Get me out of this loop!

As an avid JRPG fan, I’ve always kept an eye out for releases that seem interesting. After all, even though we naturally gravitate towards sequels and other relative known-factors, taking a chance on something brand new can often lead to discovering hidden gems and cult classics.

So, when I first heard of Loop8: Summer of Gods, the premise of being stuck in a loop while gathering the strength to fight an impending calamity seemed intriguing enough for me to check out.

Little did I know that I had not fully prepared myself for the other end of the spectrum when it comes to exploring an unknown, the potential for an absolute disaster.

WHY DO I GAME? JUST TO SUFFER?!

MSRP: $49.99
Platforms: PC, PS, Xbox. NSW
Played on PC: i7 9700K, RTX 3080, 32GBs RAM
Price I’d Pay: $0
Played: 10~ hours (Full disclosure, I did not complete this game in full as it was tortuous)

In a world where humanity is losing a fight against demons that have been wreaking havoc across the planet, there is a small Japanese town by the name of Ashihara that has seemingly been spared from the onslaught. Nini, a teenager who has been living in a space station makes his way to this quaint little town and discovers that all is not what it seems to be.

From a synopsis, it seems promising enough but whatever potential the premise seemed to hold, it was immediately broken from the get-go.

Instead of giving me time to breathe and take in the world, after a brief introduction, I was thrust into combat against what I assumed was a demon with a party of characters that I didn’t recognize. Given that it was a scripted fight to show that looping is a mechanic, I swiftly lost the battle and was thrown back to the beginning of August. While I understand trying to start a game out in exciting fashion, having to already see the same exact scenes I’ve seen before again within the first 30 minutes of gameplay had the opposite effect.

Despite being self-described as a JRPG, Loop8 plays more like a visual novel with very light RPG elements sprinkled in. There aren’t items and equipment to purchase and equip, levels to grind, dungeon diving to look for hidden treasures, an overworld to traverse- almost none of what you’d expect in a typical JRPG.

Instead, I could increase my own stats by training using the pull-up bars to increase my strength, running at the beach to increase my agility and so on. As there is a hard time limit to defeat the demon and everything except for talking to other characters took time, I could only do a few things before the day was over. As it doesn’t take time to talk to other characters and I needed to increase their relationship/stats by talking to them, I spent most of my time doing that.

Talk to other people not because you want to, do it because you HAVE to! This game is so realistic.

Given that the vast majority of the game’s appeal and time spent is in interacting with various characters in the town and getting to know them, this needed to be the game’s greatest strength. Unfortunately, that is not the case as talking to other characters mostly prompts dice roll responses that may increase or decrease their affection towards me.

Outside of a handful of events, responses were generic one-liners that I kept prompting to see the next event. There was no rhyme or reason to the conversations and they seemed random most of the time. In some cases, just starting a conversation with a character would trigger a scene out of nowhere and I’d find myself in a different area of the map.

Most of the time, I felt as though I was interacting with AI generated characters with random responses and random chances at getting a positive/negative response and any semblance of them feeling real in any sort of way vanished the moment that class ended and they started walking into the desks and each other. I felt like I was trapped in a black mirror episode.

*glitches into desk* MY MAN!

All this prep and build up leads to a fight against a demon that must be defeated before the end of the week which can be initiated by navigating an alternative version of the town. While I could tackle the boss alone, I could also invite other characters to join me as long as I’ve built up enough of a relationship.

The combat is barebones turned based mechanically and there was an aspect where I could charge the attacks with an emotion like Friendship and Hate which added a modifier to the attacks but mostly it did not matter too much. I could also get hints on what the demon is planning to do next but I found that most fights boiled down to a DPS race where I tried to kill the demon before it killed me. The party members I brought with me also acted on their own adding another element of randomness to the fights, as if this game needed any more pointless dice rolls that could lose me a fight when my party members decide to buff/debuff the enemy instead of simply landing the final hit needed for the kill.

As the demons are possessing townsfolk, I was supposed to be invested in their relationships and ultimate fate but as most of my time spent talking with these characters were just me trying to grind up some numbers, I felt absolutely nothing for any of them.

There is nothing more damning that I could say about a visual novel than to say that I did not care about any of the characters or the overarching story but that was the case with Loop8.

Incredibly bland and boring, this is one of the worst turn-based combat I’ve experienced. It also doesn’t help that the animation for the attacks looked very rough.

If all that wasn’t bad enough, losing the DPS race against a boss due to not preparing well enough or bad luck meant that I was thrown back to the beginning of the month, having to do everything again.

The same bosses.

The same events.

The same conversations.

With none of the relationships and stats I’ve built up that remain outside of the “blessings”.

Surely, I thought.

Surely, they must have many differences during another loop outside of mixing up the boss order to keep things interesting.

Surely, they must have a robust skip function that will only skip the parts I’ve read and stop at new content.

Surely.

The reality, however, was not so kind.

What was tedious and annoying when I was first exposed to it became utterly insufferable once I had to go through it again.

This thing would pop up every time I would get a blessing to say the same thing over and over again. I hate it.

Loop8 is an abject failure in almost every level.

The story and character interactions play out as if they were entirely randomly generated by AI and I would have better luck trying to get emotionally invested with my air fryer.

The combat mechanics were shallow and the RPG elements were nearly non-existent.

The very worst offense of it all is that normally, when a game is bad, I would have to suffer through it once and get to move on. In the case of Loop8, it forced me to experience the same exact terrible content over and over again by its very design, breeding a sense of resentment towards a game I haven’t felt in a very long time.

Fun Tidbit – It sucks to give such a low rating to a game but it accurately reflects my tortuous experience with the game.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.