The reviews are horrible, 58% on OpenCritic

[toughnails]

https://opencritic.com/game/15006/loop8-summer-of-gods/reviews

[archonsod]

Given they're primarily from professional games reviewers I'd assume it's simply that Xseed forgot to stuff the brown envelope with used notes again.

[Konki]

The main problem with this game is the price. If the game was 29.99$ reviews would be way better.

[Rakan]

Watched/read a few reviews and the gist is: It's a game about looping through the same days over and over again, where you are supposed to build relationships with characters that get reset over and over again. Yet, there is no option to skip through dialogue or autocomplete past dialogue choices. Like playing a visual novel over and over again reading the same thing over and over. Not to mention the problems with the lack of control of combat. I can't believe they thought this was a good idea.

[Codegears]

Originally posted by Rakan:

Watched/read a few reviews and the gist is: It's a game about looping through the same days over and over again, where you are supposed to build relationships with characters that get reset over and over again. Yet, there is no option to skip through dialogue or autocomplete past dialogue choices. Like playing a visual novel over and over again reading the same thing over and over. Not to mention the problems with the lack of control of combat. I can't believe they thought this was a good idea.

yeah that's indeed its biggest problem the fact they don't have a skip in a vn IN 2023 i feel like they deserve to fail for such a dumb mistake

[King Giddra]

I'm playing the game right now. There's a skip button and a fast forward. The fast forward part of the UI is on screen almost all the time.

[etch]

Originally posted by King Giddra:

I'm playing the game right now. There's a skip button and a fast forward. The fast forward part of the UI is on screen almost all the time.

Is there a button to specifically skip text you already seen?

[Rakan]

I already read about fast forward. It's no faster than spamming the button.

[REhorror]

Would put it into a waitlist, I will get it later.

Man, if only they port over Gunparade March too.

[etch]

Originally posted by REhorror:

Would put it into a waitlist, I will get it later.

Man, if only they port over Gunparade March too.

Only reason I doubt anything will be done about Gunparade is because it is owned by Sony if I remember right.

[digimon.movieOST]

Yeah I'll elaborate on why I think this game is getting bad reviews. So the game has an incredibly barebones presentation and there's a small amount of up-front tutorial cutscenes where they give you just enough to play the game, and from there, basically everything else is communicated to you through talking to characters in regular dialogue. For example, even though on the first few days you get a tutorial on how to use Demon Sight, you don't actually get told what Demon Sight IS until the 2nd loop starts and you can talk to someone about it. There's an auto fast-forward mode, but it applies to ALL text, not just text you've already seen, and its also not actually faster than just mashing X.

When I say the presentation is barebones, this is what I mean: after the first loop, the game tells you "Hey, talk to this person to reset the loop anytime you want." End of tutorial about that. So you go and talk to her, and she's just...a normal person? You talk to her like normal, except there's a big red box that says LOOP on the end and you ask her and she's like "oh ♥♥♥♥ are you sure?" No explanation on what her deal is, but the assumption is that by raising her friendship levels eventually she'll just tell you. And I don't mean eventually you'll get a cutscene with them, I mean you walk up to someone to have a regular "hey hows it going" conversation and suddenly you're in a very important lore conversation in the middle of class. Everything in the game is presented in this way - another character you walk up to and he goes "oh hey you're the guy with the Demon Sight who we need to defeat the Kegai! Cool!" and thats your first exposure to him. Again, the implication being that, raise his friendship, you'll find out how he knows all this.

So herein lies the problem. The game basically ONLY ever gives you any information in the form of these dialogues, but you can't skip ones you've already read, and EVERY dialogue conversation repeats EVERY loop. The Shrine Maiden tutorial girl has like 25 dialogue instances where you have to walk up to her, talk to her, have a conversation, exit the conversation, repeat 24 more times. And they all go in a row. Importantly, you can't actually interact with a character until you exhaust all these repeated dialogues. So you can't increase anyones friendship or ask them to join your party to fight the battles until you exhaust all these dialogue instances you've already seen before. The first time it happens and you see something important you're also interrupted by a little character who gives you like eight dialogue boxes about how you gained passive stats, and there's like 45 of those for each of the twelve or so characters in the game. Its just SO much time spent skipping through dialogue boxes, and I'm only on my third loop, so now that my stats are actually grinded out pretty high I'm wondering how much of my time I'm gonna have to spend on this now too. Your stats level up faster depending on how high you've gotten them previously, and how fast that actually is will probably determine how long I stick with this

[Servant_HolyKnight]

I feel like there's a lot of stuff lost in translation too or something. You don't actually get told how you can fight the Kegai or how some characters suddenly have weapons in the mirror world; just that you have to. At least in Persona they have a whole thing about saying "we need to buy weapons and armor if we want to keep doing this", which is a way to introduce shopping, but since there is no currency to worry about, here it just... happens?

Even though Nini has a name, voice and role, he is still very much a blank slate in that you don't quite get to hear him talk about what happened on the space station, or how/why he has Demon Sight. I didn't even know his name was apparently Novus when the two girls talked to you about fighting the Kegai in the tutorial loop.

I get the game is trying to be very hands off with giving you the means to figure stuff out yourself, but it should have tied the important stuff more in the tutorial like who Terasu is or even showing a full week of meeting everyone and getting an idea to interact with them some more. Instead you are immediately forced into a boss fight that kills you because you had a predetermined loop to get it done ASAP, even though you were told you had 5 days until the end of the world.

I'm starting to see why it's so mixed across the board, but I feel most people that complained about it didn't see how deep the problems were, outside of it not being the next Persona or Trails.

[digimon.movieOST]

The script is so strange. It's a problem that I think normally you feel from machine translation, but that was just how it was written. It's as though the game was written in media res, but you're just meeting everyone for the first time. There's a bunch of examples of spoilers that are just casually dropped in conversation as if you already knew them with zero context, but I think the name thing is good. You learn your name is Novus when someone calls you that in the tutorial, but the way that you learn the main character's first name is when a girl casually calls you that in the middle of conversation. But again, that's totally intentional because when she calls you that, your dialogue option is "who" and she says "thats literally your name". The writer fully knew this was the scene where you learn the main character's name, but its just such a weird thing. Its not like they do a cool twist regarding it and you've heard that name mentioned in the past but didn't realize it was you, it's just such a weird way to do it.

Spoilers, but the weirdest one for me was that Machina only ever refers to her creator as Vater and is always talking about him as if he's not around anymore or dead or far away, but if you talk to Max a little he talks all about "yeah my daughter and I moved to Japan after our hometown was attacked, I hope Machina is getting used to things." I understand why they did this sort of, to make little parts of the plot only be revealed by developing bonds with certain people, but its just SO weird that they just talk about it so casually and the two will be right next to each other and never acknowledge each other. Theres a lot of stuff like this but the reveals never feel like "ohhh ♥♥♥♥! thats crazy, I didn't know that!", it's always just confusing and weird.

Also having beaten the game now I was waiting the whole time for like, some weird cool twist but it never happened, you beat the final boss and there's like five lines of dialogue and its just over