The game’s title art?
You may be wondering, “but Eltee, why did you play a Konosuba game?”. The answer is simple, but I’ll get to that soon.
If you aren’t aware, Konosuba is one of those isekai animes where some loser dies and gets sent to some other world as penance or something. In this case, as with a lot of these kinds of mangas and animes, the world the protagonist gets sent to operates by JRPG rules more or less. This one might not be the isekai that launched the genre into what it is today but it was definitely in the spotlight for a while a few years back. I guess it’s one of the popular ones.
Let me preface this by saying I don’t care about Konosuba at all. It looks kinda silly and there’s a lot of bad anime tropes in it. It also doesn’t seem THAT bad either, it’s mostly inoffensive. Why do I know this about it if I don’t care? For a while, my YouTube recs were almost all anime clips for some reason, and while doomscrolling I caught most of them, which lead to YouTube feeding me more anime clips. So from those times I suppose I’ve seen quite a few Konosuba clips.
You have your protag, some loser named Kazuma. You have his cohorts, the dipshit goddess Aqua (who revived him in this JRPG world but then left her post in the afterlife to idk go drink beer), the maso pervert knight Darkness (what kinda name is that anyway) and the other dipshit wizard Megumin, who I guess only knows one spell. It seems to be a mostly comedic affair as all the characters kinda suck ass in different ways and the whole thing smacks of cynicism and easy jokes.
So why did I play this game? Easy. Simple. Because it’s the first title released by Team Ladybug, a studio nowadays mostly known for mechanically robust and deeply satisfying Metroidvanias, of which I own all their games so far but haven’t gotten to playing any. I want to remedy that and decided to start at the beginning.
Facing off against a brainwashed Aqua
So those were a lot of words to get to the point where I tell you this is a Mega Man clone. It does feature some of that Team Ladybug gamefeel and polish, but it follows a Mega Man structure. You have an intro stage, three stages with bosses who give you powers which you can do in any order, and then two final stages. It’s a short Mega Man to be sure; which makes sense as this was a promo item included with a DVD release I think.
There are some RPG elements, namely a shop for spells and items and experience points to level up and get stronger. There’s some polish missing at parts and some of the level design is questionable, but it is otherwise a very pleasant fan game to play. The game is deeply unbalanced but in a way that gives you the satisfaction of breaking it open once you get good at it.
Phroag
For a free fan game, it was an easy going and fun time. It can only go up from here. Team Ladybug have one more fan/promo game in their catalogue, and then it’s onto their actual commercial releases.