Ikenfell is a game that I really could not bring myself to enjoy. As a big fan of JRPGs and great pixel art, I was excited to see what this game had in store. 9 hours of slowly becoming more and more jaded later, I cannot get behind this game in any light.

First of all, the sprite art is alright. Nothing insanely pretty, it’s obviously an RPGMaker game that takes a lot of inspiration from Earthbound and Undertale. I usually love the visuals in these games but in Ikenfell it was only so-so. The character sprites were peculiar to me, opting for 3 different styles, in exploration, in dialogue, and during combat. The most appealing version is during dialogue, where you can actually see the character’s faces, while during exploration they give a strangely large amount of pixel real estate to the character’s hair, only giving 3 tall pixels worth of a face. It makes the characters look very odd during top-down cutscenes and really disconnects me from the characters (because I cannot see their eyes).

In addition, I found the combat to be an absolute slog. While I did find the idea somewhat interesting, and the lack of MP gave a lot more freedom to what spells you used, EVERY single fight is dragged on horrendously long. Even the most basic enemies take at least 3 or 4 turns from the player, complete with enemies moving AND attacking AND you having to block it. It turns what could be a 30 second encounter to 4 or 5 minutes, which in the long run becomes agonizingly long. Enemies become insane damage sponges and become entirely dependent on the timing of your attacks (which can be done automatically through settings). Also, the vocal tracks during the boss battles, while a novel idea, did not mesh at all with the gameplay, in fact it really took me out of the game.

The story itself felt embarrassingly shallow for how much dialogue there is. I understand in a 10-15 hour game with lots of characters you can’t be expected to get huge development out of each of them, but every character felt so insanely cookie cutter that I couldn’t connect with a single one of them. Each character’s arc just flipped from one end of the other, the mean girl suddenly becomes nice, the shy girl gets brave, it’s just so tiring and I found myself caring less and less about the characters as the game progressed. The actual story of the game is even more unengaging but in the opposite way, plot threads get so quickly muddled and confusing that by the end of the game you’re unsure what is actually happening, somehow the characters talk so much but never about the thing you want to know more about.

I respect the hell out of video-game creators, as they’ve made some of my favorite experiences I’ve ever consumed, and I think this is a great team with a lot of potential to make something truly special. But I don’t think this game respects the time of the consumer, it got to the point where I just started using the auto-victory for every boss near the end because it was becoming such a slog. I do think that if you really don’t mind a standard story and you auto-victory through some of the longer, more tedious bosses you could enjoy this game. But as it stands, Ikenfell, to me, is a dangerous combination of a monotonous battle system paired with fiercely rooted archetypal characters and a confusing story that they never bother to truly explain beyond “it’s magic!!”.