Long Gone Days

Easily one of the best new games I've ever played. I bought it because the screenshots reminded me of the geopolitical intrigue of the Suikoden RPG series, and I was not disappointed.
I instantly cared about the characters and their motivations, the story was compelling, the NPCs brought life to each location.
I hope this is the first in a new series.

Let me preface this by saying that I finished the game and enjoyed it, but I can only recommend it if you can buy it on sale because of the rather short playtime.
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The Good:
The artstyle is amazing. The game uses a mix of pixel art in the overworld, character portraits in combat and dialogue, and
full-on vibrant/moving art pieces in some important scenes. The love could be felt everywhere in those special scenes, so much so that I sent a couple as screenshots to my friend so we could admire them together. The main cast of characters are mostly just a bunch of everyday people, and the character design shows that by making the characters look rather normal, but in the best way. They felt real, partially because of the art. Standouts in the characters design for me were Beqiri, Coyle and Pascal (mostly because he somehow looks like my friend, who's also named Pascal). The pixel art sprites were very well done and while the environments weren't anything too special, the art depicted was still charming to look at.
The gameplay is (mostly) very fun. I'm a sucker for simple RPGs, and the gameplay fit that bill. Part of why the game only took me around 13 hours to beat is because there's no experience system, no difficulty spikes and no grinding (thank god). The combat is enjoyable and easy to understand. Each party member has a specific role that they can fulfill, with my favourite "combat" character being Ivan. His skills are definitely the closest thing this game gets to broken. The game has sidequests you can very often do, and while they're nothing super special, they're charming in their own right and I felt compelled to do them. The most fun (and realistic) aspect of the game is the fact that often times the main characters do not speak the native language of the country they are in, and thus cannot understand locals. This leads to both the characters AND the player sometimes having to interpret what is being said, which leads to some fun moments. And if you see a language you yourself know being represented, it adds to the fun of it, because you can actually understand the conversations you're not "supposed" to understand (German for me). Kinda feels like cheating, but in a good way. The only system that I did not understand was the morale system, since I didn't really notice the effects of it in my playthrough.
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The Average:
The characters are inoffensive: decent at best and boring at worst. Ivan was easily the best, standout character, playing the role of non-combatant very well in story, side quests and combat. He was definitely my favourite character. Rourke was kind of an emotional wreck all throughout the story, but mostly in an endearing way. His best aspects were his innocence and having to discover how to live as a "normal" human, while his idealism was his worst aspect from a writing perspective. Atiye and Pascal were fine additions, they had their funny and cute moments, don't have too much to say about them. Lynn's arc was incredibly predictable and while a lot of her backstory was resolved, some aspects still felt too vague. This unfortunately comes at the detriment of her character, because she isn't much without her backstory. The biggest disappointment was Adair, who unfortunately gets absolutely nothing to do in both the main story and the side content. Most often he just felt like a yes-man to Rourke. The side characters were fine. The villains were fine. The NPCs were fine. Most of the characters in this game were, unfortunately, just fine.
Unfortunately, the writing of the game was also very average. The story tackles serious topics like individuality, war, political gain, racism and actual human trafficking. For the most part, they really hit the nail on the head of the importance and effect of these topics on both the world in game and our real world. The problem is that the game has a very simple view of the conflicts and there's no room for nuance. There's an obvious "correct" answer to all of the conflicts that the game will throw in your face non-stop. I won't go into detail because I am not an expert on writing in general; I'm mostly saying this from a reader's perspective. The story is very predictable and simple. This is not necessarily a bad thing because we need some simplicity and happiness in our daily lives, especially in this day and age; I was just hoping for a bit more. The side content was very simple and unfortunately also suffers from being "in your face" about its messages. The best written parts of the story were the before-mentioned moments of Rourke and the gang just living life, especially the jazz scene and the scenes of Rourke hanging out with specific members of the group. Overall, I did enjoy the story, despite said predictability. I'd honestly love to read a story about the future of these characters, because despite my bitching about their simplicity, they did grow on me in the end.
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The Bad:
The main thing this game suffers from is bad controls and UI. I noticed that the game only uses about 6 total keys on the keyboard, 4 of which being the movement keys. Besides that, 1 button was used for pretty much everything in the game, while the last button was the "Back" button. The simplicity of the controls led to the game sometimes feeling like a slog to play, while also leading me to accidentally activate the menu over, and over, and over. In my head, I often made the comparison to the Zelda CDI games. While Long Gone Days is obviously not as bad as the CDI games, those games also suffered from having 1 button for many different action, despite more buttons being available to be implemented. The UI works at a base level, but it is very often unclear what certain parts do or which part of the menu has what information. Sometimes you get an item/weapon for one of the playable characters, but the game doesn't tell you who each item is for. That means you have to scour every single character's items in different parts of the menu to find what you just got. It's frankly just a tedious menu to navigate, both because of the controls and because of the UI.
The last thing I wanna mention is that the game speed is very, very slow. As far as I'm aware, there's no way to speed up dialogue boxes, which made reading go by pretty slow. The biggest offender of the slow game speed is the combat, specifically the buffs and debuffs. In the endgame, buffs are very important to stand a chance in the combat, and the strongest move in the game is a move that gives all of your party members +1 to each of their stats. The problem is that every single individual stat increase or decrease gets mentioned in its own dialogue box (which I just established goes by slowly), so using that move makes it so that you get 12 messages in a row telling you the characters' stats have increased. And then later when they go back down, the same thing happens. This section is the shortest section of my review, but trust me when I say that the game speed halted my fun of the game the most, because it often just felt like my time was being wasted.
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TL;DR
Art good, gameplay fun, characters and writing fine, controls and UI bad, game speed frustrating.

A nice nuanced story and decent pixel art, but very little actual game play. Terrible interface, though. Every little thing takes half a second too long for comfort. And no way to change the keybinding.
Recommended if you want a story about the horrors and uncertainties of war from the perspective of everyday people. And if you don't mind to read a lot and do very little else. And press the X key a lot. A lot!

Summary
Long Gone Days is a game where I mostly tolerated the gameplay in order to experience the story. Despite advertising itself as a modern JRPG, I would say the moment to moment gameplay was subpar compared to titles thirty years prior such as Final Fantasy I. While the story was intriguing enough to keep my playing, the short length made wanting a little more as not all the characters were as arc'd out as I would have liked.
Overall, I would give Long Gone Days a 6/10. Given the length of the game and its bog standard gameplay, I would say the game is worth approximately $10 to me.
Review
Let's quickly talk about gameplay before we get into the game's story. Despite being a JRPG, Long Gone Days has no exp or leveling with the majority of your stats coming from your equipment and a smaller amount from temporary buffs during battle. Abilities are only gained at certain moments in the story. Additionally, HP and MP are not ever recovered except through the usage of items or abilities. When you combine all of this, it results in fairly monotonous battles as you spam basic attacks because you either have no useful abilities or want to conserve your MP for boss battles.
Items such as grenades do help to compensate for the lack of abilities early on and while the game is generous in giving you more items, because there are no shops or ways to readily acquire more of the same items, you're always unsure if you should be wasting that particular item or not. Perhaps a way to barter items you have an abundance of for items you're lacking would fit thematically.
The one somewhat interesting mechanic of battles is the ability to target enemy body parts. Aiming for their torso will result in less damage but a higher chance of landing a hit while aiming for their head will result in the opposite. You can also aim at their arms for a chance to paralyze enemies and have them skip their turn entirely. However, I quickly learned that the chance of paralyzing an enemy is so low that it's never worthwhile to target their arms and the increased damage of hitting their head greatly outweighs the reduced hit chance.
Weirdly, one of the things I did enjoy about combat was being able to see each character's facial expressions throughout the battle. Seeing their determined expressions really made me feel for each character and the struggles they were going through.
Now onto the story. I adore how the game handled multiple languages and I especially loved how you couldn't understand certain NPCs until you acquired a party member that was capable of speaking said language. Rather than create characters that were walking stereotypes to reflect their nationality, using linguistics in this manner allowed the characters to shine through with their own, unique personalities.
I enjoyed the themes that Long Gone Days presented and many of them are relevant in our present day. Totalitarian governments, propaganda, and following orders, some of them hit a little too close to home. The characters were also a delight with it being funny at times seeing how Rourke and Adair were experiencing life outside of The Core.
While I am a fan of shorter games, I do think that Long Gone Days suffers a bit from pacing and could have benefitted from being longer. For example, the game begins in medias res, but we reach that particular point in the story again so quickly that it makes me wonder why we didn't just start the story from the very beginning as opposed needing a flashback. Additionally, the twist where Rourke learns the truth of their mission happens honestly surprised me. Not because I didn't see it coming, but because it happened so quick that I was flabbergasted that the reveal was already here. It's almost as if characters are a little bit TOO emotionally mature, overcoming their trauma and making life-changing decisions before I've even had a chance to get fully invested in their arc (if they even have an arc).
So yeah, while I did enjoy Long Gone Days, I do think it could use some gameplay improvements as well as a few more moments to develop the characters. For example, the various ship and train rides would have been great moments for the party to simply talk to one another and shoot the shit. Get us invested into the merry little band.
While we're here, let me just list a few quality of life things I wish Long Gone Days had:
- The ability to see what buffs your party and enemies currently have
- The ability to see hit chances for basic attacks
- The ability to see hit chances for debuffs
- The ability to see exactly how much HP an enemy has
- The ability to sort items by type
- In-game explanation for what each stat does

Very solid storytelling game, that while linear and at times a tad tedious, still captures my attention, my thoughts and enjoyment. The art is amazing, and the vibes of the game are on point. There are many mechanics that are implemented that I wish were developed further upon, but it's a game I recommend purely on the narrative and storytelling it weaves.
I don't know how much replay-ability is in store for me personally, as the roster of available party members never gets too far, and several quests are not quite intuitive to finish or start. That being said, if you can get this game on sale, just need a story to play through and enjoy, hate shadowy fascistic authoritarian psuedo-governments that ruin people's lives, spread misinformation, disrupt people's livelihoods and you want to take them down with the little guys, it's the right game for you.

Picked up on the cheap out of a humble bundle, and it's unfortunately the type of game I never would've tried otherwise.

Saw the cover, saw the trailer, something in it resonated with me - put it off for about a week, then gave it a try.

It is, at the time of writing this, 05:36 AM on a Tuesday morning, and I have just spent 15 consecutive hours playing this absolute masterpiece.
My only regret is that chances are not enough people will see this as it deserves, and those that do may not explore through every corner of the game and try to reach every sidequest to see every line of beautifully written dialogue.

Absolutely beautiful.

Great story, engaging dialogue choices, interesting characters.

A few specific things I liked:
-There are a fixed number of potential battles and no random encounters
-Being able to pick dialogue choices that visibly improve morale
-The balance between a linear story and free exploration aided by optional side quests