#gilda ikenfell

[the-lemonaut]

Finished playing this small turn-based RPG recently, it was a good time :]c It's got some useful accessibility settings and lots of queer characters. Also the art is appealing and i can't stop obsessing over the OST 😭✨

It's kind of a bit of everything: fighting, story and character development. You might notice i have some favorites lol. These two side characters snuck into my heart and are there to stay for the next who-knows-how-long

[galvanic-witch]

redrew my profile picture because it’s almost two years old at this point. it was really fun to do because my style has changed quite a bit!

[artseniccatnip]

played ikenfell i rly liked it, crossed it over with wandersong cause i DO WHAT I WANT!!!

bonus spoiler doodle under cut

canon lesbians <3

[dangerradio]

replaying ikenfell!! one of my fave games

[vgtrackbracket]

Video Game Track Bracket Round 2

The Ultimate Show from Super Paper Mario

vs.

It's Showtime! - Gilda's Theme from Ikenfell

Propaganda under the cut. If you want your propaganda reblogged and added to future polls, please tag it as propaganda or otherwise indicate this!

The Ultimate Show:

HOW COULD I LOSE WITH THE POWER OF LUIGI?? Jokes aside this is a VERY fitting final battle theme for an AMAZING game. Seriously if you haven't played this game do it now!!!!

the best thing in the game and it's not even close. and super paper mario is one of my favorite games ever.

[solarisreblogs]

When do we get to kiss I’m gonna throw my remote at the screen

[tartsplace]

I liked this outfit

[emgy805]

[shower-racoon]

Gilda is my favorite character so far. I can't wait to see more of her

[terg-verde]

who is the best Ikenfell character and why is it Gilda

[peanutdream]

Here's a free opportunity to recommend a game that you love :)

I absolute *love* and adore Ikenfell. I've honestly been wanting to replay it ever since I first finished playing it.

You play as Maritte, a non-magic user, who is looking for her sister, an attending student at the magical school of Ikenfell. Weird things have been happening at the school lately, causing it to be on lockdown.

While sneaking into the school, you discover being a magic user (a pyromancer) yourself. Great - because there are multiple enemies out there trying to get you. Luckily, you get help from your sister's school friends to get down to the bottom of your sister's disappearance and the mysteries surrounding the school.

The combat system is both turn-based and timing based (though there are also accessibility options to completely disable this, or make it easier!) If i remember correctly the timing-based inputs both make your own attacks stronger and minimize enemy damage.

Cute characters! I remember a lot of them being queer as well!

Cute pixelart!

The music is composed by Aivi & Surasshu! (the ones from Steven Universe!)

GILDA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

most importantly: I enjoyed it a lot!!!!!! that's it!!! That's the most important part of the recommendation! I enjoyed it!!!!!!!!!!

no wait i forgot this is even more important: YOU SAVE THE GAME BY INTERACTING WITH CATS, AND THE NTHE CATS MEOW WHEN YOU'VE SAVED THE GAME....................................

[veebs-hates-video-games]

I have extremely mixed feelings about Ikenfell. The characters are lovely, and the story is pretty enjoyable once you get past how much of it is just finding the next exposition lock or person who can unlock a door for you, but the actual gameplay would've made me quit playing after the first chapter if I had to keep dealing with it. My favorite combat mechanic in the game is the instant victory button.

On paper the game does a lot of stuff I should really like, but I ended up finding it really tedious and unsatisfying most of the time. If I couldn't just skip all of that and go directly to the next bit of the story I wouldn't have lasted very long. If anything I wish I could've skipped past it even quicker than it lets you.

Thankfully the characters and how their relationships develop and the reveal of more of what's actually going on at the school are all pretty fun, and that's what kept me going, even if it never quite made it past pretty good territory into the great range.

Another weird thing that I should love but was actually mildly annoyed about for a while was the queer rep. You'd think I'd think it's great that basically everyone's queer in some way but no one makes a big deal about it, but it was multiple hours before any of it really had any affect on anything. Like until the final third of the game almost the full extent of it was pronouns in bio and Gilda is gay for Maritte once or twice. And like I don't think any of that is a bad thing in any way, it just doesn't do much for me personally. Luckily there was more stuff that actually affected people's lives and relationships with each other the closer it got to the end, which I appreciated.

In the end I guess I'm glad for accessibility options that let me skip past stuff when I'm straight up not having a good time and mostly only have to deal with the parts I like, but it'd be even nicer if the parts I didn't like were also parts I like so I wouldn't want to skip them.

[tesl8n]

Finished Ikenfell tonight, which was a game I was looking forward to for literal years before it came out. It's combines tactics RPG elements with the timing minigames from the mario RPGs in a neat little package. It's also part of that genre of very self-effacedly queer indie games that've been coming out the past few years (stuff like undertale, stardew valley, hades, that kinda stuff). Tactics RPG with queer characters sounded right up my alley, so I was really excited for it to come out in switch.

It was definitely the best paced game I have ever played. Like, I have such a problem with dropping games when the gameplay sections between story beats gets too long, and there's a lot of games I really enjoyed that I just haven't finished because of it. Ikenfell was such a breath of fresh air there - the dungeons didn't get super long ever, the battles didn't get super slow, and there was never a point where I had to grind or be forced to engage with random encounters because I was too weak. I wish every game was like that, tbh.

The story is alright. It is *not* a particularly queer story - its themes aren't really about being gay or trans, it's not a romance or a bildungsroman, it just happens to have 3 sapphic women and 3 nonbinary characters in the party. Which is a kind of representation some people really want, though I'm not sure it's necessarily *my* preference. Instead, it's about a girl, Maritte, who comes to a wizard school in search of her sister, Safina, who has gone missing, only to find an apocalypse starting, seemingly at Safina's hand. So Maritte gathers all the people in Safina's orbit and follows the trail of destruction to find her.

It's central theme is about how lying and secrets hurt people - a lot of the problems in the story are cause by Safina lying to the people around her. And so, Maritte spends the story chasing after Safina, always one step behind, and finding out who she really is behind her mask, and the same for all the characters.

It’s like a 7/10 story, like, it’s alright, but nothing to write home about, I guess? At times, it suffered from passivity - the characters are never making choices, they’re always just following the one lead that they’ve got, one after another. But, there’s a few fun moments, a few cool twists, and I did enjoy it.

The characters are definitely the highlight of the story. They’re very dynamic, and the game works very hard to give everyone a character arc, and dynamics between most of the cast of 6.

I did enjoy the gameplay. I love tactics rpgs, that’s my favorite genre by far, and this one had a neat take on it. The board was small, something like 3*11, and it pushed very hard for you to work on positioning. Every characters attacks hit in specific spaces relative to where they stand, and one of the challenges was positioning yourself and your enemies in a way that let you get off your strongest attacks and your best buffs, while not being vulnerable to your opponents multi-target moves, or their strongest attacks. It made you learn each enemy’s moves, especially the bosses’, and also think about your characters’ attacks fit together.

One of the highlights of the system was a synergy I found between Ima and Gilda. Ima is a healer based around regen, and Gilda is an attacker based around moving around the board. So, Gilda has an attack lets her teleport and then immediately take another turn, which means that Ima’s regen healing goes off twice that turn, giving Gilda a big burst of healing. And, the two of them had complementary big attacks - both of their strongest attacks hit targets 3 away, but Gilda’s was one up, so if the two of them stood adjacent, they could both hit the same target. And, Ima’s healing required that zir target be adjacent, so that set zir up to kickstart Gilda’s healing again.

That synergy was the most fun thing I had with the game - it made me feel so powerful and clever for having found it, and it gave battles a fun flow, where I went back and forth between setting up buffs & doing big damage. There’s a few other synergies like that I found, or could see even if I didn’t piece them together.

But, it’s not like Slay the Spire, where the synergy system is obviously part of the game design. Here it feels like an emergent property of the design, which is cool, but there are limits to it. For instance, Petronella had a kit based around healing & poison, which felt like it could make an interesting combo - stall fights while poison picked enemies off. But, that combo is entirely contained within Petronalla - they have to do both the poison & the healing, and the action economy is not there for it. Try as I might, I couldn’t find a way to enable their kit to work. Gilda’s kit was similarly niche, but the synergy with Ima saved it and made her the best character in the game - I wish the same were true of all of the characters.

The timing mechanic sucked and was over centralizing and I hate it. It’s supposed to make enemy turns more engaging, rather than something you have to just sit through, but I suck at it and it’s not fun. Plus, it’s very centralizing - if you never hit it, fights are impossible, and if you always hit it, fights are too easy. I never find it more engaging, just more frustrating, in any game I’ve played with it. You can turn it off, but fights aren’t balanced around that, and it’s not the developers vision, so I didn’t.

So yeah, altogether a fun game that I’d recommend.

[linkdryn]

Another character for pride. Gilda from Ikenfell, she’s a lesbian.

[dangerradio]

the party!

[vgtrackbracket]

Video Game Track Bracket Round 1

It's Showtime! - Gilda's Theme from Ikenfell

vs.

Main Menu from No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way

No propaganda was submitted for either track.

If you want your propaganda reblogged and added to future polls, please tag it as propaganda or otherwise indicate this!