Wonderful game. The art is endearing, the cast is colorful and vibrant in personality, and the music is top notch. Thank you for the wonderful time.

I'm sad to give this a negative review but as the game went on, it only got worse and worse until I couldn't take the game seriously anymore. The cast is entirely queer, including one person with neopronouns which is nice to see. The story and characters are generally very shallow, and around the midpoint of the game each chapter starts feeling monotonous as the plot takes too many twists and turns to have been planned out beforehand. Combat is generally enjoyable, though in the late game health pools start scaling up and it's hard not to want a defensive build when a couple bad timings could cost 3/4 of a party member's health bar. Assigning equipment is rather unwieldy, as there's too many choices that are hard to compare to each other and become obsolete every other chapter, as well as completely arbitrary weapon upgrades that are just a money sink. There's adequate accessibility options to both autocomplete action commands as well as fights themselves, and also an option to display content warnings which is very much appreciated.

The ending solidified my negative review. No specifics, but after defeating what you'd think to be the final boss, another character unleashes barely-hinted at powers and you have to slog through a whole other multi-phase boss fight with them that I guess is supposed to be sad? the music in the fight is orchestral and somber but it's a full encounter that's only a little lower in difficulty compared to the previous boss. it's just baffling how the pace could be killed THAT quickly.

to its credit, the music is very good, though I think playing songs with lyrics during some boss fights was a mistake. it's undoubtedly the best part of the game, alongside the charming pixel art graphics. if you do play ikenfell, feel free to spin the control stick around in battle to fly into the sky!!