The Elder Goddess

Buggy, walking simulator trash. Be prepared to walk for miles for quests. Combat is just thrown together and quest markers aren't clear. You could be walking for miles in the wrong direction accidentally and waste 30 minutes

I've been playing this game for a solid two hours now, and the best word I can use to describe it is... "directionless". The game wants to take you on a journey, but it doesn't know how best to take you there, Quest markers are almost impossible to follow at some points, and you have to absolutely luck into finding the correct path. ( If you follow the marker for the second quest in the game, "Crisis at Thea Vouno", you'll end up in the middle of nowhere; it actually requires you to find a cave, enter, fight or avoid five goblins, and collect a book. ) The character's movement speed is somewhere between 'brisk' and 'meandering', with the option to dodge-roll with incredible speed albeit at the cost of a massive chunk of your stamina. The decision to have your HP and stamina attributes tied to whatever weapon your holding seems good in theory, but there's only one class of weapon ever worth wielding: the one-handed sword, which always have the most average of stats. With the fastest attack in the game, you can stun-lock enemies into being unable to attack you... well, most enemies. Even while the enemies are in hitstun, they'll still find a way to hit you, interrupting your attack string, and opening you up to getting combo'd yourself... and then there are just some enemies that either A) have super armor and don't take hitstun, or B) are just immune to damage outright. And the chests... some of them are easy enough to unlock, like finding and following a fairy to its respective chest ( falling into that dreaded trap of "NPCs faster than you walk, slower than you run" )... or you have to fight a horde of monsters, which are easy enough at times... or collecting orbs in a race-style minigame, which is totally inoffensive. But the absolute worst unlock conditions for chests are the dragon heads—sometimes you have to move more than ten heads to shine a laser upon a chest to break its barrier; sometimes you have to make two different beams converge at the same point; and sometimes those dragon heads will be halfway down a cliff , meaning if you jump to try and reach them, you will inevitably fail once or twice and need to climb aaaall the way back up the mountain to try again. I could go on and on about the most trivial of minutiae, like how I couldn't equip the skills that I had unlocked from the 'Towers of Aphrodite' using Goddess Spars... or how enemy density just seemed to get thicker and thicker... or how Lumina, the main character, has the cliff-scaling ability of a mountain goat, and yet there are pieces of map geometry where you can get irreversibly stuck... or how birthing can happen at almost any time with no real set rhyme or reason, meaning it could happen in the middle of combat, or in the middle of watching a cutscene, or in the middle of interacting with one of the Towers... or how it's inconsistent whether you respawn at a Tower after you "die", or get tied up right beside the enemies that already beat you once and have to hobble away at a snail's pace... or how the unskippable cutscenes are in English, but the scant few times I could talk to NPCs, all the dialogue and prompts were in Chinese. I could do that, but I think you get the point—this game is genuinely awful. The only reason that I'm not flat-out giving this only one star is because there is at least something here. The game is at least functional in the sense that you can move, attack, and get raped by enemies when you inevitably lose. But when a quest marker is only a hundred meters away, and yet I have to run several kilometers on the most roundabout route just to get to the actual marker? That's when I start to take contention with the game. There is only so much time I am willing to waste trying something that looks good on its surface, but lacks any sort of spit and polish. So take your two stars , be happy about it, and be gone from my sight.