The good:
- Pixel art
- Characters

The middle:
- Story
- Quite short
- Finicky movement

The bad:
- Easy
- Easy enemies
- Easy puzzles
- Easy bosses
- Easy dungeons
- Health/Death doesn't matter at all
- Handholding
- Music

I was really hoping to get something similar to Zelda: Link's Awakening from the screenshots/trailers. I knew there was some dating aspect to it but figured I'd ignore that part. You start in a small village and your move speed is slow. Reading into it, it looks like you can get running shoes later to increase movement speed but I didn't get them in my close to an hour of game play yet. The first hour is going to be extremely easy. I died once in the first dungeon just experimenting a bit and was sent all the way back to my home. I had to slowly walk all the way back to the dungeon.

Just outside your home, very early in the game, you're told to go to the mine and for directions, to ask the miner next door. The game even points out that you can ask this person for direction whenever you're feeling lost. I checked every house that could possibly be considered next door and never found this miner they were talking about. Off I went exploring with my slow movement speed.

I finally got a weapon after about a half hour and could fight but that's when you realize just how bad the hit boxes are. You will clearly miss your target and it still registers a hit. I tried sneaking by a bat which clearly didn't touch me but I took damage anyway. I played the first boss which was very simple, it felt more like a basic puzzle than an action fight. I don't expect the first fight to be difficult but there was practically no action involved.

Now maybe this "isn't for me" but I was looking for a Zelda clone. This isn't it. It seems to be more about conversing with the townspeople than actual action. What little action there is, is just bad. If you're here looking for a Zelda clone like me, this isn't it. If you want a dating sim with some light Zelda mechanics, you may want to give it a try.

To put my resume on the table, I've 100%ed every top down Zelda game, and even speedran a couple of them. It's a genre I'm very much into, and am quite familiar what makes a good Zelda-like good.

This game... ain't it. The biggest problem is the startling lack of items. Fun items to solve puzzles and generally mess around with are the lifeblood of this style of game, and this game has so few that there isn't even an interface to change what you have equipped. No need. This is very streamlined, sure, but there's so little exciting to find. The items you do have are good and interesting, to be fair. This game boasts 14 dungeons, but most of them have nothing in them except a plot device, and maybe a heart piece or two. This is fine at first, but the drip feed of meaningful upgrades gets sooo slow. The lack of items also leads to puzzles getting very dull and repetitive. I didn't get deep enough in the post game to see everything this game has to offer, but there's only so much time I want to invest in a game that feels boring.

So, what about the dating sim stuff? That's a notable feature. Well, I like the concept. The problem is, it feels like the writer got all their knowledge of women and relationships from a high school romcom anime. Most of the characters aren't compelling, and the whole mechanic feels like it exists for the fantasy of having a bunch of cute girls pine over you. Especially weird with the base premise of redemption, and starting the game as the town pariah.

I came into this game really wanting to enjoy it, but it slowly started grinding me down. Maybe the game REALLY shines late into the postgame, but that's a big ask from the player.

There is a little charm and fun here, and there is some creativity in some nooks and crannies but overall, it is a shallower GB/GBC Zelda title with girls to date if it is your thing.

It is good for what it is, but flawed, and in the end it fails to bring something really interesting to the mix. It would need a mix review, like so many other games

I snapped this game up the very moment I saw it, having never heard of it before. I couldn't help it - Link's Awakening is nostalgia crystal meth for me, and the trailer and description made it look and sound appealing.

It took an annoying amount of time to get working on my Steam Deck, because I was getting double inputs in-game, and... that's when my worries about this game started. Because looking things up to troubleshoot this, I also discovered the developer had said "If you are Oran is a male. The design was done where you could see it either way if you so chose"... this annoyed me because I had already named the character my name, but fine. If it was ambiguous, then I could at least assume that a game made in the past decade wouldn't aggressively gender the character I named.

So I started playing. The game's sprites are really cute and charming, it's solid pixel art with really cute character portraits. But I started to notice things... this game heavily advertised that it had romance in it, and there were a lot of characters that basically amounted to cute anime girl archetypes (or were just straight up playboy bunnies or maids.) But there were cute and appealing male characters too, so I assumed I was just reading into things.

The game's extremely unsubtle social commentary became quickly apparent too - it's a very baseline "why can't we all just get along?" view of racism and bigotry where Northerners and Southerners have no apparent differences but dislike each other. If the game's theme is at the level of depth of Avatar's The Great Divide or Dr Suess' The Sneetches, that really doesn't bode well. But again, I pressed on...

Only for the grandfather character to say "grandson," showing that yes, the protagonist is male. Now, sure, this flies in 1993 just fine. It even flies still in Ocarina of Time, where Link was also intentionally designed with a gender ambiguous appearance but is a male character. Unfortunately, this is 2020. A game where you can name your silent protagonist, with no indication that the character will be gendered, feels extremely dated. Even in Zelda games, as time goes on the lack of a female playable character in the mainline games is increasingly grating.

But the REAL problem is that this smashes into that the game is a dating sim. Wanting to confirm my feelings, I checked - every single character you can date is female. This reframes a lot of the beginning of the game. For instance, there is a fairly cute and charming male character, Bolivar, that you have something of a meet cute with - he lives with your character's grandfather and you walk with him to meet the stereotypical blushing childhood friend Keaton. But Bolivar isn't an option at all, only Keaton is.

This is absolutely bizarre at this point in time. Video games with romance have had the ability to select male and female characters and/or to date characters of the same sex for decades, and it's now an expectation in some genres, like farming sims such as Stardew Valley. I'm not happy that I'm forced to play a heterosexual male character in a game with a silent protagonist and dating sim elements, and I'm even less happy that if I want to date a woman, all my choices are cutesy anime stereotypes. It gives the entire game a sense of skeeviness that I really don't like, like it's one of Steam's many many games that are, let's say, targeted at a specific demographic.

Looking further at reviews, I found a large amount of criticism for the game's other elements too - bad puzzles, janky hitboxes, boring combat, pushover bosses, unnecessary tedium and poor game design. I even saw it suggested that the dating sim feeling tacked on because the rest of the game wasn't up to snuff, which makes all of the things I said above even weirder.

If you're like me and you assumed this was a modern Link's Awakening game, it seems doubtful it's a good one of those. If you're like me and wanted to play a game in the classic Game Boy 2D Zelda artstyle with cute characters and good writing, well, I don't think you're going to get much out of it in that front either. And if you're like me and are so used to games having what should be the bare minimum of respect for players being women or queer, you probably shouldn't even bother.

A huge disappointment.

A lot of elements in this game that do not feel fully realized. Other negative reviews cover most of it. The dating sim feels tacked on because the base game didn't come together well enough.

This game had some potential, but it really disrespects your time. Whenever you die you go back all the way to the initial area... this extremely poor design choice turns the game into a chore. I get that the developers were going for a retro feel, but there's no real reason to do things like this.
Also, the rest of the game is just average at best: The combat is just not good. The hitboxes are super janky and the abilities super flat. Screen transitions are awkward. Way too many fetch quests. Characters personalities are basically generic anime archetypes. All the puzzles are block puzzles that get old super fast.
The only good thing this game does it that it makes me want to play an actual good game like Links Awakening or A Link to the Past.

I want to like it but 90% of the time you're just running around trading stuff in the same map with no enemies just talking with the same npc. 5% doing short dungeons with the easiest bosses (finally I can fight) and the other 5% is waifu lore stuff. If you compare this to a game boy color zelda game like the other reviews do... It's has the graphics but not the same gameplay.

This game is pretty much like NES Zelda but replace all those monsters in the outside world into NPC and that's pretty much it. You just run around trying to trigger a npc event that will lead you into a dungeon. It was cool at first but it's gets boring.

It's just sokoban. A million damned push-the-block puzzles.

The combat is sloppy, the hitboxes are awful, there are no interesting abilities. I gave it a go, and I really wanted to like it, but it just made me want to play Link's Awakening again. I guess the lack of polish is why they felt they had to tack on a dating sim.

Ultimately I didn't enjoy the game as much as I thought I would.
Weather locking sprinting behind a buff or items that you pick between more damage.
Disliking that there's the day system but no actual play time per save.
That its relatively exhausting to actually go to heal as there's only 1 NPC that does it or buy an item to over heal and I have to run to where she is based on her schedule. The relative lack of power ups and the annoying progress.
The base game is relatively short as I understand there is an extremely expansive post game but the base generally frustrated me.
2 Chain fetch quests that overall are annoying and cut scenes that randomly happen can't be skipped and will kick you out of the place you just went to.

Keep in mind this is me being frustrated and the average person will probably enjoy it more than me but I was just tired of the ♥♥♥♥ it kept doing in its relatively short run time.

If I ever do the post game I will update this review but I don't think I will