I’m astounded that Hat World was made in RPGmaker. Valkyrie Profile style exploration, with Romancing SaGa style combat, character progression, route structure, and more. There's tons of side content, customizable (and potentially very difficult) boss fight difficulty, and a surprisingly interesting story. There’s a fair amount of Madoka and Phillip K Dick going on in the story, and I love it.

A lot of the rough edges from the Romancing SaGa series are filed down – quests are more clear, encounter level increases when beating a boss instead of with all battles, etc. There’s a bit more room for grinding throughout the game than most of the Romancing SaGa series, but most means of character progression are gated by the current enemy difficulty, so you can only grind so far. There are a ton of optional end game bosses to fight, which tend to require specific strategies. There were several I found harder than any of the final SaGa bosses.

The game looks and sounds quite good for a solo RPGmaker project as well. The pixel art conveys a lot of character, and the music and sound effects were well chosen.

It leans too hard into anime tropes for my taste in general, but I'm not too horribly bothered by it. In particular, I’d really rather the game not have the one section with 'lolicon' jokes, but luckily it's a very small portion of the game and I’m fully capable of rolling my eyes and moving on. While the customization options are great, I do wish characters had more innate traits setting them apart, though that’s a fairly minor quibble.

I had an absolute blast with the game. It says a lot that I'm tempted to jump straight back into another route without taking a break first. I almost never replay games without at least a year or two in between.