Born of Bread Review (Redfireryu)
This game wants very much to be Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door. It falls a little short and is a bit buggy. Overall I enjoyed it though.
I like the story in general. Combat is alright. Had some moments that made me laugh.
Now for the nit picks.
First the biggest offender.
In every area you can get a map that lists the number of treasure and salamanders in each area. Except it's a lie. I went almost the whole game missing the life sight boon from lapwing village. A poster in the starting town says there is a boon that can help you see the enemy hp and defense in the lapwing village. Now You can also get a type sight around there too. My map said i had all the treasure in the village and I had the type sight which shows what enemy are resistant or weak too. So i figured oh, must just be bad phrasing cause my map says I have everything. Nope there was an unlisted treasure. To make it worse the life sight shows hp, resistances and defense. It invalidates the type sight completely which I had been using the whole game.
Nitpick on boons: Some boons have multiple copies and look like they should stack and don't.
There is a late game boon that doubles your damage from weapons but doubles the cost to use them. No way to turn it off once you pick it up. Not too terrible to manage but it should be toggle-able like the other blessing that does basically the same thing for special attacks.
Another one doubles your HP and your partners hp but only the partner you had out at the time. Clearly should be all of them but it hardly matters as your partner almost never gets attacked.
A lot of boons and weapons feel kinda lack luster.
UI nitpicks.
In your inventory there is a lot of stuff that feels like you should be able to interact but you can't, with especially if it's on the right side of the pages. Also it's awkward that you can't switch what partners skills you are looking at from their skill page. You have to switch to the partner overview then switch characters then go to their skills. On that note unlocking skills equips them and you can only have one move per tree. The final skill doesn't auto equip though. Found myself with the wrong layout once or twice when unlocking skills for stats.
Story nitpick:
The story and final boss of chapter 4 is bad. If you disagree your wrong. Fight me. Number one was a little overbearing and self righteous but ultimately shared the same goal we had and was trying to stop a thief that stole from the queen, set fires and destroyed the town and planed on destroying the world. The writers here wanted so hard to do Vivian from paper mario. The purple girl who was a villain is sad and in trouble now we have to be her friend. Klein, Yago, and even you do a lot of violence to solve problems and actually make jokes about it but suddenly now it's bad so we have to fight and solve it with violence. Honestly it's also pretty messed up that Number One got all chewed up and mutilated into some cyborg with sword hands like, i'm sorry but we aren't the good guys in this. Jester and his crew nearly devastated the entire world at the end because of daddy issues and they got off with some community service but Number One was overbearing so I guess that's worse /spoiler]
Nitpick on dialog:
Some characters have too much to say about nothing but then there are obvious parts where dialog should be updated and people should have more to say but don't. Particularly at the savers guild near the end of the game where events happen but no one talks about it.
Nitpick on money:
Tons of money to get and wallet upgrades don't keep up and not much to spend on. Often times discounts come way after you would have bought anything anyway and if you buy an item early by the time you get a discount you will have picked up way more than you spent. As a little screw you though there is a hidden cardshop that sells cards for all the money you can hold multiple times over and if your like me you won't find it until the end of the game so why bother. Changing cards is pretty pointless anyway.
Nitpick on leveling:
After you unlock all the boons and backpack slots it feels like maybe there should be something else or more slots. I still had like half the game left when I unlocked all the boon and backpack slots.
Nitpick on Specials: The specials you unlock weren't very good. Never really used them. The ones that did damage didn't seem that strong. Maybe you could play passive and heal up with combos but honestly you level so fast I found myself using it as the sole way of keeping my HP and WP up.
Nitpick on bosses: Honestly bosses are real easy. Now I like a game that isn't too hard but most of the bosses I beat in literally 3 turns. I think I took about 10 damage each on the chapter 4 boss and the final boss, this was out of my 100+ hp for chapter 4 and 200 hp for the final.
Glitches: I had the quest Sweet Success freeze on me. Leaving the area and coming back before talking to the quest giver again fixed it. Some minor visual and audio glitches that restarting the game fixed. I Would lose sound effects after extended play.
Despite all of the above It's still pretty good but it could do with some patches.