izigame.me

I want to preface this review by saying this isn't a bad game. I don't recommend it, it has many issues, but it's perfectly acceptable. But I'm disappointed enough with it and feel the issues I have with it are numerous enough that the only honest review I can give it is a negative one.
I'm a lapsed wrestling fan and I have very fond memories of playing various wrestling games, and I quite enjoy turn based RPGs. So when this game was announced I immediately wishlisted it. The idea of an indie RPG about pro wrestling, which has the actual Macho Man and other famous wrestlers in it, sounded right up my alley.
So I'll start with what I like about the game. The combat is pretty excellent. It's simple but engaging turn based rpg combat, every character has unique skills, the various moves and status effects all have a strategic use, there's fun synergy between various abilities, characters and status ailments. It's not super complex and some of it feels half-baked but it works. You can even pin people, good stuff.
The pixel art is also great. It's gorgeously animated, every cameo is recognizable, and the grapples are mostly readable despite the chibi style.
The music is also quite good. It sticks in your mind and has a lot of energy.
There was also a storyline in the middle of the game featuring a luchador having to choose between being a good family man and his career that I thought was quite well done.
Unfortunately, that's the end of my positive feelings about this game.
The first and foremost complaint I have about the game is in its writing. In a word, it's bad. To start with, the dialogue constantly feels stilted and unnatural. Run-on sentences, inconsistent speech patterns, awkward turns of phrase, lifeless punctuation, samey voice for every character, inelegant exposition dumps, bad grammar.
Even when specific celebrity cameos come into the game, the simple way their dialogue is written out creates an uncanny feeling that it's not really them talking. This game's story is almost entirely delivered through text, so this is a big problems.
You also get really tired of hearing the canned audio lines each character has. They're too long and elaborate to be as frequent as they are, and distract from the text.
You wouldn't know it from the advertising, but this game is about toys. Every character is a toy, every city is a playset, there's constant jokes and references to plastic and bootlegs and toy-ness. This is weird and makes the world and story feel a bit incoherent. I'm not meeting Macho Man, I'm meeting a Macho Man toy. There's so much emphasis placed on the toy stuff that it detracts from the wrestling stuff.
I also hate how this game incorporates real world cameos. There are hundreds of them, but you're never given context for who they are, and most of them don't really fit into the story. I'll see an npc with an oddly realistic character portrait who'll say something that seems to be a catchphrase. Clearly I'm supposed to know who this is, but I don't. And it happens constantly. Most of them are podcasters or retired wrestlers, and I'm lucky I recognized half of them.
Who the hell is going to know who Konnan is just from the name and one text box obliquely namedropping his podcast? I watched him in his prime and I barely remembered him. Is this game only meant for extremely online wrestling podcast nerds? A casual or non wrestling fan will get absolutely nothing from these cameos. But will those huge wrestling nerds need to constantly get wikipedia summaries of the real wrestlers who are featured as summons and quest NPCs?
The story and characters are also just kind of boring. Really one dimensional stuff, peppered with unfunny jokes and dumb references. Oh, the canadian wrestler is a moose. He talks about maple syrup. The mexican one talks about hot peppers. Street Fighter would call this stuff tired and stereotypical. And they have no depth to get attached to them as people, either.
The world isn't fleshed out and you don't understand the relationship between any of the wrestling organizations and characters enough to care about the stakes. At one point I was in the land of giants. Apparently giants exist in this world! No one else ever mentions giants and once you do a single quest there you never hear of them again. There's techno cities but also post apocalyptic wastelands but also horror themed regions. It's justified as being toy stuff but it just feels like bad improv.
The story constantly gets distracted from the main quest to engage in dumb toy related sidetracks. If the story is supposed to be climbing the ranks of pro wrestling and defeating rival organizations, why am I dungeon delving into playsets to get macguffins? Every random encounter is just random 'wild' toys or wrestler toys just kind of deciding to fight you for no reason.
The game also treats wrestling as a scripted show but also constantly has real fights between wrestlers. Which means you can't get interested in either version of the story because the other version constantly undercuts it. And the main character seems unaware that wrestling is fake, which stops being funny the 11th time it comes up.
It seems very easy to write a rags to riches wrestling story or a story about an evil wrestling empire muscling out all the smaller federations, but this game totally bungles it.
There's also an annoying and pointless framing device where podcasters recount the events of the story and comment on them between chapters. These sections add nothing and are totally lifeless, which I assume is a bad representation of the real life podcast.
The dungeons are also boring as hell. Most of them are straight lines with samey combat encounters, sometimes if you're lucky you'll get a bad switch puzzle or a Simon Says section. The game also keeps switching the story perspective and playable party on you without warning you, which is kind of annoying and disorienting. You wanted to do a sidequest after this boss? Too bad, you're playing as other people on the other side of the world for the next half hour. It's also annoying in the sense that you can go from level 12 to level 3 between chapter transitions without warning.
Traversal sucks. You eventually, very late in the game, get to use teleporters from a teleport hub to revisit locations, but for dozens of hours you'll just be walking across large empty maps, forced to re-traverse dungeons blocking your way to revisit cities during sidequests or to shop. And you also have to take slow boats to reach different continents. At no point do you ever get a chocobo or airship equivalent.
There's some very undercooked mechanics. You can choose an entrance theme, fireworks, & taunts, and you unlock options as you progress in the story, but all any of them do is give you a tiny hype bonus before a fight. You also get to use it so rarely that it feels pointless to even have the mechanic at all.
There are Paper Mario style button prompts in combat, but the game pauses and shows a timer every time, which makes missing them nearly impossible and greatly slows down combat. Even worse, the game is balanced around the idea you'll miss some of them, since they nullify some enemy attacks completely and give you crazy damage bonuses. The fact you're guaranteed to hit almost every one makes combat completely trivial.
Theres some jank here, too. Sometimes animations play wrong. You can switch party members around but most cutscenes won't play if the main character isn't in the lead. I picked up a move meant for one character with another and it just kind of vanished into thin air. I also got trapped in a wall once and if I hadn't been rotating saves I would've been completely unable to progress.
Bottom line, this game is completely lacking in charm, heavy in tedium and I don't know who it's for. It almost feels like the creators wanted to make a toy RPG but thought the online wrestling nerd would be easier to market to.