SteamWorld: Quest for Gilgamech
The good news is the game ended up being quite interesting. The developers did an awesome job with character development, following the main theme of the game, and adding details where it mattered. You could say it was well-polished. Each character felt realistic from their personality to their dialogue. I was tripped up a couple of times with their role-reversals. The courageous character is actually a heroine and the legendary hero is actually the villain. The way the game continued to remind you that the characters are robots was also a nice touch. The clothes of the characters were metallic in statute, cards used in combat were "punch cards", and your party is "scrapped" when they are defeated. Even the title screen adapts what characters you discovered and their current progress. I didn't have the patience to read every footnote of every card but what I saw demonstrated their love of the game.
What intrigued me was that the game doesn't follow the traditional choice of deck-building that you may be familiar with. You start off with exactly 8 "active" cards from your main character, then build an additional 16 cards from two more characters. You must have 24 cards and the rarity of the cards shows how many duplicates you can use against your foes. In some cases, a card can only played once per battle. This might seem a little limiting when your typical card-game deck has around 60 cards. However, the combination and mixing of cards feels right as the number of available cards become so abundant that quite a few strategies can be built in battle.
Despite enjoying the game, there is one major drawback I must attest to experiencing. And, well, that would be how punishing it was to experiment. There are a total of 19 Chapters. The Colosseum of the Cursed becomes available after Chapter 13. Within the game's constraints, you can play a total of 6 challenges before completing the game. This means that if you want to collect the rewards on the other challenges, you would have to defeat a number of foes (to level-up) to face-off with the other 6 challenges to... to... remind me why you would want them again? Another problem is that all your inactive characters get a reduced amount of experience. Not only does this mean they are at a disadvantage when switching into your active party but also requires you to redo previous stages to get them up to par. Gaining enough money to upgrade cards wasn't so much of an issue but more of an inconvenience. You get just enough to keep up with your enemies. Because of these problems, I couldn't see myself changing my deck a whole lot throughout the game.
Summary: The game averages around 15 hours. I clocked at 21 hours. There isn't anything revolutionary about the story and I found it difficult following between the robot's facial expressions in the dialogue and the physical reactions on the screen. I enjoyed the battles and the variety of foes. I loved the characters. Overall, it was a very nice game.
6-29-2019