Recent reviews by rinimt

My full review can be found here: http://www.the-backlog.net/nekopara-vol-0-review/

A copy was provided by the publisher for review. Disclaimer: I haven't gone through vol.1 yet, so I was fresh into NEKOPARA with vol.0.

In NEKOPARA vol.0, you join the catgirls of the Minaduki household for a day in their life. You'll join them while they cook, eat, order out, go out, bathe, and sleep. They're not sure what's going on with their Master lately either, but they proceed with their daily lives as normal.

The game contains no "adult" scenes, though there is a section where you join them for a bath (as an observerer, they don't actually interact with you during the entire VN). The text is generally clean, although there are some more slightly adult lines said on occasion. You can also pet the girls (including the non-catgirl, Shigure), and adjust how certain things behave with a slider in the menu.

It's well priced for the length, which is around an hour. There are no introductions to the character though, so you're likely better not starting with this title if you're starting the series.

My full review can be found here: http://www.the-backlog.net/idol-magical-girl-chiru-chiru-michiru-part-1-review/

I was provided a copy for this review.

Idol Magical Girl Chiru Chiru Michiru stars 14-year-old Michiru as she dreams to become an idol. After a fateful meeting with a talking cat, she become a Magical Girl who is tasked with saving the world. Of course, she's a bit of a ditz and tends to mess up with everything she tries to do.

This half of the VN will take around 4-5 hours to complete. With that said, it's really short for the price (especially when you add the two parts together). It's still fairly enjoyable and is great for some laughs, though you might be best off trying to get it on sale.

My full review can be found here: http://www.the-backlog.net/invisible-apartment-zero-review/

Invisible Apartment Zero is set in a cyberpunk world. You're Kasey, a hacker who wants to get away from where she's living.

The game is a fairly short visual novel. Unfortunately, it has a lot of spelling mistakes throughout the ~1 hour it will take to get through it. There are only a few set backgrounds that get reused a lot, and some of these backgrounds make it fairly hard to actually read the text (brighter white backgrounds mixed with the white text, even though there's a dark transparent background for the text).

This is one of those cases I wish Steam had a neutral setting, but as it is I'm not recommending this title. It feels too short and there are a lot of spelling issues.

Update: As of a Windows 10 patch in 2018 or so, this game became unplayable due to extreme lag, and any attempts to fix it that I've tried have completely failed. Unfortunately this means I will need to change my recommendation to no. There's been no attempt at fixing this.

Full review can be found here: http://www.the-backlog.net/arevan-the-bitter-truth-review/

This review is based off a copy provided by the publisher.

Arevan will send you through a lot of twists and turns. Unfortunately, they’re fairly predictable. The game is also not overly long for an RPG, with my playthrough clocking in at 14 hours. A good chunk of that 14 hours turned into unneeded grinding and some idling time while I did other things. So really, for your money you’re getting an around 10 hour adventure.

Leveling in Arevan is a bit of a hit-or-miss thing. On one hand, a system exists so that you never actually have to FIGHT any bosses in the game. On the other hand, leveling up enough to be able to pull through these bosses offers some great rewards. And yes, you read that right – you don’t actually have to fight the bosses in this game. Should you die, you can choose to just continue on or try again. Choosing to continue on will automatically kill the boss, and in the cases of storyline ones, continue on in the story.

Arevan provides no in-game world map, and you’ll likely also end up hard pressed to try and find one online. And, of course, it ends up becoming very easy to get lost on said world map. Luckily, the game has a system of usable runes that let you quick travel to cities. While you have to actually find the NPCs that sell them, these prove to be a very handy to have around.

Arevan’s combat is a turn-based system. You’ll input everyone’s commands, and then based on the speed of you and the enemies, actions will happen in that order. If you know which character will go first (PS: It’s probably Pascal), you can manipulate to do certain actions at certain times. This can prove useful for landing those status effects as well. And luckily, you can scan every enemy in-battle by use of the shift key (or on controllers, at least on mine, the A button). It will be a bit confusing at first what each symbol means and what the colours mean, but you’ll eventually get the hang of it. If you see red though, use that and try and land the statuses that show as red. Just do it.

The biggest issue in Arevan is, by far, the sheer amount of spelling and grammar mistakes. From simple things such as words missing a letter to flat out spelling mistakes. I don’t know about you, but knowing I have a ]man and he’s being hemself heading intodungeons doesn’t leave that great of an impression. Sometimes the issues will be in every other line, sometimes they’ll just vanish completely for a bit. The game could use a good, thorough proof reading by a few people to try and clean up some of these mistakes.

I also had issue with how the quest log was handled. Sometimes it was really clear on what I should do, other times not so much. Near the end, I got extremely lost on where to go until I finally stumbled upon something after over an hour of searching. In that time, I had done practically everything else I could do then. I’d done all the little side dungeons to make the last boss easier, I’d rescued a mermaid, and I’d helped some selfish treasure hunter find his secret dungeon. Of course, little did I know what doing all those side dungeons to make the last boss “easier” actually meant. I won’t spoil it, but needless to say I was left extremely unsatisfied at the end.

So, like most RPGMaker games, Arevan is not for everyone. You’ll need to deal with a gigantic amount of spelling issues and general getting lost. Luckily, I found the combat system and general story – minus the spelling/grammar issues – quite good. I also enjoyed the music and sound effects, even if some of them were things that were stock with RPGMaker instead of original. Overall, I would suggest the game, but only to folks who are fans of RPGMaker titles. If you’re looking for some big, fancy, 3D title, you’d best look elsewhere.

Full review can be found here: http://www.the-backlog.net/moonchild-review/

This review is from a key provided by the publisher.

When you first start the game, you’re presented with the choice of if you want to view the introduction or not. After that, you’re presented with another choice – the difficulty you play on. You have one of three choices – RPG, Casual, or Story. RPG is hard mode, Casual is normal, and Story is easy. I had originally started the game on RPG but wasn’t really having much fun with how badly I was getting attritioned down. I decided to restart on Story so that I would be able to get through and review it.

Money is a big issue in this game. Luckily, if you’re on Story (Easy), you can often get away with not always buying the newest and best gear. A full dungeon clear would often net me enough to buy maybe a few pieces of equipment. I was generally only gearing a select few, though you’ll want to make sure you have enough gear for everyone at the end of the game! You’ll also want to spend a little time leveling up everyone.

Dungeon layouts are large. You’ll often walk down a path, see a way to go to another screen and think, hey, I bet that’s the way to go! Then you’ll find it in two other places. Be prepared to do a lot of backtracking because of this. Luckily (sometimes unluckily if you need to level), not all of the enemies you killed respawn when you re-enter a screen. Some enemies do however spawn when you walk over certain tiles, with it occasionally actually slowing down the game as it loads them in. It’s often not actually obvious this happens, though when they appear right in your face it becomes a bit more obvious then.

Moonchild has a fair bit of default RPGMaker stuff built in though it did at least feel like it fit. There were some songs in it I hadn’t heard before so I’m not sure if they were original or just lesser used, but the general feel I got from the music was that it fit in. The lack of proper victory music was a bit off-putting though as the game transitioned from the battle music right back to the dungeon music.

If you’re looking for an RPGMaker game that you can make extremely challenging then check out Moonchild. It’s also decent if you’re just looking for a game you can get through the story of in around 10 hours (ignoring side quests). Want to do more? There’s a wide variety of achievements that will have you killing a lot of stuff with all of the characters. Unfortunately, some of the grammar in the game does fall apart, especially closer to the end. If I were to put my negatives on the game, it’s that it would have been nice if enemies actually dropped more money – especially ones that are tougher to respawn – and that there was quite a few grammar mistakes in the text. Other than that, I did enjoy my time playing Moonchild and would suggest it to others.

My full review which I wrote a couple weeks prior to all of this going down can be found here: http://www.the-backlog.net/journey-of-the-light-review/

When I first started playing Journey of the Light, I was interested. I'm a sucker for artsy games and puzzlers so it looked right down my alley. However, after playing it for awhile, something was definitely off. I started showing the game to a friend and neither of us could figure it out. We had no clue what to do, the "hints" were useless. Now, of course, we know the hints were pointless. We tried for a fair bit though and got no where.

I guess at least I had fun rolling off the world a few times, as it's not like there was anything else to do in the game!