Tales of Tuscany Demo

The game itself is stellar. The character designs, art, and music are all so charming. The party system, burst skills, and enemy interactions are very unique and well done; they feel like a natural extension of the established Undertale battle system. I like how enemies have different names in regular encounters. It makes them seem more like living characters in the world rather than trash mobs, which ties excellently to the theme of friendliness versus violence (because that wasn't some random Bloomer you just befriended/killed, that was Apple, sister of Lovely). I also really like the little detail of enemies getting XP from defeated party members. The way that XP is integrated into the narrative is super cool too, I don't think I've seen something like that done before. The only gameplay related gripe I have is that the overworld is so cluttered with breakable objects (namely grasses) that enemies and points of interest are obscured.

But the writing. Oh man, the writing. I find it so incredibly grating. It reads like the writers' room was made up of middle-school meme page admins off of TikTok and Tumblr. I almost didn't even download the game because the store page turned me off so much. I sometimes see people online talk about how writers nowadays lean so heavily into irony to avoid the vulnerability that comes with authenticity. If you wrote this game with the genuine intention of making your audience laugh, then great. It will certainly turn people away from the game as it almost did for me, but that's the risk that heavily stylized games take. If, however, the writing was intended to be a shield against criticism for making a quirky Deltarune-inspired RPG because "it's just a joke game lol," then I ask you to reconsider. This game is genuinely fantastic so far and I don't want people to miss out on it because they feel that you aren't taking it seriously.