LifeisXbox’s Niinamigota review | The JRPG Niinamigota takes place after the ship called “the S.S. Stockhausen” crashed. You’ve lost your family, and it’s up to you to help to repair the ship and hopefully find them again. Along your adventure, you’ll come across a lot of different characters who all have a story of their own. This game was developed by Colin Sandquist, by using RPG maker 2003. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to live up to what I was expecting when I first started the game…
Most Memorable Moment
Despite the fact that this game has no combat system in it, that doesn’t mean that they don’t throw a few challenging parts at you every now and then. Some of these feel a little luck-based because the enemies run at different speeds in random directions, making them less predictable. Getting past these sections can be pretty relieving and sometimes also rewarding, as these usually allow you to move on to the next area. There are also a few puzzle areas with boss enemies in them. These bosses work like regular enemies, but you’ll have to defeat them by completing the puzzle while you avoid the bosses.
ℹ️ Reviewed on PC | Review code provided by PR/publisher, this review is the personal opinion from the writer.
What we Liked!
- Storytelling | The story was very well put together. Niinamigota had an exciting plot and had a decent cast of characters with their own backstories. This follow up to the game Exvelten takes place on an island after you, Island Guy, got stranded there after a terrific crash of the S.S. Stockhausen. Now it’s up to Island Guy to help the other survivors on the island and find a way to repair the S.S. Stockhausen. Along the way, he’ll come across someone called Island Girl, a friend from the past who he has forgotten about.
Mixed Feelings
- Music & Sound Design | The soundtrack definitely gave off a classic game’s vibes, and I really liked that about it. Some of the songs were also fairly memorable, which is pretty nice! There were also sound effects, but there was a lack of them. There were mostly sound effects during conversations, but very rarely during the actual gameplay. There also were no ambient sounds, and that made the world feel kinda… dead.
What we Disliked
- Level Design | Despite the decent pixel art, the level design was just… bad. This will sound very harsh, but at times, it felt as if I was playing one of those terrible levels in Super Mario Maker. Sprites just seemed to be scattered around at random in some parts of the world, pathways were disorienting, and so on, … Because of the poor level design, the world was not memorable, whatsoever.
- Gameplay | You’ll basically be walking from point A to point B. That’s all there really is to the game. You will come across other characters who’ll give you quests to complete, but these mostly just require you to find a certain item. Also, the way to keep track of your main and side quests is also very, very messy; the developer made an attempt to sort the missions in different categories in the menu, but these categories didn’t seem to work at all, everything still seemed to be scattered around at random. Missions also had no description, so you had to memorise the goals.
About 4 hours into the game I came into a section that required you to do (what felt like) a frame perfect maneuver, and no matter how many times I tried, I just couldn’t get past it.
- Other issues | For some reason, Steam didn’t want to work when I was playing the game. Normally, when you click shift+tab, this would open a menu, where you’d be able to check achievements, guides, chats, etc… and because of this, achievements also didn’t work at all. Besides this, I found chatting to NPCs to be a nightmare in multiple ways. Trying to interact with a moving NPC is already difficult enough, as they move in randomised directions at a pretty fast pace. Sometimes during conversations, when an NPC walks, it’s completely the opposite; they walk slow, very, very slow, and there’s no way to skip this.
How long to beat the story | 10 hours
How long to achieve 1000G | 15 hours
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