[Click here to start from the first progress log]

If you look closely, Ash of God’s store page image claims that it’s a “turn-based RPG featuring a rogue-like storytelling,” which is a strangely accurate description despite failing to work as a sentence. After all, roguelikes are known for their randomness, and the writing in this game is so full of non sequiturs and conversations that seem to ignore the game’s chronology entirely that “random” is the best way to describe it. The writing here is horrible, but that tricky brand of horrible where the confused mishmashes of words and declarations look like they make sense in a screenshot. In practice, though, topics are covered so haphazardly that you often have to read through the text three or four times to try and decipher what’s actually being said.

“Here are some characters. Don’t ever use them.”

The video above is of 30 minutes of random gameplay that highlight just how monotonous the whole affair is, culminating in a battle toward the end that I simply couldn’t beat without having a character knocked out. Since they’re wounded when this happens and have their stats lowered (and apparently four wounds causes that character to die), this is a snowballing problem best avoided for important characters. I ragequit at the end of the video out of annoyance, but later came back and tried again to similar results. There’s only one way to play this game:

You’d think that a game that gives you access to a ton of playable characters would be designed around using them together to amplify their good qualities and minimize their bad qualities, but you’d be wrong. I tried beating this map without losing anyone over and over again to no avail, only to reduce my party size to my two best characters and curb stomp it. It’s ridiculous how pointless actually using anyone is.

This isn’t an isolated incident, either. You can consistently win by fielding only one or two strong characters. Groups of enemies will be helpless since they all have to move before they can attack again, letting your one or two characters murder them with impunity. That’s not the only reason to only field your strongest “main” characters, either; minor characters come and go as the game jumps around, and while at least one main character can be killed, it happening is incredibly unlikely. That means it’s safest to let one or two people hoard experience and avoid becoming too invested in anyone who might be auto-killed before a fight or lost as part of the story. In short, most of the characters in this game serve no real purpose.

Even when you bring an additional character along, it’s usually to use them either as bait or a sacrifice. Their most obvious use is to tank hits since they exist for no purpose outside of building up wounds to keep the useful characters intact during more difficult encounters, but there are also cards you can use instead of moving a character. While this mechanic is basically useless and lends itself to groan-inducing bits of randomness during fights, stronger cards often come with significant downsides that can easily see a party member lose all of their health. That would require careful consideration if all of your characters mattered or were built up by the story, but the plot is so scattered that it’s impossible to get attached to anyone, and thus it’s easy to bring a meat shield along to sacrifice them to the card gods.

Also, you may be noticing that videos are numbered. That’s because the game jumps around so much and is so lacking in impact that I’d otherwise have no way of remembering the order things happened in. This game is really, unreasonably bad.

No, she really didn’t

You’re given control of three different parties in Ash of Gods, which might sound like “yay extra content” when in fact it means three times as many arbitrary, pointless decisions that you lack the information and motive to know or care about, and three times as much time spent staring at a little map icon slowly moving from one location to the next. Anyway, one of these parties is headed by an emotionless assassin-type joined by a group of women warriors. They really shouldn’t be used because I could swear that enemies prioritize attacking women, sometimes going so far as to walk by characters they could easily finish off, and that’s in addition to the fact that he can more than take care of himself. This screenshot is immediately after the fight in the last embedded video, and you’ll notice that a character who wasn’t even involved is supposedly the one who finished off the hardest enemy. There’s no cutscene or anything showing this. It’s merely stated to have happened, and you have to constantly try to keep up with (what we’ll generously be calling) the writers on things like this that happen randomly. This isn’t even a tiny thing, because the character in question is cursed as a result of her involvement despite never being used once.

[Click here to go to Ash of Gods: Redemption log #1]
[Click here to go to Ash of Gods: Redemption log #3 (END)]

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