Recent reviews by Pazumoth

First off, yes, it's basically an interactive visual novel.
But it's also perhaps the most well-made, immersive and impactful game you've ever played.
If you're a member of any kind of minority this will likely resonate heavily with you.
The themes are unfortunately also extremely relevant in 2025...

If there is one downside it's the ridiculous difficulty and tediousness in 100%ing it even after a full playthrough, filling out every part of all the flowcharts would probably take 1000s of hours due to the lack of saves and connecting dots. Completionists beware. On a minor additional gripe, I wish I wasn't basically forced into a romance with N. Surely androids with no biological reproduction should have any option available, or none if they so prefer, projecting human norms unto mechanical lifeforms is a bit dogmatic.

That said, I really cannot recommend this game enough, one of the absolute classics. A real steal if you find it on sale, which happens often.

A V. Survivors-like with excellent graphics, optimization, music and Norse theme.
So far it looks very promising, can't wait to see it develop.
HUGE THANKS for adding an option to set the controller glyphs manually so I don't have to get confused by the xbox controls since Steam always recognizes the wireless dualshock controller as a gamepad.

Worth noting however, that unlike most of the games of this genre it's not an "afk" game, the difficulty spike is quite extreme and enemies will fire massive barrages of homing missiles that kill you in 1-2 hits so standing still is never an option, (I hope the very extreme damage from ranged enemies gets changed in future updates). You also need to run around the entire map to complete tasks on a timer. So if you're looking for a mobile or idle game, this is not it.

Be aware that for whatever reason this is only 128 kbps audio, which was standard about 1995 and is considered extremely low quality by today's standards.

It's a great game in many aspects but it falls short in many other aspects compared to its rolemodel.
I still enjoy it a lot, maybe one day there will be a truly worthy successor to the amazing Suikoden.
I will be recommending it, but not to everyone.

Positives:
+ Music is great.
+ Story checks out.
+ Graphics and gameplay are both smooth and appropriate for the style.
+ No bugs that I discovered.
+ The theatre is great.
+ The way they handled warehouse/inventory and castle shops is very good.
+ No need to grind forever for low-rate drops.
+ NG+ was done well.

Negatives:
- Aside from Nowa (who, along with Seign, is amazing) the voice acting is oftentimes very cringe and childish and honestly the game would have been better with only Nowa voiced. Lian is particularly annoying but frankly a lot of the characters would have been actually cool without the silly "comical" voices.
- The minigames.. Beigoma is rigged and stupid. The sandboat racing is beyond awful and the worst of them all. Fishing is sortof alright and the card game is fun. Egg racing feels completely pointless and adds nothing besides wasting time. The cooking could have been done so much better but it's okay-ish.
- Please remove the double confirmation dialogues when teleporting, they are REALLY annoying.
- Why is there no option to mute the game when tabbed/out of focus? Massive flaw.
- Literally nobody thinks "rare finds" in item shops with a 30-minute cooldown is a fun experience that adds anything whatsoever to the game except wasting time.
- The army battles are pointless as they are all predetermined and interrupted with forced outcomes.
- What's the point of having over a hundred characters, when am I forced to use certain team setups almost every story mission? The attendant list should be longer to fix this annoyance.

A rather simplistic sidescroller rpg but it's surprisingly good at keeping the interest up.
The very definition of fetch quests. Find the cat, get X amount of the same items, repeat.
But again, it does everything well.
If you like repetition and fetching stuff then you'll enjoy this.
If you don't, well, then this is absolutely not for you.

Absolute masterpiece. A lot of Suikoden and some FF, Octopath, Tales of and other RPG inspiration in there.
Writing, Story, Characters, Graphics/Animations/Artstyle 10/10
The Music is very fitting but nothing particularly memorable that you'll find yourself humming on.
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My biggest gripe is the Overheat system during battles which I really don't like but just run it on Easy and that's fine. If you don't, well, you'll die a LOT because of this and only this.
My other gripe is the DPS check on some bosses where they will simply kill you if you don't beat them within X turns. This is fitting for a MMORPG but not so much for a single player RPG.
I am also not overly fond of the overly intricate crystal fusing system but that's a personal preference.
-
These things aside, this is a magnificent game and definitely one of my personal all-time favourites.

TL;DR
Generally a good game, good narration and fun for a single playthrough.
Absolutely not worth the full price so get it on a sale.

Completion time 15-20 hours, 40-50 hours for full completion because of the EXTREMELY low chance of receiving the fifth skills (at most 5% chance per character from a low chance event, I did it 200+ times and got 2 skills out of 5) and the achievements that are locked in the minigame which is so slow, rigged, bad and annoying that it's a literal crime against humanity.

Plus:
Narration.
For the most part the art is nice.
The music is nice.

Minus:
The minigame is abysmal and should never have been a thing.
Who decided to hide the Quit Game option behind a whole series of button presses and menus?
Short.
The game has 3 songs total, double that if you buy the DLC.
The art is kinda silly at times.

tl;dr
FORTUNE FAVOURS THE BALD

Plus:
* True successor to the first game. If you liked that one you will love this one.
* Well balanced cultures and theology.
* Lots of quirky references to the first game.
* Highly addictive like the first game.
* Don't think of this as an imitation or competitor to CK or TW, it just isn't.

Minus:
* Manual battles are even more atrocious than in the first game, just don't even try it.
* Gets very laggy and slow to respond after playing for a long while and you have to restart the game.
* "Having a governor for every settlement is recommended." How, with only 9 spots in the court?
* Wish there were at least 20 building slots too.
* Pagan shamans re-use monotheistic voice lines referencing their God.
* Multiplayer achievements, big minus.

Overall, if you have never played KoH you might just want to stick to whatever it is you are playing.
CK has much more intricate (and in my opinion annoying) details, politics and royal family stuff.
TW's manual battles are beyond superior, they can't even be properly compared.
But if you remember playing KoH back in the day then this is an absolute must-have.
Or, if you just want an alternative, rather than a replacement, for any other grand strategy game.

Cute enough BL novel.
Length is good, the story is somewhat refreshing and overall good.
The characters are decently well written and the facial art is cute.
The body art and CG art is underwhelming and frankly somewhat bad.
The music is bland apart from the OP/ED which is to be expected.
Play it for the story rather than the art.

While this is a negative review, I really like the game as such. Thus, it pains me to have to give a bad score here. As a big fan of jrpgs I will try to finish the game anyway, because I can overlook the flaws to a degree which most people will not. Hence, I can not recommend the game to others.
However, the negatives slightly outweigh the good.
First off, the game has no native controller support. Abysmal.
Second, the game crashes completely with no reason given. It is rare, but when you lose 2 hours approaching the end of an area without an early save point (there is no autosave) you just want to uninstall and forget it ever existed.
Third, the controls are rather clunky and the age of the game is certainly showing.
Fourth, the secret missions are almost entirely based on pure luck and RNG and that is garbage.