JarataireRPG

Genre: Mahjong Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

JarataireRPG, released on Nintendo Switch in 2023, is a Puzzle game that’s extremely similar to a solitaire Mahjong Puzzle with RPG elements. In this game, players face off against a series of monster gals, and must match tiles for attacks to do damage to take out the enemy before their life bar is depleted.

Players are introduced to the game via a poorly-translated prologue to the game’s story, such as it is, about a god instructing servants to fight a demon lord, but due to there being no demon lord they apparently got together a bunch of dragons and made one so they’d have someone to fight, but then decided that fighting said demon lord sounded like too much trouble so they subcontracted you to do it for them. It’s an amusing premise, but the poor localization makes it come across as stilted and awkward.

The rest of the presentation in this game has some nice elements, but seems a bit amateurishly put together. Both the enemies you’ll be fighting and the tiles you’re matching feature some well-designed anime-style artwork of cutesy monster gals, but there’s no animation to speak of, and the menus are rudimentary at best and feel somewhat slapped-together. This is all backed by fast-paced high-energy rock guitar music, which is pretty good, but doesn’t seem to match the rest of the game.

There’s another issue with the visuals, which ties in with the gameplay. The game devotes roughly half of the screen to an image of the enemy you’re facing and your lifebar, which is particularly frustrating as the enemy doesn’t really do anything. An additional sixth of the screen is dedicated to showing you the tiles that have just been matched. That leaves a corner of the screen that’s roughly a third of the size of the screen for the actual gameplay. This can be particularly galling when playing in handheld mode, as it becomes more difficult to distinguish the tiny images of the tiles on-screen from one another.

You’ll want to play the game in handheld mode though, as playing this game with a touchscreen is far more natural and fluid than moving around an on-screen cursor. Players can alter the cursor speed in the game’s menus, but this is still clearly not the way this game was intended to be played, and the way the game’s “battles” play out in real time means you don’t have the luxury of waiting for your cursor to meander over to where you want it.

The battles themselves have some good ideas, but unfortunately those ideas don’t really seem to come to fruition. As in solitaire Mahjong, you’re matching tiles two at a time, with new tiles revealed underneath as you match. Players are only able to play tiles that are completely uncovered, though unlike Mahjong, it doesn’t matter if there are tiles on either side of the one you’re looking to match. Also unlike Mahjong, you’re not looking to “complete” the puzzle, but to do enough damage to the enemy to win the battle, and you can reshuffle the board at any time to get new matches.

As for how damage works, after a second or two has passed and you’ve made no matches, the game resolves the tiles you’ve matched, dealing damage to the enemy and having them deal damage to you in exchange. The game even indicates that doing combinations of different types of tiles can make for special attacks, though it’s not exactly clear what these combinations are or what those attacks do. And as in RPGs, the damage your tiles do will “level up” after completing a battle.

If done properly, a Mahjong RPG could make for a unique and interesting experience. Unfortunately, there are plenty of problems here keeping this from being the case. As mentioned before, it’s not clear exactly what strategy there is here. It doesn’t seem like you can edit your “party” of tiles to give you greater control over your use of abilities, and exactly what those abilities are and how to use them is never clear.

However, this game fails with basic fundamentals too – you have a life bar, but your enemy does not, meaning that you don’t really know how far away from potential victory you may be. What’s worse, the moment the game takes to resolve attacks pauses and refuses to let you match tiles during that time, and it can be extremely frustrating to constantly find the game unresponsive when you’re trying to make selections, because the game froze to deal out damage just as you were making a selection.

As a $1 game, I have to give JarataireRPG credit for trying something unique and creative, giving us an interesting combination of solitaire Mahjong Puzzle games and RPGs. Unfortunately, the numerous major flaws in the execution of this idea result in a game that’s maddeningly frustrating to play, as well as failing to capitalize on this idea. As a curiosity, this game may be worth $1, but it’s too flawed as a game to be worth your time.

tl;dr – JarataireRPG, released on Nintendo Switch in 2023, is a Puzzle game that’s extremely similar to a Mahjong Puzzle with RPG elements, with players matching tiles to fight anime-style monster gals. There are some very good ideas here, but they are so poorly executed that all you’re left with is confusion and frustration. Even at $1, this game is only worthwhile as a curiosity.

Grade: D+

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