The story is simple; you're a magical girl tasked with finding your brother Reid with your other magical girl friends, only for them to get turned into monsters as you must quickly remind them of who they are by, of course, whacking them repeatedly until they turn back to normal.
The first thing right off the bat I notice is the custom game icon, which is always nice. The custom UI is also a good touch and separates it in terms of style from other, default looking ones. Also, I love the way Priscilla talks. Her dialogue actually made me want to find all the interactables just to see what she had to say about them. Also, the way the party members interact with each other on occasion is nice, i.e how Roza wants to read the book on the floor; I wish there were more of that.
Also, saying this right now, I love the magical girl transformation scenes. I totally wasn't expecting there to be a whole cutscene, but I really liked seeing it. ;o; I also love how all the characters have moves in battle that seem to derive from magical girl themes, that was super cool to see!
Now, moving onto some things I feel like could be improved, I understand the whole "unable to get into the secret room and ending" problem has already been addressed so I won't be mentioning that here. My only advice to prevent this from happening in the future is to just playtest more, but I totally understand it can be hard to do if you're positive everything's been sorted out. :">
The music that plays in the main menu plays immediately the second you start a new game, which is just kinda jarring, in my opinion. A change of music'll for either'll probably fix it. :0c
The actual gameplay — which is mostly just attacking enemies until they die so you can get a shard — isn't really that engaging or fun. I feel like there could be more of a break in the formula, like let's say instead of having the same routine for every room of gathering shards after fighting an enemy, maybe add a little bit of variety? Like, of course, you can still have those battles if you'd like, but there can be different triggers aside from the enemies just standing in front of the item you need, y'know? :0c
Now, I will admit there were some parts where I can see attempts to not make the combat an "Attack Masher" through how some moves are able to make the player regain MP and TP, and the lich fight I actually kind of liked! The nonstop invisible enemies that appear prevent you from just autolocking and killing the lich, and it seems to regain MP when hit with physical moves as opposed to being more affected by magical attacks. So, honestly, I like how the developer tried to make it so there's a potential strategy the player can go for. That's great!
Bugs/Errors I found
- There's a passability issue in the room where you find the key, specifically with the white counters.
- When all the transformation gems are collected it'll say "You have collected five pieces of Roza's transformation gem" for her, but nobody else. Since all the gems have been collected at this point, I just thought that was a bit strange.
All in all, I enjoyed this game! The dialogue was nice and it was short and sweet. The battles could use some improvement, but overall, I would definitely play it again just to find the secret ending. Since this also seems to be apart of a series, I'll definitely look out for more!
