You explore a world drawn and animated in collaboration with a famous Japanese animation studio, so nearly every scene looks like a storybook come to life. A young boy searches for a way to save his sick mother, adopting strange creatures along the way that fight for him in battles. The visuals and music carry a lot of the emotional weight, even during the game's slower stretches.
Gameplay video
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Screenshots & review notes
Overall
A gorgeous, occasionally saccharine fairy tale RPG whose emotional highs make its slower stretches worth pushing through.
Moment to moment
Battles blend real-time action with creature collecting in a way that's satisfying without ever getting overly complex.
Art and atmosphere
The Ghibli pedigree shines through in every frame, gorgeous linework and orchestral swells creating something close to magic.
Worth your time?
A lengthy, heartfelt journey best suited to patient RPG fans, especially anyone who grew up on Ghibli films.
Frames captured from the gameplay video above; notes are our own take on the game.
What it's like to play
You control Oliver, a young boy who travels to a magical parallel world to try to save his mother, exploring towns and fields that look like they stepped out of a Studio Ghibli film, complete with a storybook that opens on screen to teach you new spells. Movement is simple, running around towns and overworld areas, while combat switches to a battle screen where you can attack directly or cast spells from your book, and you also collect small creature companions that fight for you and can be trained and evolved. Your first ten minutes ease you into the story with a family tragedy that sets Oliver on his journey, and an early spell-casting tutorial that has you literally reading a magic word off the book's page.
Most of your time is spent traveling the world map between towns, catching and leveling up new creature companions to fight alongside you, and following a story about restoring broken hearts to people who have lost some essential piece of themselves. Side content includes errands for townspeople and alchemy recipes that let you combine items into new equipment, and difficulty comes from making sure your creature team is leveled and varied enough for tougher story bosses. A full playthrough runs forty hours or more given the amount of world to explore and the many side quests along the way.
Session to session the game's storybook charm and the beautiful animated cutscenes carry you through slower stretches, and catching new creatures has an appeal similar to games like Pokemon. What may frustrate newcomers is that your other party members are controlled by the computer and can make questionable decisions in fights, like wasting their limited magic, and some side errands repeat the same basic task. If you want a gentle, heartfelt story wrapped in beautiful animation, this is a genuine treasure.