Let me preface this review by saying that Virgo Vs. The Zodiacs is not a bad game. It suffers from trying too hard in some areas and not hard enough in others. A lot of work obviously went into this game and I did enjoy parts of it. Let's take it by category.

Sound- The opening screen song is a haunting piano that sets up the atmosphere for the game perfectly. It stands out the most from the music in the game, at least in my opinion, but there are many nice songs littered throughout. In training areas called "black holes" There is a dumping ground of available songs to listen to while you train. Way too many to choose from so I often didn't bother choosing any, which hindered my enjoyment of their effort. One example of trying too hard. The sound effects in the game were basic and only one really stands out because of how annoying it was. The speech sound for some characters were so grating that I muted most of the talking scenes in the game. This is a strong barrier for enjoyment of the game because there are so many talking scenes! We'll get into that later.

Animation & Design- The animation in this game is unique and charming. The levels and characters differ from one another and stand apart in each part of the game. I really enjoyed seeing the chibi art of the zodiac members, it was probably my favorite aspect of the game. There are a plethora of customizable options which I did not indulge too much but I was impressed by the amount of personalization available.

Story- The story was rather basic, but not boring. It's a straight forward collectors mission that doesn't let you deviate from the specified path. However, there are choices throughout the game that impact your course for better or for worse. I only played through once, and got the Star Cross ending, but I watched other peoples endings on youtube and I was impressed by the versatility and thought put behind the different decisions in the game. The developers give you slight nudges and hints as to what decisions to make so it is not complete guesswork. They play a mean trick on you early on in the game though, so the only slight spoiler I will give is to watch out for that. You'll know when you get there.

Mechanics- This is where this game begins to falter. In the beginning of the game I was confused and distraught because the developers do not provide adequate tutorials throughout the game. Even in the end of the game I did not understand how some things work, but I'll get to that. The information you get comes in the form of horoscopes that provide hints as to how to play the game, but no instructions. The one tutorial that is provided is about the battle system and how it uses colors like fire emblem uses weapons. This tutorial was convoluted with flavor speech about how stupid needing a tutorial for colors is, which I found horrendously insulting, considering it's the only tutorial you get. Anyway, each color has a strength and a weakness. Each character identifies with a specific color which is identified as purity, ambition and I think the last was versatility. The colors for your characters are very obvious but the colors for enemies are not. Sometimes my characters did garbage damage, sometimes they were amazing. I'm guessing the color aspect of the game impacted this, but once again, I'm not entirely sure. The difficulty scale was everywhere and I'm not sure how to make sense of it. I didn't understand the weapon system at all. There are a bunch of different weapons with individual stats and colors. You would think that the colors would be suited best to specific characters, but that was all over the place. My characters often couldn't even equip a weapon suited to their color. So most of the time my versatility guy couldn't equip a versatility weapon. I couldn't find a level cap or any other reason why this would be the case. So my characters had a different range of colored weapons which made no sense. Another confusing aspect of the weapons was the power they held. I naturally equipped the weapons with the highest power, but I'm not sure that was the proper thing to do. In the end of the game (don't worry, no spoilers) the shop held weapons that had way lower powers than the weapons I had equipped. Part of the excitement of a new area is to get more powerful weapons! I never used the lower powered equipment so I just never bought new weapons, mostly choosing to boost the ones in my arsenal to higher powers and stats. It was rather disappointing, and I never knew if I was doing it wrong. Same with the battle system in general. Most of the information in battle is displayed in text that pops on the screen to explain what status effect your character is inflicted with. To understand what the little picture above your character does, read that text! However, I don't know how most of these even impacted the character. Algol is cursed? What does that mean? She can use her spells fine. She's not losing health. How do I fix it? I just don't know! The high majority of the status effects in this game were not intuitive. I didn't know what did what and just ignored the status effects. The unique spin the developers tried to put on the game, prevented it from being great. The game was only 17 hours, and it was a huge information dump to try and understand how everything worked together. Often I just button mashed on different screens (including the battle menu) to see if different options would come up. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. They tried to add a complexity to the game which just ended in the game being too complex to understand. That being said, I did like the shield option which is a different bar from your health that causes enemies to be unable to hit you until they use up your shield. Hitting a shield allows counter attacks which can be devastating especially early in the game. The enemies have the same mechanics so this forces some strategy into the battle system. That's probably all I liked though.

Interface- The interface was a disaster. Nothing was presented in a concise manner which is the main reason I didn't understand anything and gave this game a 2 star. Again, just button mash so hopefully different options come up.

Dialogue- Normally this would not be it's own category, but my God, was this punishing. The main character was snobby and needed to insult everybody she saw. Everybody. This means a lot of unnecessary rambling as other characters retort and disagree. It was cute at first but soon became aggravating. Even before fights she would insult regular enemies when I just want to play the damn game. Dialogue before boss fights were long and tedious, mostly just trading banter instead of saying anything conducive to the situation. Thank God there was a try again button after boss fights, which cut dialogue by a considerable amount, but not always preventing it. There were conversations relative to the story that were so obtuse they made no sense. It was trying to develop story and atmosphere with these conversations, but the way they went about it made me feel like there was an entire aspect of the game I wasn't privy to rather than enlightening me. I clicked on everything in the areas possible and was sometimes treated to a remark that made me smile, but more often than not, was punished with a huge information dump that just wouldn't end. Especially the bookshelves; beware the bookshelves. Entire stories were included in the commentary which added nothing to the environment. Mostly they were about the history of the world but again, it was so obtuse it didn't make sense. Maybe if they said less and gave me interesting trivia about the world I would have enjoyed it, but these comments were often several pages long about some person I don't know that has nothing to do with the area I'm in.

Conclusion- There were some things I liked in the game but there were more things I disliked. If they focused less on customization and focused more on conveying information in an understandable manner I would have appreciated the game a lot more. There were some neat ideas and some things were done really well, but these are not enough to save this game. I don't pretend to be a professional reviewer, so there are probably many things I am not mentioning that I should but I hope this is enough information to help you understand the kind of game you're getting into before spending your money.