Disclaimer: I received a review copy of This Way Madness Lies from Robert Boyd with Zeboyd Games. The game was given without the expectation of a positive review, only that we play the game, share that experience however our platform saw fit and create a review of this game to share on social media platforms. Unless otherwise noted, all pictures and descriptions are from my playthrough of This Way Madness Lies.
Systems: Steam
Release Date: November 10, 2022
Publisher: Zeboyd Digital Entertainment LLC
Developer: Zeboyd Digital Entertainment LLC
Time Spent: 12 hours 26 minutes
This Way Madness Lies is a magical-girl comedic Shakepspearean JRPG from Zeboyd, the developers of Cthulhu Saves Christmas, Cthulhu Saves the World, Breath of Death VII, Cosmic Star Heroine, and Penny Arcade's On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness 3 & 4. If you have played any of those games, then your experience here will be similar, but if you have not, then buckle up. I will be honest though, out of the three references and styles this game derives from, I was unfamiliar with the magical-girl aspect, although I am aware of Sailor Moon and that the transformation scenes were specifically referencing that anime. As far as Shakespeare, while I am not as versed as The Kid, I have seen a handful of Shakespeare's plays both in full form and in condensed form at Renn Faires, as well as several film adaptations over the years; Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing is probably my favorite. So while I might not have gotten all of the questions correct during Shakespeare trivia, I did know a fair amount of the references. And as far as JRPGs go, I mean, come on.
This Way Madness Lies follows six girls who are part of a Shakespeare drama club at their local high school, the Stratford-Upon-Avon High Drama Society, where they perform plays by William Shakespeare and in their off time, fight against the Nightmare realm from invading and destroying the continuity in Shakespeare's fictional worlds. The premise itself is rather silly and even the characters in-game point this out, but the events happening in this game have apparently been happening for a while as the characters confront the invading Nightmare creatures with zeal they have developed before the events in this game. There is not too much though devoted to how long these attacks on the world of Shakespeare's plays has been happening, but the impression is that it has been going on for some time as a few past adventures are mentioned throughout the game. Similar to how Cthulhu Saves Christmas was a prequel to the first released Cthulhu Saves the World, I would not be upset about a prequel showing how Imogen and company received their powers and started upon their adventures; but that might be a few years away if at all.
The game is also very classic Zeboyd Games in that a lot of the characters are self-aware that they are characters in a video game and there is a fair amount of fourth-wall breaking. The writing too is very much in the style of previous games from Zeboyd with witty banter between the characters, the enemy descriptions, and how the game itself interacts with the player. In This Way Madness Lies there is the added semi-optional mechanic of offering the player a modern translation of semi-Shakespearean English during certain dialogue scenes. Anytime there is a play being performed or a character from one of Shakespeare's worlds talking, you can, if you want, see a tongue-in-cheek translation of what is being said. At fist I was a little meh about this mechanic as I felt that I have understood enough Shakepseare to not need a modern translation, but I should have known better because of what game I was playing. The translation is not intended to be a direct interpretation of the dialogue, but instead is just more comedic writing. I found it very hard not to screenshot every piece of original and translated dialogue because of how hilarious a lot of the translations ended up being. There were even a few instances where there were no interactions between characters happening, usually while traveling through worlds between monster encounters, that I wished there was another chance to use the translator.
While This Way Madness Lies is heavily based of JRPGs of the SNES era, there are several liberties Zeboyd Games takes which essentially makes this game somewhat of a JRPG-lite. First off, you are able to select the overall difficulty of the game upfront, from Easy ("Easy Enemies, For those who love story") up to Hard ("Hardest Enemies, For those who love mastery") and within that difficulty setting in-game, all of the enemies are visible on-screen and some battles are avoidable. Some of these enemies require the player to time their sprints between enemies like they were Simon Belmont in Dracula's castle, or you can just run into the enemies and engage in battle. Even outside of battle in the menu screen, you can instigate a battle against enemies found in the level to grind more than would otherwise be necessary to get through the stage.
Unlike traditional JRPGs, there is no equipping weapons and armor here, instead you equip traits that augment each character's stats, their abilities and consumable items to use during combat. So while there might some poo-pooing about not being abe to find and equip better gear, determining which abilities each character will have during combat and which traits might better suit the character based on who is in the party has its own levels of complexity beyond picking the most recently earned skill. And for me, even after 12 hours and fighting every monster I came across, as well as a few self-instigated battles, there were still about 10 or so abilities that I never unlocked per character.
Because this is a Zeboyd game, items respawn after each battle to be used indefinitely, and most abilities during combat are single-use until the character defends and then their used abilities recharge/combe back. Although when you start the game you can only equip three items, you can find backpack upgrades in treasure chests throughout the levels; some chests are semi-hidden while most are visible but take some treking and minor-maze solving to find out how to get to them. I usually found that I would have a healing potion, a potion to cure status ailments (although I never really seemed to bother with trying to cure ailments like poison as they never had very noticeable effects, or I just was not paying as much attention as I should have been). There were also items that could cause damage to one or groups of enemies and I found that I liked having these as options for when I did not want to use up a characters abilities or if they did not have any attacks left (only having buff or ailment causing abilities left).
Unlike a lot of previous Zeboyd games however, the enemies do not get stronger as the battle progresses, which I was happy to see not happen. But as with earlier games, the characters fully heal and revive if they are killed at the end of each battle, which makes the fact that enemies are sometimes more difficult than your average random monster battle in a JRPG (Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest) a little bit more foregiveable. It is also nice that leveling up happens to the entire troupe, not just who is currently with you in your party and wether or not everyone survived. It is just nice consideration to take the player's time into account and not have to worry about all of the characters leveling unequally to the point that one character is level 45 and another character is level 37 while the game levels the monsters towards the highest or lowest level character.
While the game has six primary characters (or does it have more!?), Imogen does fill the roll as the primary main character as she is playable for the entire game while the rest of the characters will swap in and out, sometimes in story-based ways and others in contextual circumstances. Not having full control over who is in your party is part of the reason why leveling in the game happens the way it does, as you otherwise, again, might have severely under or overpowered characters. Although by the end of the game, I did have my favorite tactics for going into battle which lead me to having certain favorite characters. Beatrice for instance has the Toxic Cloud ability that poisoned all of the enemies who would take poison damage on their turns although the enemies would never die from poison, instead taking them down to 1 HP. She also had the Doom ability which caused 150% dark damage to an enemy that was already poisoned. I personally found the poisoning ability invaluable especially once enemies got into the 3000+ HP realm as they would take 200-350 damage along with whatever damage my characters did with their own attacks. Although for whatever reason, possibly a combination of the traits I had equipped to Beatrice (and possibly because I also had the "Unique" trait equipped to Rosalind which made her "Less likely to be targeted by enemies"), but I found that while most characters died infrequently during battle, Beatrice ended up being "killed" 10+ times in the second half of the game.
One last thing that I questioned is only a little bit of a spoiler. About halfway through the game, the main character Imogen finds herself in a petshop and you are given the choice of one of four pets to choose. I decided to go with the goldfish mainly because of how different it was from the other fantastical options such as Neko Dragon and Unicorn. I think I liked the idea of the goldfish maybe actually turning out to be super intelligent, but instead it seemed to be a mundane goldfish. I cannot comment on how the story progresses for the other pets, but maybe the goldfish is just a goldfish and I should have chosen a different pet if I wanted the pet storyline to abe interesting. To me, this storyline (for which there is an achievement) did not go anywhere, and while I do like the idea of not everything in a story having a fulfilling storyarch, I was a little disappointed that this in fact did not go anywhere. Maybe on a future playthrough I will choose the Neko Dragon.
The Steam page for This Way Madness Lies suggests that the game is playable in between 5-10 hours and if you look up at the top, you will see that it took me almost 12 and-a-half hours. Although I tend to take longer just because of the way I play apparently, reading all of the dialogue, fighting all of the monsters and instigating a couple of fights on my own. Plus I tended to go into the menu to look over the Items, Abilities, and Traits any time I gained new ones. Additionally, entering new areas and fighting new monsters with differing weaknesses might require me to go in and more things around to make the characters in my party more efficient. But even playing at two hours longer than what Zeboyds sees as a full playthrough, I loved that the game is as long (or as short) as it is, and something that I love about Zeboyd games in general. You get a similar experience to playing a 50+ SNES era JRPG in a quarter of the time and I do not feel like I missed out on anything based on the story that was being told here. Sure there were references to past events and hints at what could be a sequel (crossing fingers for that and a prequel), but that just helps to make the world feel already lived in and established.
I believe that This Way Madness Lies accomplished what it set out to do, to deliver a short and sweet JRPG, this one of the magical-girl type set in a Shakespearean universe with the obligatory Cthulhu mythos and SNES-era references in the storytelling, monster design, and overall amazing sense of humor. The writing is again top notch and what you would come to expect from Zeboyd and I am eagerly awaiting either another game in the same universe or their next original game.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental
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