A less than Average Cyber-Slog
Orangeblood on the surface looks like a very Interesting sort of JRPG, one that strays away from common tropes of a Spikey haired hero where slimes are a common first enemy and the Sword is your main weapon. It has Grand Theft Auto vibes mixed with Yakuza and a general Cyberpunk sort of theme going for it and it is a turn-based JRPG which I adore. While this all sounds absolutely wonderful, the games flaws are seen almost instantly after beginning.
First is this weird blurry graphical effect which really does not work well with my eyes, you only need to look at the screenshot below to see this, and with all the options available in the menu, not one of them helped with turning it off, you can change the Colours to be more Vivid or Gray or Flat which doesn’t help at all. The other Menu options aren’t self-explanatory either so the only way to see any changes is to just play around until you get the right settings. Also the font in this game is awful (more on this later) While the game has a nice aesthetic everything is so small. Navigating in and around inside of buildings is easy but once you are outside among the streets of New Koza everything is so confusing and navigating to a certain point can be trial and error. The story itself is okay but the abundance of swear words and cringe urban slang makes it a chore to keep up with.
Navigating around takes some getting used to especially with how sensitive the controls are and on top of how fast your character runs and not everything is easy to make out. The game is aesthetically pleasing in that the City has many nice touches that really make it give off that Cyberpunk Vibe but with how small everything looks on top of the blurry effect the game has it is hard to make out where to go sometimes.
Weapons have some really long names and with how bad the font is in this game which requires some focus to read even simple words it makes it near impossible to make out some of the names of the weapons as the font is squeezed into one line. The battles are simple turn-based battles where you will be fighting against general thugs and shooting them with the barrage of weapons you will pick up. Items can feel seriously expensive at first but when you find out how easy it is to grind out money at the beginning you will find yourself easily being able to afford them. Enemies can drop keys where chests can be opened providing you have enough of them. They drop often and these chests and enemies can be respawned by leaving an area. As there are many weapons with attributes that don’t really make sense, it’s really trial and error on which are the best ones to use. Most guns will destroy enemies in one hit straight away anyway. The game is terribly unbalanced, it is quite possible to get a super-strong weapon early on that will carry you through the rest of the game without needing to upgrade ever, however, some bosses have proved too difficult on a first encounter, the imbalance is obvious but it isn’t something that can’t be fixed by some over levelling. AP is used to measure your Guns ammo and SP is a source of energy in a battle that accumulates allowing you to unleash skills, the Skills are awesome and having to reload your weapons during a battle actually makes sense, I enjoyed the turn-based aspect of this game but with how the hostile areas are set up with hordes of enemies sometimes just littered about I found myself bored repeatedly fighting off the same group of enemies.
Orangeblood is not a long JRPG by any means averaging a 7-hour playthrough which is more than enough for my liking. I can at least say it is playable and I have had some form of entertainment and enjoyment from playing it, the design, for the most part, is great and the sounds are also but the nausea I get from playing as well as the music is easily forgettable. Would I play it again? Maybe sometime in the future when I have run out of things to do but I don’t see it anytime soon, unfortunately.
A Nintendo Switch Review Code was provided by PLAYISM
