Karakuri-kun - A Japanese Folk Tale

Wow, this is, a lesson in game design -101, like the negative of 101. You are a magical doll come to life, when I go speak to the old man (toy maker) he tells me to go wear clothes, and then i wear clothes and he gives me the same dialog. If anything this is an indication of the attention of detail put into this RPG maker game which feels as if it was made on the spot and very randomly.

There are random encounters, but they seem to be so out of place, I cannot tell if the sprites are original but given the look of everything it is probably not. The fights are just... There, in fact they are the only instance of music playing in the entire game. You'll notice that magic attacks make more damage but cost 0 MP so they didn't really try to make you not wanna pick magic all of the time. You can fight but it's basically pointless, it is better to flee all of the time as a single battle only gives you 10g and the closest thing to what this game considers a potion costs 100g.

As you continue to explore, you'll find paths that end in nothing, objects that seem to be in front of you but actually in the foreground (so so many times) and sometimes those objects that are in front but in the foreground are directly on top of paths you gotta walk through so it's like they didn't even test that out? But guess what! Flowers are objects you cannot walk above, huge stones? Yes. You are usually walking across empty maps at first which are the most barren of life things I've ever seen, even for an RPG maker game really. You can walk over entire doors...

You know that one joke on the internet of fan subtitles on Japanese anime sometimes going out of their way to teach you Japanese words? Well this game does that, the writing ain't great too either, you'll realize a few spelling errors. After some time you learn where the "edutainment" feature comes in: Well, it is true to the idea that edutainment is extremely dull. There's a single town, sometimes sections of it don't tell you "there's nobody around here" and you can go and talk with NPCs to basically learn little trivia of the Edo period of Japan, and once you leave that district, a NPC will ask you questions that you gotta select of 4 options, if you get one wrong, the window just closes and you gotta go through all of the selections again.

...That's it. This might be one of the most dull experiences I've had. They couldn't just use free to use folk music? They just had to make everything dead silent except the fighting? Fighting which was obviously just... Put there for the sake of it, which you don't need and you could just escape forever. I just mustered to myself "I can't do this" when I talked to an NPC child that simply opened their dialog box with nothing written, went on to the girl npc, and it was the same. Nothing.