What a title! And with the screenshots used on the various storefronts, I had this on the ignore list until prompted via a friend over on Twitter to try it out when it went on sale on GOG recently.

I had much more fun that I was expecting out of this one. It is pretty much NOTHING like what I was expecting out of the game, and is really worth a look if you are even slightly into jRPGs. A genre I used to play a lot in the 8/16 bit era, but fell away from when my gaming time was primarily on the PC after 32bit era.

I'll get the complaints out of the way first, I only had one and that was more due to my preferred input method than anything else.

The game is built around a controller, I'm guessing as part of the conversion from the PlayStation 3 and Vita. You'll have a much easier time using one of these than you will my way of the Keyboard and Mouse.

Since the game itself ran right out of the install without any quirks, I spent the total 4 allocated minutes fiddling with the controls. Once I understood how the console control method worked I was able to translate and remap it suitable to the KB+M preference. It is not exactly intuitive, and I still need to think about it as I am learning it. But the Mouse can interact with every 'button' on the screen anyway. It is a little slower, but this is a turn based game, not twitch, so it helps rather than hinders.

The intro cutscene animation is superb. I'm not sure how they are rendering it, but it displays awfully clean and slick without any tearing or artefacting for me. The blend of music and animation style is really fun and enjoyable. I can see myself not skipping it every so often. And while it does use a blend of anime intro tropes, I'm not going to criticise it as it works with what the game plays out as later on.

The voice acting is also quite good. In the hour and a half that I had it running, I really didn't come across anyone that grated on me and made me want to mute it. I'm sure I've heard some of the cast voicing characters in the Luminous Arc series too. It might just be the scripted delivery, but a few sound familiar to me. It is a shame that the game is not completely voiced for the main characters. While the dialogue does not drop out mid conversation and instead between scenes, it would of been nice to hear them say some of the humorous lines they all have.

I do enjoy the level of humour in this. ReBirth 1 uses it without and does not take itself too seriously and openly parodies and references various shows and games from the past few decades. While I didn't get all the references used I was able to understand the context of what they were hinting at.

Half the game is the story mode, the rest is the RPG dungeon crawler. There's a fair amount to it all!

Combat is turn based, but the overworld map works in real time. Enemies wonder the field and you run into them to initiate combat. Or if they run into you while facing away, they can gain the advantage.

When in combat, each character takes a turn where they can move a set distance from a starting point that can be organised in a party formation setup. Get close enough to a baddie, face them, and you can attack. As characters have a distance, range, and coverage area, this allows you to hit multiple monsters at once, and even block others in your party from reaching them if you get in their way. While I was only in the early game, it appears that there is a fair bit of tactical advantages you can set up to play throughout. There is also standard attacks, defending, special attacks, spells, what I believe to be combos, finishing moves, team bonus combination boosts, and attack chains. They're all unlocked with different possibilities as you play so there is a large amount of combinations to choose from. Likely more I have not yet seen too!

Despite all this, I did not find it too overwhelming. Once I got the controls figured out for myself, the game's UI is reasonably easy to navigate and set up all the possibilities of the loot you encounter, and the attacks/spells/combos you can preform in battle. should be fun trying out different combinations and finding nice builds/loadouts when wondering the world.

To briefly cover the 'perv' factor seen so much in the official screenshots. Yeah... To be honest I was worried about that. But it makes up seconds worth per hour of play and is not as creepy as I thought it might be.

Re;Birth does have a really nice and fun art style, and character silouets make it easy to tell who is who to help with confusion.

It is especially a nice contrast to the more gloomy games I've been playing recently. Fun and Vibrant compared to Despair and Gloom.

There's a large story in it so I'll be bringing this up to the top of the to-play pile. As mentioned, I had more fun than I was expecting and want to see it to the end. Hopefully GOG will get Re;Birth 2 & 3 up by the time I finish so I don't have to scatter the games over different DD services.

Give it a go if you like turn based dungeon crawlers or jRPGs. There's a real nice charm and level of complexity to this one that the promo shots did not indicate to me in any way.

Game Acquisition: Purchased on Sale
Platform Used: GOG
Tweet Thread: 1 - 31 January 2016
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009

Windows 7 / 8 / 10 (64bit)
Processor: Core2Duo 2.66 GHz
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: DirectX 10.x or OpenGL 3.3 with video card with 1GB ram and support for v4 shaders
DirectX: Version 10 or newer
Disk space: 7GB
Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card

Additional Notes: I was able to run this on Vista64 without any issues or crashes. Game worked right off the install without running or heat related issues.