Tama and Koko were brought together by fate, Tama wanted to rob Koko’s temple and Koko needed someone to take her on an adventure. The two agreed to work together and travel on a pilgrimage but things went wrong and Koko died, Tama who grew deep feelings for Koko watched her die in her arms without ever telling her she loved her. So Tama does something desperate, she enters a dungeon and takes the Sword of The Necromancer doing anything to get the power to bring back her beloved no matter what it costs her.
This is a beautiful love story told through flashbacks, it’s not a spoiler that both women are lesbians but you learn the extent of their feelings, their relationship, and more through flashbacks Tama experiences as she kills bosses in the dungeon. It’s a really gripping story and you know the conclusion to their tragic love story right from the start but you learn that it is in fact gay and get to see how these feelings formed through gameplay. Just gonna throw our a spoiler that I think for many will be required for them to be interested and it is an unbury your gays story. There is a way to get a happy ending for these two, what it looks like, what the costs are, etc, that’s for you to find out but the lesbians are together in the end.
The gameplay has a load of ways to customize it to what you might find the most fun in terms of difficulty. For me it was turning everything to the most player friendly modes and really just being able to play a lot more laid back and I still had several deaths in my runs throughout the game but the challenge was a lot more manageable for me than if I hadn’t done so. There is a forging system, I hoarded my materials for the end and I didn’t regret it but they maybe would want to make more compelling reasons to forge items and stuff. For the most part I preferred summons until my end game build where I didn’t use any and had fully upgraded all my item slots although I still didn’t have enough to make every upgrade the maximum level of upgrade.
Regardless of the upgrade system, the monsters you get leveling up over time is a lot of fun, you get this slight monster tamer vibe but with permadeath for the monsters but an intended feeling of being able to let them die since they hit max level pretty fast and they probably aren’t randomly rolling the most optimal build ever. There is a lot of little systems to play with and engage with as far as you want to and a lot of room for the player to express themselves with weapons, items, summons and builds. It’s a game where the player can really shine in the ways they take Tama forward.
The flow of runs is pretty nice, you run through the dungeon, clear as much as you can, get the key, open the key, fight the boss, kill the boss, open the door, get a flashback. It’s a pretty solid gameplay flow with after you beat a boss unlocking the next floor and not having a need to do all the bosses in one run. When you lose in your settings you get to decide how much you lose. I personally enjoyed not losing a ton of stuff but if you set yourself to lose things you could leave the dungeon after every boss cleared and store items you want to keep for the future.
Really this game is something special, I am not lavishing the game with detailed praise only in so much that there is a small amount of story and while it’s all really good I don’t want to just tell you everything. Politically I think the game is simple but good, Queer rep wise, amazing, organic and sweet and clearly looking at what the community wants and really wanted at the time which was a way to undo the tragic love stories we’ve been fed. Pacing wise, it’s really gonna depend on how good you are at the game and how hard you make it on yourself. Sometimes I’d go story beat to story beat pretty fast clearing boss after boss but other times I’d take a while between them but overall the game only took me about 7 hours [I did look at some things and play on the easiest settings] so for me the pacing felt really nice for the amount of time between story bits. Also because they were predictable and rewatchable I could plan around what I was multitasking to make sure I could give the flashbacks the proper amount of attention and could even share them with my own girlfriends.
The presentation is really great too, I love the sprite art, the art style in general is pretty and I love the little CGs in the cutscenes. Obviously if they had unlimited budget little animated scenes would like be a dream but this is an indie game from an indie team, the CGs are great and there is a lot of them too, like they didn’t cheap out. The monster designs are really cute and fun and they're nice to collect and fight. The animations for the most part are really functional and work for the combat. There was no lag for me or anything and the flow felt great. The systems are simple at face but there is a lot of room to express even just in movement and in the weapons you chose.So I think the presentation is fantastic.
This game is sitting among my favorites of all time. If I did a new list I think this would be for sure in the top 25 maybe in the top 10. It really is a masterpiece and one I really don’t have a lot of points i can knock against it, it’s got some flaws sure and I imagine those matter more at higher difficulty like the summoned monster AIs being a little bad but this game is like a 9/10 to me which if you know me is ridiculously high given I give games in my top 10 lower scores. Love the fuck out of this game.
If I got you interested in the game the developers are in fact working on a remake of this game in a low poly art style and some system level improvements to help fund their sequel so I totally recommend you check out those projects as well. They are Sword Of The Necromancer: Resurrection and Sword Of The Necromancer: Revenant respectively with resurrection coming out soon this summer.
And if you enjoyed this review you can support me making my own sapphic art and get early access to some posts like this over on Pateron [ https://www.patreon.com/AlexisSara ] or if you wanna leave a one time donation you can hit me up on Ko-fi [https://ko-fi.com/alexiss].