This is an avoid 'em up. You can only move and use whichever ability you have equipped (dodge-roll, time-slow, etc.) by pushing the A button. The level-select is a +-shaped grid; to unlock adjacent levels, you have to complete its task, usually some variation of "survive X seconds" or "die from X types of discs." There's no level design (the saws are even launched in random directions and often from random locations each time), but the enemy variety and goal variety helps make up for it somewhat.

Each section of the map has its own gimmick. The starting area has saws moving along the edges of the arena, the center area has a circle in the middle (you have to be in the circle for your timer to progress), and the top section has the ground separated into tiles, and you have to walk on each tile to increase your timer (with all the tiles toggling back once you've walked on all of them). Those are fine, but the left section has a worm come from the ground to eat you every few seconds (and there isn't much warning, just an outline forming in the sand), and the right section is dark, with only a light, pulsing on and off, to show what's around you (and whatever pittance of light-producing discs the level decides to give you, which could be none). It's always frustrating when the light goes off before you see a disc coming towards you, and that's the disc that kills you before your light comes back on. There's even one level where you don't even get that light; you have to use the disc-absorbing power to get a light disc and bring it into the level to see (and if you die before achieving the goal, you gotta go back and get another one).

Still, it's a solid foundation with mostly-decent execution, but there is one major issue: arbitrary riddles. Notably, two levels require you to survive a minimum of 5-10 seconds in every room you've unlocked, but on top of the fact that many rooms are unlocked by surviving 5-10 seconds in their adjacent rooms, there's one level called "Timeless" where the timer stays at 0. How do you get the timer moving so you can unlock the other two levels? I had to look it up and found a walkthrough specifically for doing exactly that (just goes to show how unintuitive it is), and it involves going to a different level and interpreting the directions the saws are launched as inputs during the level select! You don't need to unlock the "survive 10 seconds in every unlocked room" to best the game, but it helps since the objective to unlock the final boss's room is "survive X seconds total in this area."

And that's to say nothing of the goals that are things like "???? the ????"

When you beat the game, you unlock "hard mode" which is the same level grid, but now all the objectives are "survive 10-15 seconds" and levels can be unlocked from ANY adjacent room instead of specific ones (so if you're having trouble surviving 15 seconds in the room that spawns 8 boss discs, you can try a different level to unlock the one you're after). Instead of ending with another boss, you just have to survive 25 seconds in the last room. I liked it more than some of the more arbitrary goals of normal mode, though it can still feel rather luck-based sometimes since the discs spawn from and are launched in random directions.

Overall, it's okay. Solid gameplay foundation, but some of the levels can be a bit cheap and the goals can be obtuse. Wait for a sale.

Platformer. The overworld is structured like a metroidvania, but the dungeons are all fairly linear, at best having keys in dead ends that force you to double-back. Standard left/right movement and jump (as well as a basic melee attack with the X button), but you also unlock traversal abilities, such as an uppercut (double-jump) and a forward-charge (get across large gaps).

One of the first thing's you'll notice is that the difficulty selection actually tells you what the differences are! Fewer checkpoints and XP loss on death. That sounds pretty bad, but I played on the harder difficulty and thought checkpoints weren't too far apart. Plus, when the game says you lose experience points on "death," it actually means on game-over; you can use in-game currency to buy extra lives so dying just respawns you at the beginning of the room you died (without any XP loss). Plus, every time you reach a save point, you get those lives back, so you're not having to go back to the stores each time.

As for level design, there are moments where enemies can work off of the terrain (like in the third dungeon where the hopping enemies keep hopping up the platforms), but it can be very flat and basic a lot of the time. The overworld is particularly egregious (though you could excuse that due to the whole metroidvania aspect), but even dungeons can be quite repetitive at times:

Many enemies also make you wait before you can attack them safely, whether it's the spear-throwers who shamble back and forth before abruptly tossing their spear at you (you need your shield up to block it) or the shielded enemies that only give you a moment to attack before they attack and bring their shield back up. They can also take a while to kill at first; luckily, all attacks in the game can be avoided, so you don't have to worry if you decide to sink all your XP into upgrading your attack until it gets maxed out.

Still, level design isn't too bad, but this game also has riddles, one of which is mandatory! See, not long after you beat the second dungeon, you'll reach a dam and a dead end. There's another path, but you can't reach it since you need the double-jump. I went back and forth across the map, doing side-quests just in case they gave me the item I needed, but nothing. After a while, I finally realized which of the NPC's was actually giving a hint on how to unlock the third dungeon.

Despite being able to avoid everything, some attacks can still be pretty cheap. For example, the third dungeon's boss can shoot a large laser you need to duck under, but its weak point is high enough that you can only hit it if you're jumping--AND the game won't let you do short hops; tapping the jump button makes you do a full jump, and the boss's foreshadow animation for the laser lasts much shorter than it takes for you to fall back down from a jump. There's an optional werewolf boss whose melee attacks reach much further than yours, but doesn't really give you time to get out of the way. There's another optional boss (a spider-like thing) that'll crawl on the ceiling to drop eggs that hatch into little spiders before falling back to the ground, but it always climbs up the right wall and drops on the left side, meaning it'll walk right into you when it goes to climb the wall a second time since you'll likely be attacking from the right side of the boss after it climbs/falls the first time. The fifth dungeon has little red enemies that look exactly like background objects at first until they jump at you (and they move faster than you can move); even after you know what to look for, there's a room where they're above the top of the screen, so you have even less time to react to them (and you have to avoid spears in this room as well, with the red guys always landing right between where the spears spawn, right where you'd be standing to take cover).

There's a postgame dungeon, but it can be pretty unintuitive to unlock. When you beat the game normally, you unlock a "book" that mentions the item you need to access postgame, then immediately mentions the dam. This made me think the item was hidden in the dam area, and although I did find a secret dungeon in that area, all I got for completing it was better armor. So, I looked up a walkthrough and found out the way to unlock the postgame dungeon is by making the correct choices in sidequests! It can be rather ambiguous what the correct choice can be ahead of time, but lucky for me, I just so happened to make all the right choices for the ones I did; my hang-up was that there were some I hadn't done yet. In my defense, though, like I said, one of them is really unintuitive: you're told that an NPC became unwell after visiting the upper-left part of the map, so you can reasonably assume that the item you need is there. This is technically true, but it isn't a key item; it's a projectile weapon! You know, the thing you shoot at enemies to make them die, except shooting the sick guy cures him. Maybe--maybe--you could argue this makes more sense in context, but I can say with confidence that I never would've figured it out on my own. It wasn't until after I had beaten the postgame boss that I realized there even is an NPC that hints toward how to solve this quest…in a different town on the other side of the map, and I only figured that out because I already knew what the solution was and I thought "hey, did that random line refer to this?"

If you made the wrong choices, though, it isn't worth going back and replaying the game because the postgame dungeon is the flattest, most blandly-designed dungeon in the game. The enemies are nearly mini-boss tier, but you can just charge up your dash to get past them without fighting. You also have to re-fight the previous bosses, except two at once and they have maybe one or two new attacks (the first boss's refight spawns more of those red guys, and I'm not sure you can kill them faster than they spawn). The postgame boss is okay, but the game wants you to stay on the center platform even though the left platform (which you use to reach the boss) never goes away, so when the boss jumps from the right side to the left side, you'll get crushed before you can react (unless you deliberately jump on the platform where all the hazards are/were).

Overall, this game is okay. There's some good level design, but it also has its fair share of cheap hits and flat, repetitive areas. Wait for a sale.

Hack 'n' slash. Move with left stick, attack with the shoulder button, dodge with A, block with B, hold X to run. You have a ranged weapon along with your standard melee weapon, and although the game says you can aim the gun with the right stick, that only happens when you're at a standstill; as soon as you push the left stick in any direction, that becomes the direction you're aiming, regardless of whatever you're doing to the right stick. You also have a stamina meter that runs out slightly before it looks like it should, at which point you walk slower and can't attack or block (you can still jump, though, so you're not completely defenseless).

The difficulty selection pretends to tell us what's different, but the descriptions are pretty vague. "Explore at your own pace," "the intended experience," but what does that mean? Hard mode's description is a bit more clear, but I still can't intuit if the enemies being "smarter" will result in a fun challenge or a frustrating challenge. I just played on normal mode.

There is one difference that's made relatively clear: hard mode claims that it has "crushing time limits." Thing is, the time limits in this game are…perhaps I've overused/misused the word "gimmick" in the past, but this mechanic really does feel entirely superfluous, like it's just there to add an extra bullet point to the store page (at least on normal mode). See, these aren't ordinary time limits; when you reach the first town, you're told that your character and every NPC have so many "hours" (minutes in real-life time) before they turn evil and have to be put down. At first, you'll be all like "oh no, I have to beat the game before everyone dies," but even if you set aside the fact that you can easily beat the game in around half the time your character is given, it won't take long before basic exploration nets you a decent collection of time-extension items that you can give to low-time NPCs to keep them alive until the end of the game (well, the important NPCs, anyway; the game won't let you waste time-extension items on second-class citizens, even though they also blatantly have timers). Really, the only way a character will die is if you let them, and even then, you'll find store owners later in the game who sell the same stuff and have much longer timers.

Even the escape sequence at the end (where you move slower due to story reasons) gives you around twice the time you need to escape, including when you go the wrong way and have to turn around. All the time limits in the game are just there to feel tense without actually adding anything (at least on normal mode).

I would like to give the game praise for having actual level design, something most hack 'n' slash games don't do. It's no Hyper Light Drifter, but some arenas are surrounded by pits you can knock grounded enemies into, and there's a few parts in the third dungeon where you have to jump across ice platforms before they crumble (then, after two seconds, jump to a side-alcove and wait for your stamina to recharge again). Falling into pits/water/lava doesn't damage you, though; you just get teleported back on the last solid platform you were on. There are also some towers in the second dungeon that shoot at you, but they're very short-lived (there's only maybe three of them, and only in that one dungeon; I don't even think regular enemies show up by them). The fifth dudgeon has flamethrowers, but they're never combined with combat areas, so they just result in you sitting there, waiting for them to deactivate. The fourth dungeon's wind segments were almost promising, but the wind can die down, meaning you have to wait for it to pick back up again; there's even one room where the wind blows in the opposite direction when it finally picks back up, making you wait extra long if you just barely didn't make the last jump.

Not so stellar are the hex-platform segments you have to go through after beating each boss; the next platform only reveals itself if you're right next to the edge, and walking on it has the previous platform turn invisible, making it nothing but trial and error until you finally reach the end and get to see the next cutscene.

At the end of the game, you kinda have to refight the bosses; it's a single entity that transforms into a different boss after it attacks a couple times. It's an interesting take on trying to make refighting bosses not completely repetitive, but when you beat it, you have to fight two of them at once! At least their patterns are synced, but there can still be too much stuff onscreen to keep track of (I'd burn my defense/attack/stamina cogs on this part every time). Honestly, the third phase of the final boss (which is actually unique this time) ends up being easier; the only thing you need to watch out for is that the boss's melee attack has it teleport right next to you before it attacks, so you won't be able to get any hits in (nor will you be able to use your healing item, which takes a second to activate) if you want to avoid getting hit. Also, dying here means you have to redo both previous battles against the doppelgangers, so if they weren't blatantly repetitive before, they are now.

Overall, this game is okay. It's definitely well above most other hack 'n' slash games due to it having actual level design, but I'm still yet to play a game where the stamina meter actually adds anything instead of just forcing you to retreat preemptively and wait, well before any foreshadow animations happen. Wait for a sale.

This is a run 'n' gun. You have standard left/right movement and a jump button, but there's very little platforming; one extremely brief vertical section in 2-1 followed by some basic pitfalls, then a similar series of pitfalls in 4-3, and that's basically it. Instead, most of the game will be the screen stopping and waves of enemies coming at you from both sides of the screen (and maybe some from above), and once you shoot them all down, you can continue forward. You might think the game would try to have different level design at least for the arenas, or maybe introduce different enemies regularly, but…not really? IIRC there's the bugs which aren't that different from the soldiers, there are the motorcycle soldiers that move faster, and there's an airborne enemy exclusive to 4-1, but that's it. As for level design, there's one arena that has some bumps on the edges so you can't just stand in the center and shoot at the enemies as they come on screen, but again, that's about it for level design.

Even if that still sounds like something you'd enjoy, keep in mind the explosions and debris from destroyed enemies regularly gets in the way of alive enemies and their projectiles, meaning you can get hit without knowing what hit you.

The difficulty curve is also out-of-whack because the second boss is one of the hardest in the game. You're on a car that's constantly driving forward, every now and then going up/down hills (which changes the trajectory of your shots); the first phase has the weak point in the upper-left, which charges and shoots a giant laser, but since the arena slopes down from the top-left to the lower-right, it can easily cover the entire arena and give you no safe space; you have to walk towards the weak point (turns out it doesn't have contact damage) to bait the laser straight down, then you can safely shoot the boss. The second phase has you shooting down at the tires, but projectiles are constantly coming at you from the right side of the screen (and some from the top of the screen); even though they move slow and can be shot down, the car randomly going on slopes causes your shots to be shifted at angles, making it unnecessarily difficult to destroy the tightly-woven projectiles (you can only aim in the four cardinal directions, making the offset very frustrating to deal with).

The other bosses aren't too bad. There's a giant worm in 3-1 that'll try to fall down on you, but you can dodge-roll out of the way in time. 4-1 has a cloaked figure that spawns little cubes; I forgot what the cubes do, but you can shoot them and the boss just fine. There's also a robot at the end of 4-3 that's constantly scrolling the screen while moving away from you and tossing arced projectiles at you.

The final boss has a shield, and the only way to break it is to keep shooting at it until you fill up your mighty meter, then activate it and shoot it a bit more, at which point you can actually start harming the boss. It's okay, just shooting some regular shots at you and summoning flame pillars you need to avoid/dodge through. The second phase has guided missiles, and it can shoot a sustained-giant-laser downward while moving across the arena; at first, you'll think you'll have to dodge through it, but after a bit, you'll realize it never actually goes to the edge of the arena, so you can just stand there safely. Annoyingly, when the laser appears to be dissipating and is only one pixel wide, it can still hurt you.

When you beat the game, you unlock a postgame level that's quite a bit longer than any of the other levels. It almost has a bit more verticality, but there aren't any enemies during those sections. The most unique thing it does is it has water; you can't dive, but enemies can be underwater, so you have to jump and shoot downward. It also has a unique boss, but it's really difficult since it'll flood the arena and send mines up at you, and you don't have enough time to destroy them if you only have your default weapon (special weapons all have ammo that runs out). Also, if you dodge-roll in midair, you can't stop yourself; pushing the opposite direction on the left stick has you move in the other direction at the same speed, making it hard to be precise with your dodging.

Also when you beat the game, you unlock "mirror mode" which is basically just the same levels again (without the postgame level). They aren't even mirrored. I think there are more enemies (evidenced by some cutscenes where motorcycle enemies ended up in them when there were no enemies during the cutscenes in the regular levels), but it isn't that noticeable. They may actually be easier since you can use your late-game-unlocked ally and power. In fact, I S-ranked every "mirror" level except two: 2-1 (A-rank) and the final level (C-rank), where the final boss was notably much harder (a lot more guided missiles you need to shoot down). I even S-ranked 4-3's mirror level despite dying twice, so I don't know what determines rank. You even get the exact same cliffhanger ending as when you beat normal mode, even though the level-select heavily implies that mirror mode is what would bring closure to said cliffhanger.

Not recommended. Even if this were a $10 game instead of a $20 game, it'd have to be on a pretty big discount before I could recommend it, even to fans of Metal Slug or Midnight Wanderers.

Hack 'n' slash. Left stick moves, A dodges, X does a melee attack, hold LB to aim and push B to shoot, hold RT to charge a more-powerful melee attack. Regular melee attacks can be chained together relatively quickly for a hack 'n' slash (even compared to UNSIGHTED), but it seems like many enemies' attacks are also quicker to compensate. Plus, not only are you still unable to move while attacking, you can't even dodge out of an attack animation, and given how little time the foreshadow animations give you, that could very well mean the difference between life and death.

There's also barely any level design; sometimes there are pits you can lure/knock enemies into, and falling off actually damages you (unlike UNSIGHTED or Bug Fables), but even that much is rare, with most of the game just being generic combat arenas and empty halls. There's a brief part where you can shoot an arrow through a flame to light torches, but that gimmick is over just as suddenly as it's introduced; no time to build on it and have actual puzzles or anything. There are some jars you can break, but most don't have anything in them; green jars spawn glowing white orbs when you break them, but those are actually projectiles that'll hurt you (would've been better introduced by having the enemy green jars first instead of the regular green jars). There's also this one part near the end of the jar level where a grenadier is placed out-of-range and is shooting at you while you have to fight other enemies; killing the other enemies opens the way for you to reach the grenadier. The closest the game gets to having meaningful level design is in the ice level, where platforms start to fall after you stand on them, and you have to hit switches while avoiding the pits and the spinning lasers. Those parts were fun, but again, pretty short-lived.

Also, you can't use healing items directly; you have to find a pot to plant the seed, then you can use it, and you have to find another pot if you want to use another healing item (the plant does grow back and let you heal again from the same pot, but it takes a while and may or may not be based on progression).

The boss of the ice area is especially frustrating. The front half is immune to damage, but its attack reaches quite a bit further than its front, and you can't really get behind it since it always tries to face you. Plus, it has a rolling attack which can only barely be dodged because it'll continue facing you until the moment it starts moving, and it moves pretty quickly. You only barely have enough time to attack once before you need to become evasive again, and since only its back half can actually take damage, that one chance could very easily be in vain. After this, I decided to upgrade my attack speed (something I didn't think I'd have to do since, as mentioned earlier, attacks are relatively quick compared to other hack 'n' slash games).

The final boss also has the rolling attack, but between its other attacks and its better hitbox, it's much easier than the ice boss. There's even a bit more level design with the segments where you have to avoid charging bulls or grapple a grapple point before the platform you're on collapses.

There's a postgame here, but it's extremely aimless, especially after you ring the bell and switch to nighttime. I skimmed a walkthough, and it was basically all just wandering around until you stumble across something new, then wandering around some more until you stumble across what to do with the new thing. I even tried out doing the first one, but there's absolutely no in-game hint what you're supposed to do with the ghosts (heck, since it's nighttime, the Lord of Doors statues are harder to see!). Needless to say, I did not try to finish the postgame.

Not recommended.

Top-down action-adventure. It's not quite a hack 'n' slash since you don't really have combos, and some forms even let you move and attack at the same time. Dungeons are procedurally generated (the overworld is fixed, though), so I guess it's part roguelite? There are also RPG-mechanics, but instead of the usual "kill enemies to get XP," you have to do sidequest-tier actions to level up different forms, like "kill X enemies at once Y times with this specific attack." You unlock later forms by reaching certain levels with earlier forms. Some of the tasks are quite frustrating to try to do and are best ignored (especially since at a certain point, you'll get plenty of other form-specific tasks, more than enough to unlock all the other forms). Plus, it's not like the forms are in order of worst to best; since melee enemies give you no time to avoid their attacks (and your own melee attacks are short-reaching), you don't have much incentive to use any form except the ranged ones (especially since the mandatory dungeons lock your form-progression sidequests). The game tries to mitigate this by giving some enemies shields that can only be broken by certain types of attacks, but then you can just switch back after breaking the shield.

Speaking of sidequests, completing them gives you stars, and you have to spend stars to unlock the mandatory dungeons. Thing is, the dungeons require quite a lot of stars, and since you're spending stars to unlock the dungeons, having just enough for one usually means you wont have enough for the next one, so you'll have to grind, doing a bunch of different sidequests, before you can finally unlock all the dungeons.

The game actually has some level design; one dungeon has fire-wheels spinning along rails, and other dungeons have projectiles being shot from walls, so you have to time your movement through them. There are even a few regular sidequests that have fixed design instead of being procedurally generated. Unfortunately, since all the dungeons are procedurally generated, mandatory or not, that means the enemies can't be built around the levels, but instead need to have the more generic "run towards the player" AI. There's still some variety despite this, like the torso enemies that stay still for a bit, then wind up and spin towards you before stopping; or the buried enemies that you can't attack until they pop out of the ground (next to you, to attack you); but the end result is still just mobs of enemies heading straight towards you while you run away shooting at them. (like I said, you could use melee attacks, but they make it near impossible to avoid damage, especially the ones where you can't even move and attack at the same time). The ranged enemies fare a bit better, like the cat-cloaks who stand still and summon a hazard circle around you, or this one enemy type whose projectile shoots other projectiles in a spiral pattern, but most of the others are just your standard "run to you and shoot when in range" enemies. The blobs are especially frustrating because their projectiles leave a puddle on the ground, and staying in the puddle for too long poisons you, but the halls are often too thin to walk around the puddles, so once you've killed the enemies, you're just standing there for several seconds, waiting for the puddles to disappear (which is extra frustrating in the upper-right mandatory dungeon where poison lasts much longer than normal).

To keep that from becoming too repetitive, dungeons have rooms that go into lockdown and make you fight waves of enemies. That way, instead of them all coming at you from the same direction, they're coming at you from around the arena! The arenas have fixed level design (even inside dungeons), but even when it isn't just…a room…it doesn't make much difference given how the enemies act. The main difference is when the wave doesn't spawn all at once, but one at a time; you'll think you're safe to shoot at the first enemies, but then suddenly more enemies spawn where you are, and it's made extra frustrating when combined with actual level design like a giant flame wheel you just have to run away from.

The bosses are extra disappointing because they're just larger versions of regular enemies with minor adjustments to their attacks (the only unique boss is the final boss). The first boss is a larger torso that spins longer and bounces off the walls; the second boss is a larger cat-cloak that summons more hazard circles and splits in two as you damage it; etc.

The final boss isn't in a dungeon, and thus you don't need to spend stars to unlock it, so there's one good thing. As for the boss itself, it's another wait-for-the-weak-point boss, with swarms of enemies going after the center point that you need to defend. Sometimes, the boss will shoot a projectile at the center point, but since you can't attack projectiles, you have to switch to the form that can summon familiars and have them take the hit for the center point. Also among this chaos, a small circle can appear on the ground below you, then have an arm reach out to deal damage if you're still close to it; between all the enemy swarms, it can be hard to notice this one after a while.

Overall, this game is hard to recommend. It has a decent bit of variety with the elemental hazards, and it even does a commendable job at trying to add variety to the "run towards you" enemies, but the massive number of stars you need to unlock dungeons can make the game grindy and repetitive at times (only five dungeons are mandatory, but you'll still have to do most of the others anyway just to get enough stars). Wait for a really good sale.

Puzzle-platformer. The platforming is always really easy, but the puzzles…are honestly also pretty easy. You switch between platformer mode and room-moving mode, moving the rooms around until you can connect doors/ladders with each other, then you go back to platformer mode to progress. If you break a connection, everything gets reset, which means puzzles need to be simple enough that they can be solved without breaking a connection, so it's really just a matter of figuring out which room goes where.

The game acts like it's gonna get more complicated by introducing things like holes (sends you to whichever room you placed behind the one you're in) and even LEDs that prevent a room from being reset when a connection is broken, but the puzzles never get that tricky until near the end of the game. The only times you'll get tripped up are mechanics that aren't introduced too well, like how keys can block lasers or how the elevator-activation button always moves the elevator to its topmost position instead of whichever floor you're on. The gimmick at the end of the game was especially sinister since the game threatens to reset the position of the key your 3D-self is holding when you go to break a connection, even though there's no other way to solve the puzzle, so you break the connection and the object in question doesn't get reset after all.

The game also introduces things like saws and lasers, and you might think the game is gonna give up trying to have puzzles and go straight action-platformer, but no, those also don't see much use.

Not recommended. It's mostly just kinda boring; even the final puzzles are only a little tricky.

Just like Luna Nights before it, this is an Igavania: similar maze-like structure to the game world as Metroidvanias, but much flatter and more bland level design (even in vertical shafts). The most this game has as far as level design is a few rooms after you get the double jump, there's one hall with a low ceiling and spike patches; I couldn't figure out how to get through without getting hit, but at least it tried. You get progression-based powers just like in Metroidvanias (such as the aforementioned double-jump), but more often than not, you'll just get weapons with higher attack power or a key to open certain-color doors.

What sets this game apart is its element system: you switch between wind and fire elements with the shoulder button, and you're immune to attacks from the element you have equipped. Killing enemies increases the level of the element you don't have equipped (and getting hit lowers the level of the one you do have equipped), and when an element is at max level (3), equipping the element slowly heals your health bar. Oh, there are also a bunch of other elements besides those two, but they have to fight for scraps like magic attacks or the rare elemental weapon.

One of the first things you'll notice is the game feels like it's lagging constantly. Not just because of the somewhat-sluggish movement and slightly-choppier-than-average animation, but also because every now and then, the game speeds up briefly. It's not my computer because I can run The Pedestrian just fine; it has to be whatever engine the game is using. Another irritant is if you unpause the game with the B button, the game also does whatever action you assigned to B (in my case, it was magic attacks).

Almost every boss has some cheap hits that you can only avoid if you memorize and preempt them. The very first boss shoots a laser towards the sky, then sweeps it down (faster than you can move) so the only safe spot is right next to the boss; later, the boss jumps over the arena (so you get hit if you're mid-jump) then immediately slides across the floor (so you get hit if you're not mid-jump). The second boss will run towards you, but you won't know if it'll just attack directly (avoid by jumping) or if it'll jump over you (avoid by not jumping) ahead of time, so you just have to remember when each attack happens in the pattern.

Bosses aren't the only thing that's cheap, though; some enemies are also blatantly unfair. For example, there's an enemy that's just transparent, invulnerable black fog while you're facing it, and since level design is just "hall," you'll almost never not be facing them (especially when they're first introduced). Plus, the backgrounds are detailed enough that the wisps of black fog barely even stand out despite still having contact damage:

As if that weren't bad enough, there's another enemy that is drawn behind the background, and the only way you can tell it's there is by looking for purple smoke behind the windows:

And if that's all too unique for you, the game also has generic "blends into the background by being the same color" enemies as well, made extra frustrating by being obscured by the HUD on your way up:

And just when you think the game can't possibly get any more unfair, there's this enemy that can straight-up turn completely invisible (the GIF compression makes it easier to see its eyes):

As if all the cheap hits weren't bad enough, the game goes even lower by straight-up recycling bosses. The first phase of the sixth boss is nearly identical to the first phase of the fifth boss, the eighth boss is a duplicate of the second boss, and the ninth and tenth bosses are very similar to each other as well; the only differences are a couple new attacks. Then, before the final boss, the game has the gall to make you re-fight all previous bosses, without any extra attacks! It doesn't even have the excuse of being an endurance test like in Mega Man because you're given full HP/MP/element-level restoration items between each fight! It's just padding. Also before the final boss is a bunch of long, empty shafts and corridors, all of which easily could have been summed up in a single cutscene in a single room.

Not recommended.

Turn-based third-person shooter. Each character has a time meter, and actions like walking and shooting drain said meter; when it's out, that character can't move until the next turn. If a character dies, that character can be revived by moving another character nearby and spending some more time holding the examine button. What separates it from Valkyria Chronicles and Codename S.T.E.A.M. (post forthcoming) is that, although you can use the right stick to move the camera without consequence, your time starts draining as soon as you start holding the aim button (LT), meaning you need to be quick as well as precise with your shots. One issue I had is that, even in aiming mode, the game doesn't always make it clear if your explosive shot will get hit by anything, especially a chest-high-wall you're taking cover behind, meaning it isn't uncommon for you to blow yourself up on accident.

Another difference is, instead of enemies having fixed positions or spawn locations, they always spawn around whichever character is closest to the goal, and always at the end of each turn. This means, if you're clever enough, you can usually wipe out all of the spawned enemies in a single turn before they can act and continue forward without taking damage; whether or not you succeed, more enemies will spawn next turn anyway (unless the objective is to kill all remaining enemies on the map). Sometimes they even spawn behind walls, which can be annoying since ghosts can move through walls, but you can always push the X button to toggle top-down view, which uses icons to better show where enemies are in relation to you.

Due to the nature of how enemies spawn, the game could get repetitive even with its fixed level design; however, this is mitigated by the enemy variety. Along with the aforementioned ghosts, there are runners that explode if they reach you, mummies that toss a long-range projectile at you, and even mini-boss-tier enemies like a vampire that spawns duplicates of itself (you can't tell which is which, even if you keep an eye on its movements during the enemies' turn) and a yeti that will revive if you don't destroy all the crystals that grow from its corpse.

There are some issues with the enemies, though. For example, one enemy will only go after a marked character and it can only be seen if you have the marked character selected (can't be seen as other characters or in free-camera-view or even in top-down view), but it can only be attacked by other characters. Fine in theory, but levels can be pretty big, not to mention all the walls they have, so if your goal is to kill all the enemies and this is the only enemy left, you're basically just standing around, ending your turns until you finally see it pop up somewhere.

More frustrating are the assassins. Normally, the game has a cutscene that more-or-less tells you how the enemies work, but this is definitely on the less side because you won't know they can turn invisible (to all characters/camera views) until after it happens. The game does give you the option to "research" enemies so you can learn more about them, but to do that, you have to kill a certain number of said enemy beforehand. This means you won't know how to reveal invisible assassins until after you've had to deal with the frustration of not knowing how to reveal invisible assassins (at least with Vampires, you're given the hint that you need to examine them to finish them off). Worse, it turns out they're only revealed when a character is facing them. Not the camera, the character. Beyond that, your only clue for where they are is a very unhelpful audio cue.

As for level design, while it's fine for the most part, the game doesn't introduce bounce pads. They're just there, and you won't know they'll launch you up/forward until after you try to climb on one. They can also require pretty precise alignment, as if you're just a bit off, your character's feet will hit the bottom of the upper platform, causing you to fall back down and take damage. Also, some levels have elevators, but for whatever reason, the button to activate the elevator would sometimes deactivate randomly and come back on just as suddenly; I have no idea what causes it.

It's not just combat, though; there's also an overworld, showing available levels and beaten levels. This part also has a time meter; you spend time researching enemies/weapon upgrades/etc. or scouting enemy territory to make it an available level. Here, when your time is up, there's a chance that one of the areas you've beaten gets invaded by enemies again, at which point you can defend it. If you have a university (what lets you research stuff) on the territory being invaded, you get a unique map with the unique objective of turning on all three defense pillars in six turns; it's pretty tough, especially since this will likely be your first encounter with the reskinned bounce-pads that always toss you in a specific direction. If the invaded territory doesn't have a university on it…it's literally just a duplicate of the mission you did to liberate the territory in the first place, and thus quite a bit easier than the unique university-defend mission. This part of the game doesn't feel that well fleshed out, not just because there aren't that many territories, and not because defend-missions aren't unique, but also because the game doesn't keep total track of how many enemies you've killed; this means that if you haven't done basic research for an enemy, your kill count for the enemy's advanced research will always start at zero, even if you've already killed enough for both.

The final boss isn't too bad, but it can be kinda slow since you can only hit each eye (its weak points) once per turn before they close and become invulnerable, even if you have enough time to hit them more than once.

Overall, this game is okay. It's got a solid foundation and some interesting mechanics, but a couple of the enemies are more frustrating than fun, and the repeated missions can be a little annoying (even though it doesn't happen much before you beat the game). Wait for a sale.

Well, I gave this a chance, but it isn't for me. You have a 4x4 grid and the enemy has a 4x4 grid, and you shoot at each other until one side dies. Your special weapons are all cards that are drawn in random order, but you can always just shoot with RT (it doesn't do much damage, though). Having movement be instant from one tile to another is one thing, but almost every attack requires fast reflexes to avoid, even from the beginning. For example, there's a scorpion enemy that shoots a bunch of projectiles at your side, and the flashing ! icons show up so quickly one after the other that you basically just have to get lucky that the spot you seek refuge happens to be where they stop falling:

They should've all appeared at once so you could be like "okay, that's where I need to go to avoid damage" instead of having them appear one after the other in random locations before abruptly stopping. I admit I haven't played any of the Battle Network games, but I did play Mega Man Starforce Dragon a while back, and I'm pretty sure none of the battles or bosses in that game were nearly this quick or cheap (except maybe the final boss, that being the first time you have to use the counter/parry mechanic to avoid damage).

What's extra frustrating is, when I went to pause the game to record that footage, I realized too late that you can't pause! The start button does nothing, and I hastily had to switch back to the game to stop myself from taking even more damage. Why do single-player games do this?

Bosses are somehow even more fast and cheap than the regular enemies; it's hard to describe because it all happens so fast. I would've gotten game over on the first boss if the game didn't feel sorry for me and let me go ahead. Then, I would've gotten game over on the second boss, but the game once again felt sorry for how badly I was doing and healed me so I could keep fighting. Finally, when I made it to the third boss, the game decided to flip the mechanics on their head by having the flashing tile be where I have to stand instead of what I need to avoid; by the time I figured that out, I had lost quite a bit of health, and the rest of the boss's attacks finished me off, finally giving me an actual game over.

Also, this game is a permadeath roguelike, so getting game over means you have to start all the way over from the beginning (no permanent upgrades or anything). Not recommended.

This game is mostly just switch hunts. You just kinda wander forward until you stumble across a seed to plant or a bomb to blow up rubble or some gunk to vaccum like an even-easier version of Super Mario Sunshine. Level design is basically just "hall" and split paths that lead to crafting items, though it can still be annoying to figure out where to go due to the lack of landmarks or other clear direction; I'd be thinking I was going the right way, only to hit another dead end with crafting materials and having to turn around.

It takes a solid half-hour to reach the game's first hazard: acid dripping from the ceiling. The game does a good job of highlighting the location and range of the drips, but it's still just a matter of basic-timing/basic-platforming to get past them. A few minutes later, you encounter the first enemy type, and it's just your standard "run towards you and attack" enemy; all you have to do is vaccum them to grab them and then toss them wherever to kill them. The most notable thing the game does is the enemies spawn from nearby gunk, so you have to vacuum it all up before more spawn, but the game doesn't do anything with its unique ideas.

The game does have a second enemy type, but it takes TWO HOURS before finally deciding to show up. It's a ranged enemy that stays still and shoots at you, and you just have to vacuum/pull it from its roots to kill it. It's actually pretty tough to avoid getting hit since not only are its projectiles pretty fast, but it'll adjust its trajectory based on where you're walking towards. If you're just standing still on a moving platform, however, you'll never get hit. Despite their issues, they result in some of the best parts of the game since they involve the few parts with actual level design, being able to shoot you from ledges you can only reach from certain points.

There is no third enemy type, unless you count the first boss. It's a large enemy that'll charge at you, and you just have to bait it into hitting a wall or something so you can vacuum its back. The second boss isn't really a boss; you're just getting lasers shot at you from the center point (you have to take cover behind some chest-high walls), and you have to run around until you find the thing you need to vacuum.

After the second boss, you reach a wasteland that pretends to be more open, but this is actually a trick since the game will just straight-up kill you for going the wrong way (this was the only time I got game over).

The final boss is just the second boss again, except now it spawns the cannon fodder enemies as well as a couple first bosses. You're still just running around the arena, pulling levers.

To top it all off, despite how thinly-stretched the game feels, despite all the padding, switch hunts, and empty halls, the game is only about four hours long. But hey, at least it looks pretty.

Not recommended.

The game advertises itself as a classic-style JRPG, which is mostly true, but it should be noted that the game also does the "push the button at the right time to increase attack/defense" thing (I probably would've been more interested in the game had I known that). It even does the Bug Fables/Ikenfell thing where being extra precise with your timing lets you deal/block extra damage. That said, the game never actually tells you that, and since the timing for it is slightly later than you'd expect, it can be a while before you'd figure it out on your own.

The game's "see through time" gimmick isn't very well thought out. When it shows up, the left side of the screen shows the past and the right side shows the future, but the simple act of walking left/right has you clip behind the corresponding display, and NPCs can suddenly appear next to you even though there's no corresponding NPC in the past/future. Plus, if you actually want to time-travel (whether to overhear a conversation or simply get an item that isn't in the present), it isn't actually your character doing the time traveling, but the little frog following you; this means not only will you be further away from your target, but you'll have to slowly crawl across the distance. The time-manipulation gimmick is similarly disappointing in combat: enemies have three different states, and the time crystals can send them into their past state (if they're on the left side) or their future state (if they're on the right side)…unless, of course, they're already at their temporal limit for that side (future and past enemies can always appear instead), in which case the state-change just deals damage. As for what good this does, not much; some enemies are stronger in the past and weaker in the future, some vice versa, and others (like most bosses) have minimal-to-no differences, so you're often better off spending your turn attacking.

You can also scan enemies, but just like Bug Fables before it, the descriptions won't be too helpful. However, you also get told the enemies' elemental weaknesses along with revealing their health bar, so it's still worth it sometimes. The game also works this move in with its time-manipulation mechanic since just doing a normal scan will only get you info about its current state; if you want to get info about all of the enemies' states, you have to plant the scanner, then wait for the time mage's turn so you can send it into the future…if the enemy in question is on the right side of the screen. If they're on the left side, you have to activate the past crystal, then wait for the scanner's turn to plant it, then wait some more for the time mage's turn so you can deactivate the past crystal. After a while, you'll realize there isn't much difference between enemies' states, and I stopped bothering with this not long after one enemy's past form wouldn't let me deactivate the past crystal.

As for combat, the game is pretty easy. At first, I thought the game might get pretty tricky since it only takes a few regular battles for enemies to whittle your party's health down, but your MP is so massive (even from the beginning) that you can just use healing and attack spells to get through many battles (and even a boss or two) before you need to worry about refilling it. You also never have to worry about using time-manipulation since, as mentioned previously, it rarely does much of anything, and the game will let you know when it's required for a battle.

One of the only noteworthy bosses is the first one, mainly because of how slow it is. At first, you can only attack its left arm or its right arm; its actual weak point is safe in the background, free to grip any of your party members to prevent them from having a turn as well as heal itself for the damage done to you. Then, when you finally kill an arm and bait the weak point out to heal it, it only takes one turn for the weak point to heal the arm back to full HP and retreat back to the safety of the background. And thus, the cycle continues.

Oh, and the boss is immune to poison, because of course it is. Classic JRPG!

The only times battles will trip you up are when the game changes the rules. Notably, the first boss of the lava zone has a fire-wave attack that goes back and forth across your entire party, but try as I might, I could never block it no matter when I pushed the button. The boss also has a "syncro" attack, and if you try to block it, it deals more damage than if you just let it hit! I sent the dev team an email asking about this, but I never got a response (part of the reason I'm only now making this post is because I kept waiting on an email that never came; not like anyone's reading this anyway. If you are reading this, leave a comment saying Kari Hudo did nothing wrong). Even a simple "no, that was on purpose" would've been enough, but I never got anything! Still, if those were the only issues, it wouldn't be that major, but there are some deliberate choices that exacerbate these seemingly-accidental problems:

• One of your party members is removed for story reasons, and any equipped items are removed along with him.
• The character replacing him (who can't be swapped out during this part) has special attacks that use a roulette to determine who is attacked (allies are also on the roulette!), but it spins so quickly that you can't really time it properly. Even the normal attack has a small chance to deal a status effect instead of damage, which is useless when the boss is immune to status effects.
• The boss actually splits into two bosses, but it's random when it happens. It could be on the first turn, or it could be after 5-6 turns, but it's definitely not based on how much damage you dealt to the boss.
• When I finally got lucky enough to whittle the boss's HP below 400, it started healing itself.
• You can still swap out your 3rd party member, but for this part only, you can't do so in the pause menu; you have to take a six-minute round trip back to town. I did finally win when I swapped out my scanner/healer for the robot; turns out the robot is significantly more powerful than the scanner/healer and it has moves that doesn't cause it to overheat. Also, it even learns scan after a while, so that cemented the change for the rest of the game (it just can only scan one form, no ability to scan all forms like the other character, but as mentioned previously, it doesn't matter much).

MINOR LORE CRITICISM: I don't know why the game made such a big deal about Kari Hudo killing Azufra. It was clearly the right thing to do given what happened (and especially what was about to happen).

Outside of combat, the game is pretty bland. Dungeons are just your standard mazes with random encounters, sometimes with a switch-hunt to break up the monotony. The museum dungeon in the third area introduces pillars that you can toggle, but only their extremes are useful (creating a path in front of you or on the floor above you); despite this, if you want to toggle to the other extreme, you have to "revert" it to its middle state first, resulting in lots of unnecessary extra button pushes. The museum is also the only time the game's dungeons go beyond basic switch hunts, instead also making you look around for hints for the password (passphrase?) needed to access the boss room. Even the optional dungeon you unlock shortly before reaching the final boss is pretty bland, only now the switch hunts are significantly more time-consuming since you have to examine a switch to cycle which type of statue appears for which of the three available states, one by one, then spawn the statue and push it to where it needs to go (and only one state is pushable, so that's even more extra button pushes to change its state there and back again).

There are also sidequests, but in classic JRPG fashion, they're just fetch quests. You also get told that you wont be able to complete an area's sidequests if you fight the area's last boss; this is because you're given a choice after each battle, and if you don't do all the sidequests, you only have one choice (and thus won't get the best ending). Thing is, even from a story perspective, the game easily could have made one of the choices be something like "let me ask around town first" so you could finish any sidequests you haven't done without having to refight the area boss. Ironically, the one time the choice actually has a good story reason not to do this (incoming lava tsunami) is the one time the game actually does let you save and go back for sidequests after beating the area boss!

By the way, sidequests don't give you any rewards individually (at least, none of the ones I completed did so); they're just for getting the best ending, so if you miss one, there's not much point to do any others. Oh, but if you're an achievement hunter, you'll be disappointed to learn that you'll get achievements for both choices, meaning you'll have to refight those bosses--if not start a whole new game--to get all the achievements.

If you're not an achievement hunter, don't worry; the game will make sure you also have to refight bosses, too. The game tries really hard to make it seem like it's almost over, but then suddenly you have to go back to earlier dungeons, which now have new areas. Despite the new areas, the bosses are identical to the ones from before, just with more health (and even if you scanned the bosses before, too bad, you have to scan them again if you want to see their HP/resistances). You even have to refight that slow first boss again (healing grip and everything), now scaled up to match your current level! It's so mind-numbingly tedious. At least Bravely Default let you skip the duplicate battles if you knew what to do (you'd maybe just miss unlocking the final job, which isn't that impressive anyway).

After this, the game tries once again to make you think its gonna be over, but nope; more going back to previous areas and more duplicate battles. After two of the four, I thought I figured out the pattern and was sure the next two would be original bosses. Nope, only one is original. The other is a rehash of the slow first boss yet again! At least it doesn't have the grip move this time (it also has less HP than the previous first-boss-duplicate battle).

Not recommended.

Hack 'n' slash. I don't know why the game is trying to ape Zelda's style with the outfit when the closest similarity they have gameplay-wise is "sword cuts bushes" (well, I guess it's similar to the more modern 3D Zelda games in that combat is separated from the rest of the game, without any environmental hazards; the only level design here is hidden shortcuts, and that one dark area with floor spikes). One notable major difference between this and the Zelda games is that this game has a stamina meter that drains as you dodge-roll and block attacks (and not while you're running, which was the only thing that used stamina in Skyward Sword). That said, there's no movement penalty for running out of stamina: you can still walk and attack just fine (attacking doesn't even use stamina when you still have some), and you can even push the dodge button to jump forward a bit. In fact, the only thing the game tells you about it at first is that having 0 SP causes you to take more damage. Likewise, my initial reaction was "wow, this game has the best innovation for the stamina mechanic: making it not matter!"…but then you make it further in the game (much further than a gameplay demo would reasonably allow you to go), and you find out that being out of stamina also means your dodge move doesn't have any i-frames (you can't block, either). Okay, maybe the game is built around avoiding attacks entirely? Nope. In fact, the boss guarding the second belltower has a sword so massive, the only way to avoid damage is blocking or dodging. Worse, the boss gets very aggressive when it's low on health, to the point where you have absolutely no time to recover stamina, and thus no way to avoid getting hit.

Although that's enough for me not to recommend the game, the reason I gave up is because of how aimless it is. I rung the first two belltowers and got the grapple whip from the frog dungeon, but then couldn't find where to go next. There were some pillars on the overworld near the dungeon, but I couldn't seem to interact with them. I wandered around and found a forest temple I hadn't been to, but shortly into that area was another of those pillars blocking my progress. I even went back to previous areas to see if there was something I missed, but I never found anything. Maybe this is my fault (I did get turned around at the beginning because I didn't notice a grassy path around the bushes leading to the sword), but like I said, how the game handles combat and stamina is enough for me not to recommend it.

This is a first-person shooter…nah, I'm kidding; it's a turn-based tactics game. Movement order is determined by characters' speed stat, but you can delay your current character's current turn by 2 speed instead of being forced to waste the turn (it goes back to normal next turn). Even if a character isn't in-range to attack an enemy or assist an ally, the "wait" move always has an effect of its own, from increasing HP/shield/attack/evasion or even applying a buff to the character (which can sometimes be detrimental since each character can only have one buff at a time, thus waiting would overwrite the pervious buff). Once you get enough XP to reach level 10, you get an ultra meter that fills as you attack and get attacked; once it's full, attacking triggers your more powerful ultra attack; even if you don't need it to kill the enemy and you want to save it for a later turn, you can't without simply not attacking at all. Between battles, you can also equip three spells to bring into battles, but they all have a cooldown before they can be used (resetting the cooldown once used), with more powerful spells having longer cooldowns; it's an interesting concept, but some of the cooldowns last so long that most battles will be over (or almost over) by the time you could use them.

The game actually has a lot going for it at first. On top of the aforementioned mechanics, there's elemental weaknesses/resistances, and even level design: only flying and aquatic units can go on water tiles, and there's elevation that both gives you an attack bonus for hitting lower enemies as well as makes you find a staircase for non-flying units. There are even "hazard" tiles, like mushrooms that poison units on or adjacent to them, though they can be annoying since they're the same shade as the surrounding tiles, thus hard to see (and putting the cursor on them doesn't help any). The battles themselves can also be quite challenging, especially if you're trying to get the "no units lost" bonus or the "subdued [instead of killed] enemy leaders" bonus.

However, as you progress, you'll notice an extra line get added to your attack-preview window, saying things like "Evasion: 8%" or "Evasion: 12%." Some enemies even have a chance to evade if you're attacking them from behind! Then, you'll start having some of your attacks miss, sometimes even crucial attacks like one that would kill an enemy right before it can move again. There isn't nothing you can do about this; there's a buff that gives the character in question 100% accuracy, but to get that buff, you'd need to sacrifice a spell slot (and wait for the cooldown) or use one of your limited party member slots to have a character that gives the buff as an assist (and even then, it can only be given to one character per turn). Not only would this drag out battles longer than they reasonably should go, but often, enemies start off already close enough to your party that you can't afford not to attack them.

The whole percent-chance thing becomes even more unwieldy when you realize just how challenging the game gets. Each zone has its own story arc, with battles in different areas of the zone that progress the zone's story. The semi-final battle for each zone is always a boss that has a long attack range and more than 1000 HP (normally, bosses only have around 200-400 HP). Not only are bosses pretty powerful, not only do they almost always have at least a small chance to evade your attacks, but they also have much larger chances to counterattack, and these counterattacks have a chance to apply a status effect. You can cure a status effect by applying a buff (because characters can only either have a buff or a status effect, which is neat), but there's still the simple fact that you won't be able to beat the boss without attacking it, so there's no way to plan around it since it happens at random. I gave up after reaching the last(?) boss of the second zone (Mirrar of the Marsh), because for the first time ever, the boss evaded my spells. You know, the things you already have to wait for a cooldown to use? Who in their right mind decided it's a good idea to have both cooldown and a chance to miss?? The whole point of cooldowns is to provide a reliable drawback instead of the unreliability of evasion chances! Nothing in the game was more frustrating than when I went to use my "reduce ultra meter" spell on the boss only for it to miss (twice in a row, I might add), thus allowing the boss to hit me with the ultra attack. Again, I want my games to be challenging, but I also want my failures to be my own fault; nothing is more demoralizing than having already lost the battle several times, only to lose again distinctly because the game decided the boss evaded that one crucial attack.

Not recommended. Stuff like this is why I stopped playing RPGs for a while.

You know how sidequests in subpar action-RPGs are things like "gather X resources" or "kill X enemies"? That's it; that's this whole game (besides the four different bosses). There's a bulletin board that lists objectives that the game claims are optional, but it isn't uncommon for your main objective to be "level up the town's stats" which is done by completing optional objectives. Enemy variety is almost nonexistent, with the vast majority being blobs that shamble in random directions and don't even have contact damage. What's more irritating is this game has a stamina meter, and the very first enemies you encounter take more hits to kill than you have stamina for: three hits to rid their larger form, then one more to finish off the smaller form, so even when your stamina is upgraded from 2 to 3, it's still not quite enough.

As you might expect, level design is also nearly nonexistent, even in dungeons. There are never any environmental hazards or anything to spice up the combat, but the first dungeon has some tiles you walk on to activate the door…and that's it. The first dungeons boss is a worm that mostly just drops blobs from the ceiling before making itself vulnerable. The second dungeon has levers in the water, so you have to use your slow ranged weapon to grab them, then push whatever direction shows up on screen; it's only slightly more complicated since the levers move, meaning you have to time your shot somewhat. The second dungeon's boss raises tentacles to shoot bubbles, but I don't think the bubbles actually hurt you? At least not until they explode into purple smoke, which can take a moment. The third dungeon has actual puzzles, because it's Sokoban.

It's the best part of the game, which is immediately followed by the worst part of the game when gardening is introduced: you dig the hole by holding the shovel in the right position, then wait for the border around your stamina meter to turn white to release the button. Then, you plant the seed and wait three in-game days with nothing else to do except the town's sidequests (then wait an additional day so the town architect can use the materials you grew to complete your main objective). Even more irritating, some sidequests require you to go back into the third dungeon, some even going so far as to make you re-fight the third boss again! (the whole dungeon resets when you leave, including the puzzles) By the way, that boss is basically the same as the first boss, except it has an area-of-effect attack instead of shooting regular projectiles (and it has a higher defense stat).

In contrast, the fourth dungeon makes you re-traverse it as your main objective instead of an optional objective. This is also one of those Lost-Woods-type levels where you have to go the right way (and you don't get the item that tells you which way to go until after you've had to go in a few times). Thing is, even if you go the right way, the room you're sent to is random (it can even be the room you were just in!). When you finally make it to the end, you have to go back to the first three dungeons so you can unlock a unique room in them, which is immediately followed by that dungeons' respective boss again (no changes). Then, you can finally face the final boss: areas of the ground will glow red to indicate an attack about to hit there, and you have to use your ranged weapon to pull up allies who can make the boss vulnerable. It's okay, but when you get its health down to zero, it takes so long to die (sending out waves of hazardous vines all the while), I though I was missing something and had to do something else at first.

Not recommended.