that's right yall it's Low Budget JRPG o'Clock

already off to an incredibly powerful start with incorrect button prompts on the main menu

please do not interpret this tweet as a Dunk I am 100% earnestly here for this shit

Really curious where this is gonna go. The only other Gust games I've played are the ateliers ryza

Ryza 1 is an INCREDIBLE feat of design, but AFAIK this is a more standard jrpg, so I'm wondering what they do without an all-encompassing System to build around like ryza's alchemy

(here's the ryza thread if you want to read me being incredibly confused for like 30 hours and then suddenly discovering I was actually playing one of the most brilliantly-designed games I have ever seen
)

ambient of clusion

oh hell yeah

yo I turned into a magical girl with a bigass sword like ten minutes in. this game does not have time for slow intro chapters

look at this combat ui this rules

oh yeah i love persona 5

ohh this is a *JRPG* jrpg

excited to see what the last 20 years of advancement in the "making up weird things and calling them the sephirot for some reason" field have brought us

extremely stylish fast-travel menu

equipping girls onto girls

this mf said grape

holy shit you fix that girl's emotional issues and the lesson she learns is "actually it's important to ALSO be angry"

this game rules

more extremely stylish ui

how is Gust even a real studio

they released three entire rpgs in 2017

they make a new atelier game every 12 months

like sure their games are low budget and atelier reuses tons of assets but like dude. they're not all THAT low budget. games aren't, like, easy to make

For anyone wondering, this game has chosen to depict the sephirot as "what if hidetaka miyazaki drew a tank"

okay so there's a "paralysis" status ailment, like your usual jrpg combat stuff, but the icon for it just says PALSY

presumably a valid translation but what an absolutely wild word choice lol

magical girls fighting gods casting spells like "30% chance to inflict 【ＯＳＴＥＯＰＯＲＯＳＩＳ】"

ah yes hello frustrated pianist girl the thing you are describing is called Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and no one tells you this until you are like 30

when u play a jrpg

Mhematics meeting for the study
Presentation

okay I know this game isn't very long but like... there are definitely more than 4 sephirot my dude

like.... The Number of Sephirot That There Are is kind of a whole thing. like I'm not particularly Rabbinical but I have read as many as two paragraphs of the wikipedia article

VIDEOGMAES

this game does the JRPG thing where the normal combat music becomes dramatically more kickass in the third act, except at this point you're also so overpowered that everything dies in one turn

so combat is just *five measures of extremely sick edm beats* *victory fanfare* lol

I haven't played a lot of Gust games but it's interesting to look at their combat design in terms of, like, chronology

like Blue Reflection -> [another atelier I haven't played] -> Ryza -> Ryza 2 feels like a fairly direct sequence of improvements on the same basic ideas

Blue Reflection is pretty much a straightforward ATB system, with a super meter that you can expend to take extra actions

[atelier lulua happened here]

Ryza adds an FFXIII-style stagger gauge, and combines the MP and super meters into a very cool snowball/momentum system

Ryza 2 added this wild chain system where you could swap characters mid attack to reset everyone's gauges and keep a combo building

it was really fun but tbh I've completely forgotten how it worked because that whole game's balance is just kind of busted lol

anyway someone who's played more ateliers could probably make smarter observations here

but like, it's neat to see this studio just absolutely cranking out games every 10 months or less, but finding smart ways of iterating on their designs every time

also the fact that ryza's combat is WAY more elaborate than blue reflection is funny, given that most of ryza's actual gameplay is about this anime girl constructing a nuclear arsenal out of rocks and grass and then using it to nullify the combat system lol

TANGENT: ryza 2 was kind of a mess compared to the first one but I will never stop laughing at this

arguably it was unintended due to a bug with one specific item, but afaik they never acknowledged it or patched it out so: lmao

powerful

localization team really going all out lmao

vast majority of the localization has a pretty flat affect, so I have NO idea what was going on in the japanese script that caused them to switch to like circa-2009 gg fansub mode for one line lmao

WHO COULD POSSIBLY HAVE GUESSED THAT THE FINAL BOSS'S PLOT WOULD BE INSTRUMENTALITY

they put like half the budget of this game into the final boss this rules so hard

- mega spoilers for the final boss of Blue Reflection -

but if you don't intend to play it yourself:
holy shit this is like Metal Gear Rising levels of boss music synced to gameplay. Just unbelievably hype

(video is from my playthrough; I just had to put it on youtube bc it's too long for twitter)

It's some wild combo of
- Dynamic music changing with boss form
- Form-change music scored to the animation
- Just me getting really lucky with timing when I was choosing actions I guess

if I want to over-analyze it; I *think* a big part of what works here is that even the non-dynamic loops have huge drops or mood changes every ~20 seconds, so it's statistically likely to line up with player actions

in practice it just felt fucking incredible to play lol

and like that's really the goal of any music system right? you don't want the player thinking about "whoa how does this system work"; you just want them to think the coolest shit they've ever heard is keeping pace with them

*massive dubstep bass drop as I break the final boss's armor* videogames are Good