Games I Finished 2023: LiEat
Sep. 9th, 2024 04:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmicspear(Originally posted on November 18.)
(Putting the entire trilogy here because they're really short games and I played the commercial release, which has all of them.)
Honestly I mostly picked these games up now in order to do something short before diving headlong into Astlibra, since I've only been playing massive epic RPGs lately and I may as well take a break from that.
LiEat stars a girl named Efina, or Efi for short. She just so happens to be a dragon. What kind of dragon, you ask? The kind who eats lies, of course! I mean, it's kinda in the title there. But LiEat dragons in general are...interesting—they look mostly like humans, they mature quickly and age slowly (Efi is 4 months old in the first game and looks closer to 4 years, and there's another dragon character who's 100 and looks a lot younger than that), and every dragon has a unique power of some sort.
Efi travels with her father figure of sorts, a con artist who goes by a different name in each game. I'll just call him Leo since that's what he uses in the first one and it's simpler that way. He's also the only person whose lies Efi can't eat, and the reason for that isn't directly stated but there's a general implication that it's because he's just too good at lying for her to deal with due to, y'know, being less than a year old. Their dynamic is pretty much what you'd expect from a cynical crook and an adorably innocent little girl, and it's pretty entertaining on the whole.
Anyway, Efi and Leo go about having episodic adventures in various towns, inevitably getting involved in assorted incidents where Efi's ability to sense lies is, as it turns out, incredibly valuable. The lies she senses manifest as creatures that you then have RPG battles against in order to eat them. This leads into a recurring investigation gimmick, where you'll get a testimony that has one or two lies in it, all the statements manifest, and you need to figure out which ones are lies based on what you already know. It's an interesting way of doing things, to be sure.
And I feel the need to emphasize that the battles are, in fact, extremely easy. This isn't a game about throwing combat challenges at you, it's a story that happens to require that you fight enemies a few times. It's even possible to find a set of cheat weapons that make you basically unstoppable in every game, with only the third one requiring you to fight anything before they're available.
Anyway. The general theme of LiEat is obvious enough, given that the main character of the series has the ability to make people's lies take physical form. And indeed, while there are antagonistic presences in every game, the general mood is focused on how their lies pile up, driving them into a corner and corrupting them even when told with good intentions. It's extremely on the nose, but that doesn't make it any less effective.
All told, this was a fun distraction and it makes me want to check out some of Miwashiba's other games
(Putting the entire trilogy here because they're really short games and I played the commercial release, which has all of them.)
Honestly I mostly picked these games up now in order to do something short before diving headlong into Astlibra, since I've only been playing massive epic RPGs lately and I may as well take a break from that.
LiEat stars a girl named Efina, or Efi for short. She just so happens to be a dragon. What kind of dragon, you ask? The kind who eats lies, of course! I mean, it's kinda in the title there. But LiEat dragons in general are...interesting—they look mostly like humans, they mature quickly and age slowly (Efi is 4 months old in the first game and looks closer to 4 years, and there's another dragon character who's 100 and looks a lot younger than that), and every dragon has a unique power of some sort.
Efi travels with her father figure of sorts, a con artist who goes by a different name in each game. I'll just call him Leo since that's what he uses in the first one and it's simpler that way. He's also the only person whose lies Efi can't eat, and the reason for that isn't directly stated but there's a general implication that it's because he's just too good at lying for her to deal with due to, y'know, being less than a year old. Their dynamic is pretty much what you'd expect from a cynical crook and an adorably innocent little girl, and it's pretty entertaining on the whole.
Anyway, Efi and Leo go about having episodic adventures in various towns, inevitably getting involved in assorted incidents where Efi's ability to sense lies is, as it turns out, incredibly valuable. The lies she senses manifest as creatures that you then have RPG battles against in order to eat them. This leads into a recurring investigation gimmick, where you'll get a testimony that has one or two lies in it, all the statements manifest, and you need to figure out which ones are lies based on what you already know. It's an interesting way of doing things, to be sure.
And I feel the need to emphasize that the battles are, in fact, extremely easy. This isn't a game about throwing combat challenges at you, it's a story that happens to require that you fight enemies a few times. It's even possible to find a set of cheat weapons that make you basically unstoppable in every game, with only the third one requiring you to fight anything before they're available.
Anyway. The general theme of LiEat is obvious enough, given that the main character of the series has the ability to make people's lies take physical form. And indeed, while there are antagonistic presences in every game, the general mood is focused on how their lies pile up, driving them into a corner and corrupting them even when told with good intentions. It's extremely on the nose, but that doesn't make it any less effective.
All told, this was a fun distraction and it makes me want to check out some of Miwashiba's other games
