*=Video
^=Music
All Caps=Recommended
Hover mouse over screenshots for commentary.
 A typical battle screen. The top left has which characters will take a turn next, the bottom left are the command prompts, and the bottom right shows the current character's HP and MP. |  |  Frickin' bees. . . |
|---|---|---|
 That guy saying "heart" can heal me, but only if I give him a butt load of money. |  Smite! This is a typical animation from a special move. |  The battle ground changes depending on where you encountered the monsters. |
 You get a small bonus if you choose to start the game without some items offered to you. |  |  Walking around in the world map. |
 The yellow boxes mean no one can be there, and the orange box is where the special move will strike. Much of the game is using moves with specific attack patterns. |  That's a lot of monsters! |  |
 Lots and lots of enemies. |  |  You get XP and Moon Gems after each battle. |
 Oooh, these enemies are lined up perfectly for my special move. |  An arrow volley. |  One well designed feature of the game is that you can voluntarily engage in battle even without any visible enemies. I prefer this to random encounters. |
 |  Walking around the world map. |  Again, lots of enemies . . . |
 BOOM! |  |  Most battles aren't this crazy, but many boss battles are pretty much like this. |
 A powerful special move. |  Ooh, these four morons have lined up perfectly for this powerful attack. |  |
 |  In addition to the main world map, there are many dungeons throughout the game. |  Hitting four enemies at once. Not bad! |
 BOOM! Take that, scorpion! |  Who puts wings on a helmet? |  |
 And with that, I gave up. |
November 2014
Rainbow moon is a tactical RPG, much like Final Fantasy Tactics. The game takes place in an open world that is about the size of old-school RPG's like the original Dragon Warrior or Final Fantasy. The game is complete with character classes, constantly improved swords, shields, staves, and all manner of items.
The battle screen is on a grid system where each enemy will get a turn based upon their speed. Additionally, each enemy and player gets a certain amount of actions per turn. For example, if you had two actions you could move and attack, or attack twice. As you level up your stats increase, including occasionally getting one of those sweet, sweet extra actions per turn. All players have a basic attack, but can use Magic Points to perform special moves. These moves sometimes target a single enemy for lots of damage or sometimes they target many enemies at once. All par for the course for a tactical RPG.
Each character gets experience after battles which automatically level up each character, but they also get "moon gems" based upon how many enemies they kill - if one character doesn't kill any enemies then they don't get any moon gems. Moon gems are kind of like currency and are used to increase your stats - each time you level up you are allowed to increase your stats a bit more, but only to a certain amount. Eventually you'll have a character with lots of extra moon gems but you can't spend them on stats until they level up again. I found this to be somewhat limiting. However, there's always a lot of room to upgrade either Hit Points or Magic Points - you're allowed to upgrade these so much that it's unlikely you'll be able to fully upgrade these stats before leveling up again. HOWEVER, this was impractical. You could spend maybe 15 hours to get the moon gems required to increase your hit points by 40 points, but that's the equivalent of getting hit like one more time, or even less. No thanks. I thought it was silly that these upgrades were so expensive.
For what it is, the game is adequate. But that's about it. I actually really wanted to like Rainbow Moon and played it for way longer than I normally would have (I really try to finish any game I post about here), but it just wore on me. I think this was for a few main reasons:
​
1. The actual combat gameplay (the tactical part) is not really my cup of tea. I like it a little bit, but battles would often take ten minutes and wouldn't result in many rewards.
2. The game design was too transparent. I've played a lot of games and get how they work, but in Rainbow Moon things just felt like tasks rather than things I wanted to do. Let me give an example of what I mean: Let's say I need to cross a pit and come across a path and three locked doors - a red one, a blue one, and a yellow one. There's only one path to explore, and after I get to the end of a monster-covered path I get a yellow key. I use this to open the yellow door and go down another long path, and at the end is a blue key. Behind that door is a red key, and behind that door is a ladder that I can use only once to cross the pit. I mean, come on! That's not creative and I can see what they're doing. And the entire game is like this - I thought it would only be this way for the tutorial areas but the entire game consists of the gameplay I just described. I frequently thought "What am I doing? This isn't fun."
3. The game required too much grinding (repeated, extended gameplay just to get your character strong enough to move on). I finally gave up (after dozens of hours) when I came across an enemy that I had to beat but who was way more powerful than me. I estimated I would have needed to engage in battles for about 10 hours just to level up. That's nonsense. And I wasn't cutting corners, either - if anything I was grinding and leveling up more than I thought necessary.
I had a few other niggles with the game, such as that special moves had unskippable animations that were sometimes as long as 20 seconds, but those three things are my main complaints. There is a lot to like about this game and if you like tactical RPGs then you might love it, but it's flaws just wore me down to a point where I had to stop playing.