of "they've completed the main game, so the first stage here has to be harder than the final stage there", and shamefully, I haven't been able to get to the first boss in this mode, let alone the final. You also unlock Knightmare mode, which is a completely merciless masocore version of the game. Also, after you complete the game for the first time, everyone's voice actor is swapped to be the voice of the pumpkin guy who runs the in-game shop. I don't know why, or if there's a way to get the normal voices back.

 

The difficulty all comes from the stage design, too: the controls are perfect for what they are, and it would be interesting to see a version of this game that focussed more on action and combat, rather than puzzles and investigation. We do get a little hint of this (and of the developers' STG heritage) during the boss battles, which are a lot of fun, but unfortunately very brief and the long stages space them out to be very far apart. It's a good game, but I wouldn't say it's one of Platine Dispositif's most exciting. It's definitely worth your time, but I would recommend waiting for a PSN sale, rather than getting excited and buying a physical copy like I did. Especially since there seems to be some kind of fault with the physical copies: when you first put it into your console, it'll register as an unrecognised disc. To get it to work, you've got to reset the PS4 with the disc in the drive, a solution I only found by chance and laziness. It'll work every time after you;ve done this once, though. And I assume it's a fault with the whole print run, since when I discovered the trick, I'd already returned one copy under the assumption that it was totally unplayable.

Wolf Simulator (PS4)

 Or to give it its full title, Wolf Simulator: RPG Survival Animal Battle. As you might have guessed from that "please put me in someone's search results" title, this is asset flip shovelware. But I thought there was a chance, however small, that there might be something worthwhile in that realm, maybe. Plus, action games where you play as four-legged characters are usually a nice enough novelty. I'll spoil the end of the review right here: I was wrong, and this game sucks.

 

But at least it does so in enough ways that I can fill out a review of decent length talking about them. So, the premise is that you're a wolf in the United States. Though there are a couple of buildings around, and some abandonded train tracks, there are no roads, people, vehicles, or power lines. So I guess it's set some significantly distant time in the post-human future? That would explain why there's tigers and leopards and hyenas among all the normal North American animals. Like Tokyo Jungle! Anyway, you're a wolf and you've got to kill and eat other animals, while trying not to have the same happen to you. Like Tokyo Jungle! 

 

You also get missions, though they're not as interesting or varied as the ones in Tokyo Jungle. Instead, every mission is a randomly generated quota of certain animals you hve to find and kill. I suspect that the game was originally a free-to-play mobile game, as there's experience points plus two different currencies, one of which lets you skip long cooldown times involved in one of the more pointless parts of the game. That one's the coins, a tiny amount of which will be given to you for completing missions, and there's also fangs, which are given for killing other animals. Fangs are used for increasing your stats. So what do experience points do? They eventually level you up, and every other level up, you're allowed to take part in an incredibly easy boss fight against another wolf to unlock a new area in which to run around and hunt.

 

That's pretty much the entirety of the "game" part of the game. If you really want to play as a realistic animal and hunt other animals, then Tokyo Jungle is orders of magnitude better than this in every way possible, so play that instead. But there's other stuff to talk about too! Like those coins, for example! You can use them to unlock different wolves to play as. Some of these wolves actually look really cool (though I'm 99% certain every model, texture, animation, and sound in the game was probably just bought off-the-shelf), but the coins needed to unlock them would take eons of completing missions.

 

There's also another thing in the menu that lets you use coins to buy wolf puppies, smaller versions of all the different kinds of wolf you can unlock to play as. Supposedly, these puppies can follow you round and hunt with you. However, having played through something like 70-80% of the game, it never gets any mroe difficult, and I've never felt like I've needed any assistance. But they can't join you unless you keep feeding them fangs to level them up ten times. Every time you do this, the amount of fangs for the next level increases like you might expect, but so does the amount of time you have to wait before you can do that. Unless you cancel the timer by paying a huge amount of coins. So I never got a puppy past like level three or four.

 

Wolf Simulator is awful garbage. It's insidious awful garbage, though. It's blandly engaging enough that if you were in a sufficiently deep bout of depression, I can see a person idly playing it for hours, never enjoying it, but having their brain and hands occupied enough that they don't stop, either. But you deserve to waste your time on better games than this tedious, unimaginative swill. Wolf Simulator costs about £10 normally, but I got it in a sale a while back because it was 90% off. Neither price is worth it, nor, in fact, would it be worth getting for free. Like I already said: I know the idea of being a realistic animal on the hunt in an open world will be a draw for a lot of people, and if it is, then you need to play Tokyo Jungle. No-one needs to play Wolf Simulator.

Silk (PS4)

 Sometimes when you watch a particularly low budget horror movie or tokusatsu production, it's inspirational: these works stand as proof that it's possible to create interesting, entertaining works on modest budgets. Silk is kind of like that! Common wisdom would tell you that it's impossible to make a large scale RPG/trading sim/resource management game without a large team and the financial backing of a publisher. But here Silk is: claiming to boast the largest explorable world in videogame history, and it all appears to have been made by a solo developer (or at least, a very small team) on a shoestring budget.

 

Silk is an absurdly huge sandbox of a game. You start out by picking out a quest, though you really don't have to follow it if you don't want to, and you set off on your big adventure. THe name comes from the fact that you play as a trading caravan on the silk road, and as such, the aforementioned gigantic open world encompasses huge swathes of Europe, Asia, and Africa! The most basic mission is to get from the Roman empire, over to the Han empire in what is now China, and then back again. I've attempted this a couple of times now, and though I can just about manage the "getting there" part of the journey, my party always ends up starving to death in either the mountains or the desert on the way back. Or murdered by nomads, who for some reason are incredibly hostile to your little band of travellers. Even though technically, you're also nomads. 

 

You get across the world via dungeon crawler-style "blob" movement, being able to face eight directions, and move one big footstep at a time. Which is kind of how the game acieves its huge world claims: there's quite a bit of simplification and abstraction at play here. Distances are approximate, and there's a day/night cycle that goes round every few turns, and when you "enter" towns and other locations where trading is possible, it's all done via a menu. But somehow, this doesn't do anything diminish the sense of scale in the game! So much is done through clever game design that you might not even notice unless you're specifically thinking about it. For example, you start out in the Roman empire, in Europe. There's lots of water for fishing, forests for hunting, and friendly cities for trading, so you're never going to be short on food.

 

Your first big challenge coms when you get to the mountains: they're somewhat maze-like, there are no towns, and there's nowhere to hunt or fish. But unless you get really lost, this isn't a huge area, and once you get out, the Parthian towns on the other side are a little hostile, but they'll quickly warm up to you once you get in there and trade with them a few times. Later, though, you'll get to what the game calls the Sea of Death, which I think is supposed to be the real-life Taklamakan Desert. This place is huge, something like half as wide as all the ground you've covered before reaching it, and there's no woods, no water, and very few settlements. And a lot of the settlements that are there are surrounded and inhabited by the aforementioned very hostile nomads. So, to stand a chance of getting across here, you need to hire a bunch of guards, and also stock up on enough food to feed them for the several weeks it'll take you to get across. While you're in the desert, a little bit of flavour is also added by the unusually large amount of abandonded and ruined caravans you find, which will yield a small amount of silver, wool, and spices when you pass them. It really gets across how treacherous this terrain is, while also giving you something to trade for more food once you get to the other side and have to journey back again.

 

While the game successfully gets across what a grand undertaking a silk road journey is, it still has the low budget charm and appeal that I mentioned back at the start of the review. All the sprites representing locations and obstacles like mountains, sand dunes, and so on all look like they were drawn using felt tip pens, and they haven't been filtered or sharpened up in any way. It creates a look for the game that really makes it very clear that it's a passion project and a work of pure creativity, and not a capitalist product that's been through focus tests and an overly powerful marketing department. 

 

It might sound to some that I'm damning this game with faint praise, but honestly: I'd prefer it if all games were passion projects, and we never had to hear about crunch time or developers being traumatised by having to repeatedly watch real gore videos for reference or playing games that would obviously have been a thousand times better if some bean counter hadn't demanded more potential revenue streams or if some soulless animated corpse in a suit demanded less marketable elements be watered down or removed altogether. I'll be honest and say that Silk isn't really in one of my preferred genres, and it's definitely got its flaws, but it is an incredible achievement, the sense of scale is really awe-inspiring, and it represents a better way for videogames to be in the future. Furthermore, it often goes on sale for an absolute pittance, so if you want to give it a try yourself, it's not like it'll take a big investment to do so. And I definitely recommend that you do.

Future GPX Cyber Formula Sin Vier (PS4)

 So, back when I reviewed the PSP Future GPX Cyber Formula game, I said I'd get around to this one eventually, and I finally have. Unfortunately, my first impression of it wasn't a great one, as the anime license has been pretty much wasted: there's no story mode, or even endings, and the characters only appears as the names of the other drivers against whom you're racing, they have no art or voices. It's even more of a shame, since, as far as I know, this is the first time one of these games has received an English release that didn't strip the license away.

 

However, This little disappointment is gotten over quickly, as the game itself has a lot to like about it. As a single player (and the only multiplayer is online, no splitscreen), you can pick between the 2022 and 2023 championships. That's an amusing little detail: since the game's based on a sci-fi racing anime from the 1990s, these are the canonical years that these futuristic races take place, not the years we have been recently experiencing in the real world. Each championship offers seven races, with the typical system of getting more points the higher you place in each race, and winning by having the most points after all the races are done. All pretty standard so far.

 

What aren't so standard are the cars themselves. There's a lot of them to pick from, all taken from the series (and presumably also its various OVA sequels?), and they're all pretty different in their abilities, too. Basically, there's two main abilities the cars in this game can have: transformation and boosting. Transformation refers to the ability to switch between two modes: circuit mode, where the car handles normally, and aero mode, where your acceleration and top speed increase at the cost of vastly stiffer steering that has no chance of getting around most corners. But transforming can be done as often as you like and happens almost instantly, so the challenge here is judging when best to enter and exit aero mode. A couple of the cars don't have the ability to transform, and they have the higher acceleration and top speed all the time, but they're also much more difficult to handle all the time.

 

Boosting is much more obvious: you press a button and get a temporary massive boost to your speed. Some cars have the "two step boost" ability, whereby the boost enters a second, even faster phase after being active for a few seconds. A third ability that some cars possess, but doesnt seem to be listed on the car select screen is some kind of AI speed management system that automatically starts to lower your speed as you approach corners. I'm not actually 100% sure on that one, to be honest. I might have imagined it. These abilities make a clear and tangible difference to how each car plays, even to someone like me with knowledge or interest in more subtle automotive nuances.

 

I really enjoy how the game plays and feels in general, too. You drive fast around nice-looking tracks in a blue skies future. It's never really stressful, and a championship run is about thirty to forty-five minutes, so you can easily just get a little speed fix every day or two without it feels like a labourious chore. It is incredibly easy, and I haven't played through a championship yet without finishing it as the winner,  but to be honest, I don't really play racing games looking for a big challenge. I just want to drive fast through nice-looking environments with very little stress or resisitance. Another weakness is the soundtrack. Though there's a cool vocal song that plays during the final race of each championship, the rest of the music is very generic, very cheap-sounding dance that just kind of blends into the background noise.

 

Though there are a few arcade-style racing games on modern consoles to pick from nowadays, if you want one that doesn't take on a low polygon faux-retro aesthetical affectation, it's slim pickings. In fact, I can't think of any other game like this on PS4 that also has modern-style (albeit kind of low budget) graphics. You can get an English version on the Hong Kong PSN Store for about £20-ish, and if you like this kind of racing game, I'd say it's worth a shot.

Shenmue I & II (PS4)

 It is the first of April again, and as tradition dictates, it's time to write about a game that's a bit more well known than the usual fare. And this year, it's the turn of SEGA's divisive, absurdly ambitious adventure (and its sequel). In case you're wondering, I'm firmly in the pro-Shenmue camp. 

 

For those who don't know, the Shenmue games tell the story of a young Japanese man in the mid-1980s named Ryo Hazuki, and his quest to get revenge on Lan Di, the mysterious martial artist who killed his father. Well, they tell part of that story anyway. Unfortunately, though the games are absurdly ambitious, those ambitions never even came close to fruition. This story's been told many times before, but the original intention was for Shenmue to be twelve games, all as long as the first. Shenmue I is the first chapter in its full intended length, but then chapter two was skipped entirely, and the second game comprises chapters three-to-five. I haven't played the third game yet, but I do at least know that the story still isn't finished after twenty years.

 

But anyway, despite the reduction in scope from the original plans, these games are still incredible. They're open world adventures where you gather information, occasionally get into fights, and if you feel like it, you can waste time playing various side games, including a bunch of actual SEGA arcade games contemporary to the setting. Though they weren't the first open world games, you could make the argument that they were the first modern-style ones, with all kinds of distractions and things to do alongside the main quest. 

 

I could also talk about the way every character in the game has a name, backstory, and daily schedule, no matter how minor they are, or all the other bizarre and incredible things that are in these games, but to do so would be to do them a disservice. They're games that are much more than the sum of their parts. There's just a certain magic to them that's hard to describe, and judging by the way some people have reacted to them over the years, it's something that you either get or you don't.

 

Though I finished the first game a few times back on its original release, I never got all the way through the second until its HD rerelease. Furthermore, though I was always a fan of the games, it wasn't until I'd played all the way through both that I really realised how special and beautiful they were. Beyond the specifics of the plot and mechanics of the games, they're also a celebration of life, with themes of personal growth, the way people, places and events come and go with ever-shifting levels of importance, and all that kind of stuff.

 

There's a lot of stuff to see and do and find and collect in the games, but they aren't really made for completionists. Instead, it makes everyone's experience of the game slightly different: most of the main points will be seen by everyone in mostly the same way, but there's plenty of stuff you'll see that your friends might not, and vice versa. I mentioned earlier that I played through the first game a few times back on the Dreamcast, but on my recent playthrough of the PS4 port, I saw for the first time a pretty lengthy dialogue seen that is not only fully voice-acted (like all the game's dialogue), but even has a unique flashback cutscene. And unless you do a specific set of actions, you might never see any of that stuff! And there's a whole bunch of things like this in both games!

 

The atmosphere of the games is also noteworthy, in how immersive it is. There's some kind of magic captured in these (by 2021 standards) low polygon models and grainy textures, such that you can practically smell the environments you're exploring. Even playing back then, as a fourteen year old in the north of England, I recognised that these games were instilling in me a nostalgia for places I've never been to, at a time (slightly) before I was even born. I know lot of people don't think highly of these games, but to me, they're two of the best and most important ever, and I think everyone should play them both at least once.

Girls und Panzer Dream Tank Match (PS4)

I thought this a few years ago, and it still seems to be true: there's surprisingly few videogames about tanks. But here's another one, based on the anime, Girls und Panzer. In case you aren't already aware, the anime is set in a world where Panzerfahren is seen as a respectable and feminine sport for young women to participate in. Panzerfahren is the waging of tank battles, in actual World War II tanks. The insides of the cockpits have been treated with a special carbon coating, so no-one actually gets hurt, despite them shooting live ammunition at each other. Totally believable, I don't know why we don't do that in real life.

The game is surprisingly structured like a home port of a fighting game: there's a story mode, where you play through the events of the movie, "domination mode", which is essentially arcade mode, having you pick one of the available school teams (each one very loosely themed around a country involved in WWII and driving that country's tanks) and play through five randomly assigned battles, and "extra mode", which has a bunch of special challenge missions. In all but extra mode, there's also ludicrous amounts of dialogue before and after each battle, which can luckily be skipped, since each conversation takes two or three times more time than the battles themselves. I started the game intending to watch them and find out about the characters, but they really are too long.

So, the important question: are the battles actually fun to play? Luckily, yes! There's various kinds of battles on offer, like straight up team battles, kill-the-captain "flag battles", one-on-one battles, and a weird kind of gauntlet thing. The gauntlet, referred to in-game by the unwieldy title "arrive at the destination", is almost the most interesting type of battle.  You play it alone, and the aim is to drive your tank to the end of a treacherous mountain path, along which are the five members of the opposing team, who'll take pot shots at you as you go. The one thing holding it back is the fact that there's only one map that you play every time this match type comes up. What a shame!

That's not to say the other battles are bad, though. The tanks are satifying to control, feeling big and slow and heavy as they trundle around the maps (I felt a similar way about the way the monsters feel in the excellent PS4 Godzilla game. Maybe there should be more games where you control big heavy things?). As well as moving, there's also satisfaction to be found in shooting. You can only do it once every few seconds, since you're driving a tank, and every shot needs to be loaded individually. There's an auto-aim option, but you really shouldn't use it, as a big part of the combat in the game is not just hitting your enemy's tank, but hitting the right part of the tank, as different parts take different amounts of damage, and you can temporarily immobilise foes by shooting their treads. Like movement, the combat is slow, heavy, and satisfying.

Girls und Panzer Dream Tank Match is a game I definitely recommend. It's fun to play, and there's a lot of it (other than the lack of maps for the gauntlet missions), and through the use of the anime license, it manages to be a game about vintage military hardware that doesn't have a boring, ugly macho aesthetic. The license also gives it an excuse for its fighting game-style structure, as opposed to being about larger scale, more realistic battles, which might have ended up been longer and a little more tedious. It never got released in the west, but an English version did get released in South East Asia, so track that one down if you're interested.

Sword and Fairy 6 (PS4)

Okay, so this game only came out a month ago, but I don't think it's got the coverage it deserves, so just this once, that's obscure enough to get it on the blog. It's a Taiwanese-developed RPG, and the latest entry in a series that's supposedly as popular in Taiwan and China as Final Fantasy is everywhere else. Like Final Fantasy, all the games are standalone stories, so we aren't left in the dark having missed the previous seven games (there were a couple of non-numbered spin-offs, of course). I'll start by addressing the twin elephants in the room, that every other review seems to have obsessed over.

The first, and biggest elephant, is the fact that this is a pretty unstable game. It glitches a lot: every time a new scene loads, the framerate takes a nosedive for a couple of seconds, battles start with a split-second of character models freaking out a little, and sometimes the menus act in strange, and unintended ways. The second elephant is slightly more subtle, and it's the fact that the translation is far from perfect. Some other reviews I've read and watch would have you believe that the dialogue is reduced to gibberish, as if it was translated by Alta Vista's Babelfish in 2001 or something. Really though, it just amounts to sentences sometimes reading a little awkwardly and occasionally the wrong word's been typed. But it's totally understandable.

Now that I have those two points out of the way, I can tell you the truth about them: they don't matter at all. I bought this game on a whim, since I just happened to be online when the limited edition went on sale, and it was pretty reasonably priced. So I decided to satisfy my curiosity about Taiwanese RPGs and get a game that sold out within a couple of hours. And I'm glad I did! The reason the above negatives don't matter is because over the past week of playing Sword and Fairy 6, I've totally fallen in love with it. It's hard to know where to begin in describing it!

The first thing you'll notice, and you can see it in the screenshots, is that this is an aesthetically beautiful game. It stars beautiful characters in a world made up of beautiful locations. The writing is also good enough to shine through the issues the translation has, too. I don't want to go into too much detail, because I really want you to go and play this game, and I'm trying to avoid spoiling anything so you can go into it with almost as much ignorance as I did. The story itself is a pretty decent fantasy saga (so far, at least. At the time of writing, I'm "only" about twelve hours into it), it starts with the protagonists investigating a cult that's been scamming and kidnapping people, and gradually escalates to involve gods and demons and hidden realms and so on. The best endorsement I can give is that as much as I normally hate cutscenes in games, this game's story is good enough that I can sit through some very long scenes of almost nothing but dialogue with no problem at all.

But it's the characters that are Sword and Fairy 6's real strong point. Every character has their own distinct personality and motivations, and they all feel like real people, not the usual scenery-chewing videogame hams made of stereotypes and cliches. Also of note is that in your own party there's a character who has trouble understanding interpersonal relations, and needs help knowing how to talk to people, and what people mean when they talk to her, and a character who suffers from depression and low self esteem, yet isn't depicted as a moping, spineless sadsack. The other characters are all interesting and unique in their own ways too, but again, it's hard to talk too much about them without spoiling anything.

It's not a perfect game, of course, and there are some lesser faults to add to the two big ones, like how the battle system is poorly explained and will take a few attempts to get to grips with (but basically: it's real time, but you only control one character at a time, which you do by selecting their actions from a menu. You select which character this is going to be by going into the "queue" section of the out-of-battle menu and putting them in the leftmost space in your party.) The subtitles are also a bit of a problem. All the cutscene dialogue is spoken in Chinese, and there are English subtitles. The problem is that these subs are small and white, and there's no thick outline or backing box, so that if the background behind them is light-coloured, they become pretty hard to read. This is a nuisance, but again, it's not a dealbreaker.

In summary, I strongly recommend Sword and Fairy 6 to anyone who has ever liked RPGs, and I honestly think it's an instant classic and one of the all-time greats. Playing it has made me feel the same way I did the first times I played Final Fantasy VII, Grandia, and Shining Force III. Can you give a stronger RPG recommendation than that?