Tokyo Twilight Ghost Hunters Daybreak: Special Gigs reviews

A hard one to review: summarizing, I had fun with it, and it is different enough to deserve a run. But "different" also includes an obscure interface and an unbalanced progression which requires lots of "grinding". So let's start talking about the interface: I actually enjoy learning a game's mechanics, and there is tons to learn here -- even the board minigame within the game is not clearly explained, but it was actually fun to figure out what was going on. But a few things are just plain weird, like: -- The "senses" wheels are totally bonkers. You choose "friendly" and "mouth", that means you will talk nicely to someone, right? Well, suddenly you are trying to lick someone's face, deal with it. You try to "friendly look" at someone, and they accuse you of stalking... Sometimes you find these strange substances laying around... and the game expects you to lick them? This does not make a lick of sense! (Sorry, sorry....) -- It took me half the game to figure out that I could take side missions to level up my characters; problem is, you need to press a button combination to access them, and this combination was displayed with a cryptic description which led me to think it was something which would show up later in the game. -- I only found out I could speak with the characters between missions from the main office at the very end of the game -- another button needs to be pressed on the right screen, otherwise you will never see this! -- The game does not allow any saving until Chapter 2, and there is a lot of stuff until then. I fired up the game, watched a long cutscene, interacted with a few characters, had the first tactical fight, searched for the save button, could not find it, then figured it must be autosaving, quit the game.... Well, WRONG, had to replay this whole thing later. :( Now the balance: the first few fights are super easy, which is ok; then I found out about the board minigame, which was fun and let you level up your character, so I played TONS of it. My main character was level 3 or 4 before I did that, and I got to level 30+ after a long time. Of course, this made the fights even easier, but it felt right, since I "grinded" so much. Then, suddenly you get to chapter 11 where you get FLOORED by these super hard fights near the end of the game. Worse, some of these fights force your party choice on you, so, if you have not leveled up the right characters, you are screwed... So lots of MORE grinding was necessary to level up everybody to level 60 or so... The game was fun, but this spike felt very very wrong. Item acquisition is also very strange... I got TONS of money during the game, but there was nothing to do with it. There is a shop, but it does not seem to upgrade enough -- all items there were worse than whatever I got through other means. I can only wonder if the shop would level up had I bought more stuff there, but why buy stuff if nothing is worth it? There is also a bit of crafting, but is also very very limited and dependent on materials which were hard to come by. But, again, the game is different enough that I do think it deserves to be played. Yes, there is quite a bit of RNG in combat (you have to predict how the ghosts move, which does not always go the way you think), but you are supposed to manage that as well. And there are so many abilities you can acquire, the game is more of a Strategy RPG than just a Visual Novel. Score: 76/100.