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« on: October 28, 2015, 12:57:14 PM »
Played the demo for Stella Glow, Atlus's upcoming "RPG for pervs" (Guillaume)...
...and if I was not sold on this game already, I would probably skip it after playing the demo. If The Legend of Legacy's demo was meaty, this is rather skin-and-bones - there is so very little to do here except for moving through the prologue of the game proper. Which was, again, fine in TLoL's case since the demo just throws a lot of what makes up the core of the game proper, but here I wish they had gone with something separate to allow more insight into more of the mechanics.
Talking of the demo itself, the gameplay is decent, but has brought nothing new to the table so far. It's a tactical RPG in the vein of Final Fantasy Tactics, bringing along even many mechanics from that game, i.e. positioning being relevant to damage taken (and whether or not your main character can execute a counterattack), though its leveling is lifted from Fire Emblem - each action nets EXP, taking down an enemy gives you some more and it seems scaled according to the difference between your level and your enemy's. The visuals are also decent, the character design is not stunning per se, but nicely done and less cheesecakey than what I would expect from an Imageepoch game, though the hero seems a bit bland in this. Oh, and bring on the trope counter, because this beginning has you play as an amnesiac (!) who for some reason is the best hunter in the small village he lives in (!!) and lives with a girl who kind of likes you but is a bit aloof about it (!!!). Also the village goes to hell after a witch starts singing. And there are ungodly amounts of text, but there's a text skip feature and autoplay.
Presentation-wise it is acceptable, keeping in mind though they had considerable budget problems when finishing this (Imageepoch went broke while wrapping up this game). The dub is... it is Atlus USA's own dub, so you will probably recognize some voices from other games they localized (I believe the main character is voiced by Yuri Lowenthal). What is really good is the music. Yasunori Mitsuda has not brought his A game so far into the demo, but I found the menu theme good enough to just put headphones on and just listen until the loop restarted.
If a demo's goal is to sell you on a game, this does not really cut it. If you are not sold on this game already or can look past some of the contemporary anime clichés the story in the prologue offers, then I do not believe this demo will make you desire Stella Glow.
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