Fortune Summoners: Beat it. It was rather fun for the first half, but less so the second half.
At first you may think the game is a metroidvania where you control a little girl as the main character. However, the progression is entirely story based and all skills save one are from level ups and are solely for combat. You also get three characters and the AI controls two of them.
The controls are rather bad. If you keep attacking and then hold backwards, you will never turn around because the game keeps queuing up attacks and they take priority over turning around. Also, Arche (main character) has an upward slash, but to use it you can't just hold up and attack, you have to tap up right before attacking. The same goes for other moves. If you want to downstab, don't press down until right before you press attack, else Arche will do a normal attack instead. The characters also has a large momentum and thus needs quite a lot of time to stop.
It's not so bad at the first half of the game, you can compensate for the bad controls by figuring out how the enemies moves and fight smart. However, the game then gets harder and due to the controls, it cannot pull that off without bullshit. Enemies will fling spells from afar and are often airborne when they do so. You can cancel their spellcasting by hitting them, but the bad controls makes hitting enemies in the air harder than it should be. The melee enemies also becomes very good at blocking attacks and hitting them multiple times in succession is impossible, which is rather bad since it takes over five hits to kill them. The game also likes to place spikes or other terrain hazards in combat zones, something that doesn't feel fair in a game with such floaty controls.
The AI is very good though. Your companions will navigate platforms just fine and can find you even if you're at the other side of the map and there's a lot of platforming needed to reach you. Unfortunately, the enemies also have very strong AI. They know how to dodge spells, even though you have multiple spells and each covers a different area. Also, if your casters start charging up a spell, they will try to interrupt it if they are close enough. The effect is that if you cast a spell to far from the enemies for them to reach you in time, they will dodge the spell and if you cast it close to them, they will interrupt it. In the end, spells only work because when the AI has three targets and you use your fighter to repeatedly hit them, half the time it will be to much for the AI to handle. Actually, at the first half of the game the spell casting will work just fine since the enemies aren't bullshit yet and you can reasonable keep them away from your spell caster.
The game does have a lot of charm. The main character is a tomboy who's rather dim in an adorable way (says butter instead of butler, need to use her fingers to do addition and so on,) and is generally all brawn over brain. The dialogs aren't particular well-written (some are actually rather bad,) but are still cute. The charm kind of breaks once the third character joins, I found her rather annoying and I don't think her personality really fits a child character. Oh, and it's at the halfway point that she joins.
It's a game that could have been way more fun that it was.
