Overall, I enjoyed the game quite a bit. I think that there was a great amount of effort put into creating this jRPG and I really appreciated the intricate artwork throughout.
While the game featured much difficulty at times, I enjoyed the challenge. I could have done without the occasional ambiguity, between the maps and the unclear battle actions, but all of it together still made for a good game.
Chronicles of NyaNya is certainly the most interesting game I have ever played. Set up similar to an old-school Pokemon game, this Russian, Indie developed, ninja-cat game was one of the more difficult games I’ve ever taken on. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I turned on the game, but once I did it was rather intriguing.
Often times, developers try way too hard when attempting to create a story for a game to follow and it ends up being nearly impossible to follow and too complex for anyone to really care about while playing a game. Unlike those games, Chronicles of NyaNya set up a pretty basic story from the start. Essentially, this was going to be a revenge story and you knew that from the first five minutes of playtime. A revenge story is a great premise for a video game, especially an RPG such as this one, because the user feels a certain sense of pride the entire time as they make strides toward the ultimate revenge. To that end, I had a lot of fun completing each objective and moving closer and closer toward the end. So I was very impressed with the writing and development of the story.
As a seasoned game player who has played just about any genre you can think of across all difficulty levels, I rarely find myself struggling with a game. Believe me when I tell you, this game is DIFFICULT. Let me tell you why this game was so difficult to me… For starters, the navigation is a bit absurd. There are moments in the game where you are (gleefully) gifted a “map,” however, the maps given to you are not as helpful as you may wish. Often times I spent upwards of 15-20 minutes just trying to find the building I knew I was looking for, and without a comprehensive map or radar of sorts, this seemingly simple task frustrated me to no end. From that, you then get to the battles themselves. There were numerous VERY simple battles, don’t get me wrong, but on the other hand, there were also a ridiculous amount of rather difficult (nearly impossible) battles. While I like a challenge in my gaming, I found myself questioning why there wouldn’t be a way to improve my characters enough to make some of these battles more winnable. I tried spending down to my last bit of in-game currency, in order to give myself a perceived edge over some of these foes, but even then found myself getting beat senseless. My other qualm with the battle interface was that it was rather inefficient and unclear what each action did. For example, I would use my “dodge” abilities and still take damage and/or die. Other examples include the unexplained magic abilities in which you are simply left to guess what it will do, to often be incorrect and take a lashing for it. My last issue with this topic would be the inability to always attack any opposing character to attack. Sometimes you could attack any of the four freely, other times you were restricted to attacking only the closest two while the back two throttled you unpunished. So in my opinion, the difficulty could have been lowered somewhat and the battle interface could be modified and/or explained a bit better.
My last bit of review to this game was just my enjoyment of so many references to other productions. For example, the room I entered with parodied superheroes, the many Harry Potter references, and so on… I thought it was a very creative idea to parody these productions with cats. I honestly lost it looking at all the cat-superheroes. Playing with headphones in while sitting in a quiet room at that point in the game proved to be a bad idea, as my laughs filled the room and I looked/sounded ridiculous, but so it goes…
Ultimately the game was, to me, GOOD. This was not the best game I have ever played in my life by any means, but it also by now means was the worst. I think if the difficulty came down a bit and the battles/abilities were better explained, I could have REALLY enjoyed this game. Alas, the game is what it is and I definitely enjoyed myself. Job well done, guys.
