A game that tries to be bigger than it should be, which miraculously works, but again, bigger than it should be. Tower is certainly very fun and interesting but this game has many drawbacks for me to really enjoy.
+ Pros +
This game has lots of content, but not the sort of lots that you'd expect. I came in expecting a standard RPG, but I was somewhat amazed. The game has lots of variety in terms of content. It has time-based RPG as its standard gameplay, where there's a bar that you and the enemies fills up before actually deciding the move, normal attack has a Quick Time Event which upgrades slowly to 5 inputs later on. There's a Pokemon-like mechanic where you have to get the enemies to low health in order to use a special move you can use to extract souls that upgrades your other special moves.
Each boss of the game has significantly different ways to beat them, first boss is the 2 phase boss battle where you beat the main enemy at phase 1 and then spam click at the actual boss at phase 2, repeat until main boss dies and win. One of the 2 bosses after that is a weird 2.5D third person battle that have you fight a big boss, click on circles to do actions like blocking, dodging, healing and attacking until she dies. The other is talking, and it's not really a bossfight. Next is a QTE to dodge but otherwise normal RPG, and the final bossfight is just QTEs until you survived the whole thing. As you can see, each boss is extremely different and I give kudos to that.
Also, there's a mini-dating-sim with the boss that you talked to. So now there's a dating sim in here??? Granted it's actually nothing complex, buy her books, clothes (since everyone in here is naked), talk until you can have sex with her and that's it (for now). All of these, in a FLASH game, damn.
Asides from the absurd amount of times this game changes genre (for a flash game, at least), the animations are quite well done. Of course it's not the prettiest or the best animated H-game I've played, but it's not unserviceable and in fact, this game has that whole classic flash/Newgrounds game aesthetic which I like.
The OST is... good. But, it's not memorable or anything. Even though they are pretty nice to listen to while playing the game, I wouldn't say this is something I'd like to listen to when I'm not playing. There are plenty of examples of these sort of soundtrack in other games, it's just that this game is not one of them, it got pretty close though.
H-contents in here is pretty nice as well, there's a lot of scenes and extra bonuses around, plenty for you to enjoy. And also, the sex mechanic in this game also not bad, there's a pleasure bar that fills up when you get hit. I like that it's useful to you since you can get into a sex scene in the RPG sections, which would not deal heavy damage against you and deal a little bit of damage to the girl. It's also risky since you'd not be blocking after the sex, and if you blocked beforehand, it cancels it out so the next enemy can just attack you with full power, giving an actual reason to reduce your pleasure bar rather than leaving it as a very exploitable defensive mechanic.
- Cons -
Ok, now this game has some... annoying stuff all around. There could be lots of quality of life improvements made to this game, unfortunately those don't exists. Such as, most of the QTEs can benefit from a timer, or some of them don't actually tell you that you messed up or successfully pulled off the QTE while others do. Namely the final bossfight, which is kinda messy to be honest.
I find the game's vision is both a good thing... and a bad thing as well. The game, like I said, aimed to be too much. The individual switches between the gamemodes is pretty nice, but it also left wanting more, having just a little bite out of those battles is a bit underwhelming. Same with the dating sim, it's just spamming until she gets 100% relationship, there could be a bit more complex dialogue choosing to reach that 100% relationship status, which is honestly too much work for what is already a large game to make as one swf flash file.
Speaking of dialogue, remember what I said about classic flash/Newgrounds vibes I got. Yeah, this game has BAD GRAMMAR. I know this is not something that big to note about, but Octopussy really messed up their grammar lessons. It has multiple grammar errors, and it really breaks immersion for me sometimes when I'm in (supposedly) tense or deep moments of the game. But overall, the game's writing is not really good at all. It feels like it's something you'd read from a roleplayer's post on rule34. All of the actions are inserted mid-sentences, instead of doing the classic (and objectively correct way) splitting the actions into the next dialogue before continuing talking. The "character development" is isekai anime level of speed. The friendly-boss I talked about takes only like 4-5 sentences from your ass to actually "blushes" and fall in love with you, and later on when you time-travelled (this will be another thing I'll talked about later on), she believed you immediately, and I know that's not how it works, I've seen time-travel animes/stories/movies/whatever before. This "character development" problem is also present everywhere, so the game's story has some serious pacing and writing issues if you wanna take the story seriously.
How about... scaling. This game has good scaling to be honest... in the first playthrough. Beating the game the first time will lead you to New Game+, except it's actually not at all. You keep all of your stats, sure, but basically every other enemies do not properly scales with you at all. They do, a little bit, but you are god OP and one hit everyone as soon as after you've finished the first playthrough. The QTE combo system I mentioned earlier is great, it gets longer over time so you have time to get used to it... and it also lets you one hit everyone, including the bosses. I can only see the Cyclops, the fourth boss, to be the only one that properly scales with your stats for... some reason.
And completing the game and get the true ending? Guess what... you have to beat the game for a total of THREE times, 2 including replay. I just don't like how not obvious it is that you have to beat the game three times. An obvious fix to this is when resetting the game (with your stats kept of course), there could be like a monologue like "Huh, why am I here again? Did I... go back in time?!", or if you talked to the innkeeper, you asked stuff like "You don't remember me?" and shits like that. The only way I noticed that the second playthrough is different, is when innkeeper asked for the necklace that we used to time-travel which I noticed was a new dialogue option. That is NOT obvious at all. We speak like normal, as if it's just you going back to the main screen and press new game, until new dialogue appeared, which is not how you execute "time-travel", the only time our main character EXPLICITLY reveals that you are in fact time-travelling is when you talked to the boss-girlfriend. Unlocking the true ending requires playing the same game over and over again, and I legit would not have a problem if things do change up whenever you resets. Make everything (properly) harder, add new enemies, buff bosses, add new dialogues replacing old ones, make it INTERRESTING that you time-travelled. There was actual gameplay until the first reset where it now only becomes "Speedrun through the game as god twice, and boom, real ending".
= Conclusion =
Underneath these problems still stands a great game, you can enjoy it and to be honest, the resets are not that upsetting. It's frustrating that there is nothing, but not annoying to rampage through everything, and it's not that sluggish, which is a good thing. It didn't take a long time to complete everything in the game even after multiple resets. I can still tell you that yeah, this game is good. I'd recommend you playing it. 7.5/10
+ Pros +
This game has lots of content, but not the sort of lots that you'd expect. I came in expecting a standard RPG, but I was somewhat amazed. The game has lots of variety in terms of content. It has time-based RPG as its standard gameplay, where there's a bar that you and the enemies fills up before actually deciding the move, normal attack has a Quick Time Event which upgrades slowly to 5 inputs later on. There's a Pokemon-like mechanic where you have to get the enemies to low health in order to use a special move you can use to extract souls that upgrades your other special moves.
Each boss of the game has significantly different ways to beat them, first boss is the 2 phase boss battle where you beat the main enemy at phase 1 and then spam click at the actual boss at phase 2, repeat until main boss dies and win. One of the 2 bosses after that is a weird 2.5D third person battle that have you fight a big boss, click on circles to do actions like blocking, dodging, healing and attacking until she dies. The other is talking, and it's not really a bossfight. Next is a QTE to dodge but otherwise normal RPG, and the final bossfight is just QTEs until you survived the whole thing. As you can see, each boss is extremely different and I give kudos to that.
Also, there's a mini-dating-sim with the boss that you talked to. So now there's a dating sim in here??? Granted it's actually nothing complex, buy her books, clothes (since everyone in here is naked), talk until you can have sex with her and that's it (for now). All of these, in a FLASH game, damn.
Asides from the absurd amount of times this game changes genre (for a flash game, at least), the animations are quite well done. Of course it's not the prettiest or the best animated H-game I've played, but it's not unserviceable and in fact, this game has that whole classic flash/Newgrounds game aesthetic which I like.
The OST is... good. But, it's not memorable or anything. Even though they are pretty nice to listen to while playing the game, I wouldn't say this is something I'd like to listen to when I'm not playing. There are plenty of examples of these sort of soundtrack in other games, it's just that this game is not one of them, it got pretty close though.
H-contents in here is pretty nice as well, there's a lot of scenes and extra bonuses around, plenty for you to enjoy. And also, the sex mechanic in this game also not bad, there's a pleasure bar that fills up when you get hit. I like that it's useful to you since you can get into a sex scene in the RPG sections, which would not deal heavy damage against you and deal a little bit of damage to the girl. It's also risky since you'd not be blocking after the sex, and if you blocked beforehand, it cancels it out so the next enemy can just attack you with full power, giving an actual reason to reduce your pleasure bar rather than leaving it as a very exploitable defensive mechanic.
- Cons -
Ok, now this game has some... annoying stuff all around. There could be lots of quality of life improvements made to this game, unfortunately those don't exists. Such as, most of the QTEs can benefit from a timer, or some of them don't actually tell you that you messed up or successfully pulled off the QTE while others do. Namely the final bossfight, which is kinda messy to be honest.
I find the game's vision is both a good thing... and a bad thing as well. The game, like I said, aimed to be too much. The individual switches between the gamemodes is pretty nice, but it also left wanting more, having just a little bite out of those battles is a bit underwhelming. Same with the dating sim, it's just spamming until she gets 100% relationship, there could be a bit more complex dialogue choosing to reach that 100% relationship status, which is honestly too much work for what is already a large game to make as one swf flash file.
Speaking of dialogue, remember what I said about classic flash/Newgrounds vibes I got. Yeah, this game has BAD GRAMMAR. I know this is not something that big to note about, but Octopussy really messed up their grammar lessons. It has multiple grammar errors, and it really breaks immersion for me sometimes when I'm in (supposedly) tense or deep moments of the game. But overall, the game's writing is not really good at all. It feels like it's something you'd read from a roleplayer's post on rule34. All of the actions are inserted mid-sentences, instead of doing the classic (and objectively correct way) splitting the actions into the next dialogue before continuing talking. The "character development" is isekai anime level of speed. The friendly-boss I talked about takes only like 4-5 sentences from your ass to actually "blushes" and fall in love with you, and later on when you time-travelled (this will be another thing I'll talked about later on), she believed you immediately, and I know that's not how it works, I've seen time-travel animes/stories/movies/whatever before. This "character development" problem is also present everywhere, so the game's story has some serious pacing and writing issues if you wanna take the story seriously.
How about... scaling. This game has good scaling to be honest... in the first playthrough. Beating the game the first time will lead you to New Game+, except it's actually not at all. You keep all of your stats, sure, but basically every other enemies do not properly scales with you at all. They do, a little bit, but you are god OP and one hit everyone as soon as after you've finished the first playthrough. The QTE combo system I mentioned earlier is great, it gets longer over time so you have time to get used to it... and it also lets you one hit everyone, including the bosses. I can only see the Cyclops, the fourth boss, to be the only one that properly scales with your stats for... some reason.
And completing the game and get the true ending? Guess what... you have to beat the game for a total of THREE times, 2 including replay. I just don't like how not obvious it is that you have to beat the game three times. An obvious fix to this is when resetting the game (with your stats kept of course), there could be like a monologue like "Huh, why am I here again? Did I... go back in time?!", or if you talked to the innkeeper, you asked stuff like "You don't remember me?" and shits like that. The only way I noticed that the second playthrough is different, is when innkeeper asked for the necklace that we used to time-travel which I noticed was a new dialogue option. That is NOT obvious at all. We speak like normal, as if it's just you going back to the main screen and press new game, until new dialogue appeared, which is not how you execute "time-travel", the only time our main character EXPLICITLY reveals that you are in fact time-travelling is when you talked to the boss-girlfriend. Unlocking the true ending requires playing the same game over and over again, and I legit would not have a problem if things do change up whenever you resets. Make everything (properly) harder, add new enemies, buff bosses, add new dialogues replacing old ones, make it INTERRESTING that you time-travelled. There was actual gameplay until the first reset where it now only becomes "Speedrun through the game as god twice, and boom, real ending".
= Conclusion =
Underneath these problems still stands a great game, you can enjoy it and to be honest, the resets are not that upsetting. It's frustrating that there is nothing, but not annoying to rampage through everything, and it's not that sluggish, which is a good thing. It didn't take a long time to complete everything in the game even after multiple resets. I can still tell you that yeah, this game is good. I'd recommend you playing it. 7.5/10
For some reason, non-boss scenes aren't unlocked even when finishing the game once.
