[DE:]Fanastasis

世界観がダークソウルに似てメトロイドバーニア感じでルートが豊富にある長編RPG。戦闘を突入するか避けるかが自由、秘密を全部潜り出すのが自由、断片的な情報集めてこの世界の歴史と関係がどう繋がった考えるのも自由。絶対プレイヤの知識侮れない傑作でした。

100000/10, TIL you can make a great game with a crappy engine like RPGMaker and open-source assets. Do yourself a favor and play this game.

After roughly 70 hours, I'm done with the game. I'm pretty sure I still have some things left to see as I haven't unlocked all red magic circles, but I watched what presumably was the final ending after retrieving all memories and voiding the contract. Maybe I'll revisit some time again to finish up the loose ends. It rquired a bit of tinkering with compatibility options and gamepad configurations to play on my Steam Deck and it has some issues with framerate if you play for too long in one session, but overall it worked more or less fine. This game has a lot of similarities with Histoire, Nepheshel and similar free RPG Maker games, but to put in perspective how it plays in terms a westerner would understand... You guys remember Ash Lake, from Dark Souls? How to get into it you had to get into a tree, then pass through an illusory wall to get a chest, and then go through yet another illusory wall to get into the secret area? Imagine that, except the whole game is like that and it's made in RPG Maker. That's Fanastasis. It's a pretty unique way of designing a game, with positives and negatives. Especially at the beginning, the feeling of getting into hidden places and discovering all the lore and so on is really good, I loved that part of it. At the end though I must admit I was having to take a look at some walkthroughs and old 5ch threads to find out about the last memories and fragments of other dimensions I was missing as I would frequently get stuck trying to figure out how I should continue. Another thing to mention, in case that wasn't obvious, is that you absolutely should know Japanese or have some kind of machine translation tool ready if you might want to tackle this game. Lots of puzzles, hints and so on rely on the notes and dialog you get from the game. The lore and story is also rather intricate, in a good way. It is not spoon fed to you but rather you need to figure it out from the bits of information the game gives you. But all in all, this was a really fun game, I really liked the free version when I played it and I liked the additional scenario with the witches as well. I could see it gaining a niche following in the west if it was translated someday. Thumbs up.