Played it some more and it's pretty decent. Still hate deckbuilding, but meh.
Rusty Mini-Review:
For storyfags: There's nothing here for you, continue to the next thread.
Everyone else: It's actually hard to describe what this game is. "like Ultima and Wizardry"? No... not at all. But there's a lot of character building, different combos, unique items(and sadly, color coded generated puke loot).
There's survival elements, you have to manage your camping resources. These are expended when you camp, travel, and through using various abilities at camp. When you camp, each character has their own abilities to use to prepare/heal up/etc., and you can also use generic 'abilities' related to camping available to everyone which may produce other abilities and eventually lead to things like your adventure team having fireside chats and gaining permanent companionship bonuses(or whatever they're called.) That is rather important, as there's special companionship-only abilities you want to unlock.
There's something like 10 heroes(classes) and each one has 4 "subclasses"(starter decks/branches). There doesn't seem to be much toe stepping here, all well defined and such. If you're familiar with Path of Exile or Final Fantasy 12(was it only the special Zodiac version?), character customization is a bit like that but with a twist in that you lay out the grid yourself, but once you place a 'brick' of the grid, it's fixed.
On top of the skill tree, there's also a more classical talent(?) tree that's about the attributes rather than the hero so each hero has the same one.
Gear can be heavily customized via enchantments and gems, upgraded, and so forth.
Combat: It's turn-based, played on a grid. There's a lot of grid shuffling going on, environment effects to watch out for, and so forth. Most abilities have reach and range, meaning you have to be within distance to hit your target.
I played on the hardest difficulty and the combat is difficult but fair. I got close to wiping a couple times but managed to move it back into my favor through careful use of cards/consumables.
Artstyle: It's less anime than it seems. It's basically only the characters themselves, everything else seems like it's pulled directly from a D&D adventure... which this game actually feels a lot like and therefore...
-> Other gameplay: There's fair bit of interactive CYOA-style adventure stuff with a lot of dice rolls. This impacts loot you get, changes encounters, etc., You can 'exhaust' cards to get a bonus to your dice rolls but then you can't play those cards in combat until you rest or remove your exhaust somehow.
Encounter modifiers: There's a lot of these, at least on the hardest difficulty. Plenty of different battlefield modifiers, modifiers on enemies, unique elite enemies with unique abilities/modifiers, and so forth.
Technical side:
- Apparently the GOG version is not kept up to date like the Steam version is.
- Lots of tooltips, tooltips for everything! Don't have enough tooltips? Press CTRL to get even more information on your tooltips. Love it.
Verdict:
Recommended, with exceptions.
