Bug Fables

Playtime: 8.9 Hours

Gave up 02 January 2025.

Played on the Switch, paused in Chapter 3 - right after the beginning of the lockdown in the Honey Factory. By all accounts, I think this game is fantastic and does pretty much exactly what it wants to do - but this kind of gameplay really isn't jiving with me. Stopping it for now and maybe forever, since I don't want to keep pushing at the risk of completely burning out.

I think it's very easy to understand why lots of people like this game, and consider it to be very faithful to the Paper Mario games while forging a unique identity of its own. As simple as it is, I find the artstyle of the game very charming, and pretty much every aspect of the world feels like it was made with care. I like how the entire world of Bugaria consisting of empires of different species actually takes place within someone's back yard, which you can see from a telescope within the Beehive. The music and sound effects are on point, and the writing of the story is very entertaining thus far. I don't find it to be hilarious or anything, but it bring levity to the overall tone of the game and helps a lot in really differentiating the identities of the main characters. The first few chapters were all of a reasonable length, and made use of interesting overworld mechanics that break up the dialogue & fights.

But even with all of the positives in mind, I just can't bring myself to enjoy the combat in the game, which ultimately still takes up the majority of the gameplay time and difficulty. As far as I'm aware, it largely works the same way as the Paper Mario games, but I haven't played any of those before so I can't give any direct comparisons or opinions. From that point of view, I don't think I can properly judge the quality of the game; I can only definitively say that I can't really handle the game mechanics.

The first main issue I have is with combat being primarily a series of quicktime events. I find it to be very painful and unenjoyable in a turn-based game, and unnecessary to boot since it I don't think that kind of interaction is interesting or meaningful. On top of this, it means that enemy attacks have very strange delays or animations to make them more difficult to guard. It's very common in lots of action games where enemy strikes will have really awkward animations delaying or accelerating their strikes before they actually hit you, almost like the game is lagging. I think it always looks really tacky, and trying to time blocks (in this game or others) ends up being an irritating chore.

The second issue is a bit more severe, in that pretty much every resource in the game is extremely limited. This is another personal gripe, as I'm usually the kind of person who likes to end games with a giant hoard of unused items and/or money. But I never got to a comfortable point in the game where I felt like I could really just explore... HP values are very low, so even very basic enemy formations can kill you quickly if you get unlucky. The time spent running back to get heals is almost more than the amount of time progressing in any area. TP values (kind of like SP/mana for your party) are also very low, so you can't use skills very often for normal fights either - this means that the fast HP/TP drain of your party will force you to return to town for heals every couple of fights, much worse than if you constantly go back to the PokeCenter in any Pokemon game as an example. To compound on this, since EXP values are pretty low as well, you need several fights to get another level, which implicitly requires many trips to town. Since your item bag and bank capacities are also low, it's difficult to spam items for recovery as well without depleting your supply that might be better used for bigger fights. And to wrap things up, money is fairly scarce in this aprt of the game, meaning that it's not feasible to consistently maintain your items to spam them anyway. Good items and combo items are extremely expensive relative to the money you have, especially when considering the other things you might want to buy, so it's a complete waste of money to experiment with recipes and stuff.

All of the above compounding factors - HP, TP, EXP, items, money - contribute to the entire gameplay loop feeling like a bone-dry resource desert which is simply not fun to me. Because of my gripes with the combat system (my fault), fighting enemies isn't really fun. Meanwhile, due to all of the other limitations and lack of sustainability, exploring dungeons isn't fun because you make progress one step at a time. This really exposes my issues with RPGs centered around very small numbers; without enough graunularity in the way numbers are used to determine power, it's pretty much impossible to balance enemies in a way that feels satisfying. Keeping in mind that characters will have at most low double-digit HP, enemies doing just a few damage will quickly overwhelm your team at any point in the game. Then, to make boss fights feel more powerful, their attacks stride into the territory of 2HKO range for your characters, which just makes them busted in a different way. And since the entire gameplay loop is trapped in a cage of small numbers, I've felt almost zero progression from the beginning of the game until now, around 10 hours in. This lack of evolution is just another nail in the coffin.

At the end of the day, I'm fully aware that this was a fairly likely outcome of my attempt to play through the game. From having watched other games in the genre, pretty much all of my issues are points that I had already noted before. I wanted to give this an honest shot to see if I could get attached to these systems, and unfortunately it looks like my answer is no, for now. For the time being, I doubt I'll have any plans in the future to bother with anything like this again, but I'm happy I tried. At the very least, the overall tone of the game left a very strong and very positive lasting impression on me; it's probably better I leave it off now rather than burn myself out continuing.