So I picked this game fairly randomly. I was expecting something much more awful than I got.

To start, I only played through to the first save point. This is not representative of my enjoyment of this game, but I felt at this point I already had a lot of experience with the game.

As a game with a custom combat system, it should be a primary point in my review. It is what is considered an "ABS" (Action Battle System) and is fairly competent at that. The controls are easy to understand, and you are given ample opportunity to experiment with the melee combat aspect.

I found that the Ranged aspect was an interesting design choice. Rather than being able to freely make ranged attacks, you have to be standing on arbitrary glowing points. Even then, the attack is made in a specific direction regardless of how you want to attack. This is not a design choice I would have made, but it is very interestingly done. The ranged attacks from what I saw were mostly one-hit kills. These points are sometimes difficult to see, with the giant trees and blue-on-green color scheme. This made them rewarding to find, as opposed to an overpowered mechanic. Every enemy can be killed using your melee attacks, but these ranged attacks offer you a way to dispatch an enemy without taking much damage (often none) and break up the combat quite a fair bit. I found that when I saw these spots, my mind went "Nice, I was low on HP and really needed that."

The melee combat is somewhat slow paced, which makes the engagement with the enemies almost seem turn based. You are free to move between attacks, however, which allows you to reposition or disengage to heal. The Quickattack button combination allows for you to do a neat combo (quickattack->attack is almost instant double damage) and allows the player to make a decision. "Do I want to quickly dispatch my foe at the cost of some SP, or do I take him toe-to-toe and lose some HP?"

Anything that makes the player think is a good design choice, in my opinion. I don't know how well this would fare late game, though, when your SP is so high that every attack should be a combo. Perhaps I should play further on to see how it works out, but initial impressions are good!

A side note regarding the enemies. In an action battle system on a fixed grid, it is often difficult to make interesting enemies. Especially in an event-based ABS (which I believe this to be, although I could be wrong.) The enemies were for the most part toe-to-toe fighters, but the interesting part was their pathing. They don't engage until you come within a certain range, but they are quick to move and I had several of them side-step into my path, blocking me from gaining an advantageous position. I don't know if this was intentional, or simply the way pathing was decided, but it actually made me 'Wow' when it happened.

Enough about combat though, there is some other stuff here.

Graphically, the game uses a mix of RTP, and 2D sprites which I believe to be ripped from other games (possibly Ultima Online?) and uses textures for some things. I think the blend works because it is very consistent. Some walls aren't using the proper RTP tiles; if this was an RTP only game. But because some of the other walls (mostly interior) use a solid texture with no trim, the walls actually look okay. Consistency is the key, and this game has it graphically.

The use of facial portraits is good, as well. Although I would have liked to see faces for all the characters (or at least a generic 'THIS ISN'T AN IMPORTANT CHARACTER' face) instead of just fading out the hero's portrait (William kind of looks like House, no?)

The introduction was very well made. The art was striking (is it original? I didn't check the credits) and the zooming/panning effect was well done. Not much effort is put into intros in a lot of the RM* games I have played in the past, so this was refreshing. A sound effect when ...Revolution! comes up was noticeably absent.

The music didn't strike me as anything special. In fact, I would have to replay it to see if it even had any? I am not sure.

Content wise, I found the 'fight 7 animals' quest a bit grating. I couldn't find that last wolf, and had almost 2000 steps taken before I did. Perhaps some sort of mini-map that marks the location of your quest targets/enemies, or just moving them a bit closer together on that map. The NPC specifically said "...near the barracks" so I was looking there to begin with.

The fast travel map was awesome; despite the low resolution text describing the controls, it looked great. Also, the achievement system was neat. I wonder if those trophies are visible elsewhere other than that initial barracks? The achievements I saw were all the cop-out "Get to lv2, Get to lv5, Get to lv10, Finish the game"-types. I'd like to see something a little more interesting, that requires effort or skill to unlock.

I won't nit-pick on spelling/grammatical mistakes (they were there) or mapping/priority mistakes (also there) as the content of the game was enough to make me say "Hey, this is competent. Dare I even say, good! I enjoyed it."

Thank for you for the experience Infinite Games.