Re: Yumina the Ethereal
does this game ever get more interesting? I've gotten to the point with Ai's family but the gameplay is never more than "pick best song -> pick strongest attack -> repeat" leaving out the song bit for non-boss enemies...
The story seems to introduce characters completely haphazardly without giving any real depth to them; "here's this new guy, completely out of the blue, you like him and care about him now" or; "here's this new enemy/villain, he is totally evil and is pointlessly saying the most evil things we can think of because he is evil, you hate him now and care about stopping him"
The production values are horrid, the game has these constant, unmoving images of whichever character is talking on the foreground and the effect is just horribly jarring. Yumina is angry! -> neutral faced image of Yumina on screen. Yumina is sad! -> neutral faced image of Yumina on screen. The little images beside the text do switch constantly and display a fair bit of emotion, making the still, staring image in the centre ever more jarring and awkward as you try to avoid looking at it as much as possible.
The worst part is that it shows so much promise, it could be a fantastic game with it's setting and ideas, but fails to execute a single thing right, the story feels half-assed and rushed, the images feel incomplete and some just seem downright missing (the hangar, for one, looks nothing like a hangar, I could show the picture to someone and they'd never guess it's supposed to be a hangar, it looks like some sort of placeholder picture) The music is okay, but fails to distract from the extremely boring and repetitive gameplay, there is no sense of strategy or planning involved as most of the encounters/drops/items/skills (it's random what drops, then it's random again what it is once it's identified) are completely random, making the only way to get some kind of reliable plan going to grind and grind and grind until you get what you need.