When I looked at the screenshots for Edge of Allegoria, I thought, another Gameboy Pokemon clone. But I love Gameboy, I love Pokemons, how bad can it be?
I start the game. I name my character, choose the type and appearance of my pet (you can choose a dog or a cat), I also give it a name and I'm thrown into a town called Primishire (all towns are named in the order you will visit them (Secuntston, etc.)). At the beginning, nothing will be clear to you because there is no defined goal to follow in order to finish the game. But everything will be explained later, through the game and a bunch of meaningless conversations.
In conversations with the first few NPCs, you learn the basic mechanics of the game. You will immediately notice a certain tone of the narrative that follows you throughout the game. Light teasing, insults, adult humor, references to classic films, and a lot, a lot of sexual innuendo. Most characters are angry at you for some reason, offering you various "services" (wink-wink) or are completely stoned. Conversations mostly make no sense, unless they are about important quests, but you won't understand who is who until they start talking. For example, in one of the towns, you meet a prostitute who hates men. She sends you on a mission to bring her poison which she then uses to kill the Goblin King, because that poison supposedly tastes like urine, and the king loves it when she urinates in his mouth. When you kill the Goblin King, his angry subjects destroy your house and the whole village hates you for it. I say, a lot of it makes no sense.
Although you have the freedom to go in any direction you want, your pet blocks paths that are not yet open or if you lack something for progress, so it practically guides you through the game and directs you. If you don't know what to do after a boss fight, ask your pet and it will advise you. Along the way, you will encounter caves, dungeons, clearings with divine beings, and after discovering any of them, you can select them on the map and your pet will teleport you there.
Like all RPGs of this type, aside from boss fights, all other battles come down to random encounters. Battles are classic turn-based, and you have a choice of 5 skills that you can use during the fight - note, they must be pre-selected because once someone attacks you, you no longer have the option to change.
Every weapon has its unique skill that you can only use at the beginning if you have that weapon selected. By using that skill in combat, you improve it, and when it reaches 100%, all bonuses from the weapon are permanently added to your attributes, and you can use the skill even without that weapon. There are 96 different skills, and the game encourages you to buy weapons, change them regularly, unlock skills, and find the winning combination for yourself. Also, some skills provide huge combo bonuses if used one after the other, so it's good to combine them that way.
You also need to improve other equipment, but in a way that enemies hit you - meaning that, unlike weapons, you cannot grind and improve equipment on low-level enemies. Once a piece of equipment is improved, its attributes are permanently added to yours. Enemies give a lot of EXP, so just by progressing through the game, you will level up quickly without additional frantic grinding. Once you discover your winning combination of skills, you will be practically unstoppable and will want to reach the final boss as soon as possible.
Both your attacks and those of enemies have the potential to cause special conditions (bleeding, fatigue, madness, etc.) that greatly affect battles, and some also have certain side effects that will hinder normal movement - the entire screen will blur, making it hard to see where you are going.
Throughout the game, you will fight against no less than 41 bosses, and you will discover approximately 150 different types of enemies, so you can expect around 20 hours to complete the entire game, uncover all secrets, and develop all skills.
Now, to not make everything sound so great, there are also certain drawbacks: the music is monotonous and loops every few seconds, quickly becoming tiresome. The items you use during combat do not have descriptions, so you don't know what they actually do - I recommend reading in the inventory what effects they prevent, how much HP they give you, and similar. Over time, you will memorize all of this, but until then, I recommend having a small piece of paper with notes.
Also, through battles you will collect a bunch of various ingredients, but it never tells you which ones are important, so you will often sell everything, only to find out that one of the NPCs needs exactly what you sold. Then you embark on a quest for new ingredients, but the problem is that you don't know which monster you got it from or where that monster resides - and monsters don't always drop the same ingredients, which makes things even more difficult. There is an option to mark in your inventory what you don't want to sell, but how to know what you will need somewhere in the future? And you need money, because apart from a couple of skills that collect money in battle and you will only get them much later, the only way to earn money is by selling ingredients.
However, the game is not too demanding, it is quite easy and the story is interesting. If you love 8-bit graphics, and adult humor, sexual references, and enemies that look like they were drawn by a horny teenager don't bother you, you will have a great time. Because that's what games should be. Fun.
A copy of the game for review purposes was provided by the publisher CobraTekku Games
