I saw the girls and the city but where was the river?

Love the art style, love the music, love the simplicity. This game has a lot of great features. But the bosses are insanely frustrating, and most of the times the controls don't feel as tight and responsive as it seems like the game wants them to be. Precise movements are not easy to achieve, which makes it frustrating in sections where precision is key, or when you want to execute specific moves. I also have the feeling that they expect you to be playing with a buddy, cause some sections/bosses are just frustratingly difficult when you are running around the arena by yourself, only able to get a couple of hits in before the boss becomes vulnerable again.

So even though I really wanted to like this game, I just can't play it anymore. It's not got enough else going for it to be worth the stress.

This is not a bad game but good Lord, everything surrounding the core gameplay is horrible... . I usually enjoy 2D beat em up games but this one just has too many bad things around a rather good core gameplay loop. I finished this game 2 times on hard difficulty, got the bad and good ending. I played alone,

Pros:
- Rather good fighting system. In general it is well made but it is not something revolutionary in that genre. Controls are responsive, a lot of moves that can be used in various situations.
- Nice graphics. Game looks good, 2D sprites are really well made.
- Okeish character design (visuals).

♥♥♥♥:
- Every time you start the game you receive an ear r**e. For some reason audio is cranked up to the maximum until you load your save. I know that there is a fix for that but in the base game this is not fixed. Didn't anyone really notice that when they were testing this game?
- Horrible writing. 95% of the dialog in the game is pure cringe, painful cringe. For a while I thought that this is some bad translation but then I found out that there is no Japanese setting for this game and those are original lines for those characters. I had this feeling that they were really trying to be funny but it did not come out well. For example, at the beginning there was a joke about puberty.... because you know it is funny to joke about puberty "hahaha". I think that this game would really benefit from a laugh track here and there. Another thing that this game writing is trying to grasp is to have "Japanese humour" but it misses it entirely. In my second playthrough I have been skipping all already seen dialog and the game was much more enjoyable.
- The game is in general very easy. Enemies are not very intelligent or hard to beat. Only times that I have died were in strange situations where I was stun locked and received massive damage in a short time (Spider lady boss). It would be good that some enemies would have their own behaviour etc, instead of just having some other animations for the basically same types of attacks / actions.
- Game lacks good signaling about stats. In this game you can level up and gain stat etc. It would be good to have some kind of enemies health bars to see that you actually deal more damage etc. Only in my second playthrough I managed to see the difference between enemies going down quicker.
- Useless items. Most of the items are not really that helpful. For example 5% percentage to down enemies, you do not even feel that change and most of the items are like that. Only a few items are good and worth wearing.
- Getting new moves. You can gain new moves in the dojo but there is no place to test those moves safely. When I was playing on hard difficulty, at the beginning I really had to be careful about my health and testing new moves was really risky.
- Consumable items descriptions in the shop. These are always hidden before you consume them. Buying them is not enough but in the inventory you can see what this item is doing. I guess that they made it that way to mark that you have not yet consumed this item. It could be replaced with just a simple check mark in the shop or something.
- Support characters. In game you can convince enemies to join you as a support that you can call in the battle. None of those support characters are very useful... I do not know if it is my set up or the game problem but sometimes it is very hard to call those support characters when you want to. Usually it results in missed calls or late calls that you and your support character receive damage. You can also hunt for various enemies color swaps to catch them all... yey...
- Steam achievement bugged? I finished this game two times on hard difficulty and did not receive an achievement for it. Maybe you have to complete the game in one sitting?

Before playing this game I heard a lot of good opinions about his game so I was kind of excited but got very disappointed in the end. Most of those design problems that I described above can be fixed easily with patches that would already make me give it possible a positive review. I really would like to see better writing though. Maybe they fixed this game in the next game from this series that I am planning to play. I do not recommend playing this game ... alone. Maybe if you are playing together with someone then there are some sparks of joy etc...