A game that doesn’t need an introduction or a review even! Adventure Time was one of my favorite shows on Cartoon Network up to this day. It provides comedy without having to resort to dirty jokes and crude humor for most of its scenes and it’s something that I and my kids can enjoy on the couch. Put it in an open-world RPG game however and it becomes a hellhole of bugs and terrible mechanics. Everything just falls out of order and complete chaos ensues from start to finish. A game that was better left in the Gunther with the Ice King!
Slap something with open-world and I lose my mind so it’s a no-brainer that I just couldn’t pass this up. Although a few minutes in and I already regretted my decision. This is one of those that I consider a fake open-world game that has nothing in it but the empty hopes and dreams of exploring the world. The game’s file size itself doesn’t scream open-world with a mere 1.83 Gb on the PS4 version. That alone should’ve been the first sign but I simply ignored it and kept an open-mind.
Finn and Jake, our adventurers, woke up one day in the Land of Ooo just like any ordinary day if it wasn’t filled with water as much as the sea. So as far as exploration goes, you’re stuck on a ship with nothing much to get but the salty winds and yummy pirates. Since everything is submerged underwater, the only places to go to are the very small areas of the different kingdoms. One that I probably wouldn’t mind if not for the loading screens everytime I leave or enter the vicinity of one with another loading screen to get off your boat and into dry land. Open-world? I don’t think so!
And all of that would’ve been swept under the rug or sunk in the bottom of the sea if not for the mediocre map sizes of each one or the unpolished work done within those close corridors. Paired with a very slow hovering with a sword-like cursor and the fact that you can’t see the bottom of the map until your cursor touches the bottom of the screen makes using the map a very annoying experience. Everything is simply a struggle to keep me from losing my mind and deleting the game for good.
The story is not good nor bad, it’s mediocre at best and that’s just how I like it. It also includes an interrogation time during certain parts of the story which provides different approaches to gather info with a good and bad cop scenario. What bugs me though is the terrible mouth animations… actually, that’s a lie, most games suffer from those! The real stinker here is that the voices themselves get unintentionally muted in some parts of the story. Which is kind of important to me since there’s really nothing else that can capture my attention when the core gameplay is one terrible piece of jumbled shit?
If this was a game made for kids, I would’ve thrown it out of the window right away. How can my kids enjoy this unrewarding turn-based RPG system where the same level enemy hits way harder than your own and the EXP gained after so many grueling turns not give me a level up? Fighting slightly lower level enemies provide a challenge as well as more often than not, I either have to spam healing items or just leave them to die. Now if that wasn’t enough, once you finally spent hundreds of coins on consumables and leveled up, you get slapped in the face with even more ways to spend all those coins in order to gain higher HP, Dodge Rate, Accuracy, Attack, Defense or Special Skills which at some point becomes a huge pain in the ass as it needs to be done for every character.
But let’s talk more about the actual combat, starting one is as weird as it gets, as a fight can start without actual contact with any of the enemies so it’s a bit of a hard thing to manage when all you really want to do is avoid them. On the actual fight screen, we have your average health bars in the form of hearts for each character in the bottom as well as another bar for your unique skill that fills up for doing specific actions in a battle while enemies get an actual health bar on top of their heads and a shared energy bar on top of the screen for using special skills. Pretty basic but it gets even more basic as that’s about it. Without an actual turn timeline, it’s almost impossible to know whose turn is next if you don’t pay attention which makes decision making a little bit harder than it should be. Issuing commands like attack, skill, item, defend or unique skill is controlled with the left thumbstick which somewhat gets frustrating at times as you have to hold it to the direction of the command. I love turn-based RPG games but this one’s a complete mess.
The graphics were the only thing that would deserve praise here if it didn’t have any invisible objects you can step on or previously opened chests that would close again after reloading your game, maybe it’s a feature but I don’t think it is. But it’s very minor so I guess I’ll give this one a pass. Characters are pretty accurate and still holds the charm of the original. Plus having their original voices just makes it even better. If only… If only the game was less frustrating and more story-focused I could’ve enjoyed it but alas! Ye landlubbers! I spent more time collecting crates and breaking objects just to get coins and items around the area only to get my characters trained enough to endure on a fight. And what do I get? A few bits of dialogue after a few minutes grinding levels and farming coins only to go to the next piece of land and do it all over again.
NOT WORTH IT! No matter how much this game is sold, I honestly can’t find any reason to recommend it to anyone. I didn’t have high expectations, to begin with but honestly, I didn’t expect the game to be this terrible. And in case you’re wondering its $39.99 which is better spent on a game that actually gives you a good amount of fun than frustrations considering the game stutters way too much and at times becomes a headache when it actually freezes to a halt before you’re forced to close the application.
With version 1.01 going live a day before the game’s official release and putting the game up to 2.76 GB, it begs the question… what for? And to answer that it doesn’t feel right to just check the update log so I was convinced I need to try the game one more time on my current save and on a fresh start. And while some parts have been fixed like chests stay opened unlike before where it would be closed again after restarting the game, some of my previous complaints still stay as is and that includes the bugs. Navigating the map is still a struggle and battles still being harder and unrewarding than I want them to be. Lastly, error CE-34878-0 still happen quite a lot making the whole experience a huge letdown as I’m forced to end the game every single time the game freezes. As of now, there’s still a lot of flaws and I don’t think I’ll be motivated for another thorough run.
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