4/5 ★ – TNGLiam's review of Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling.

Platform: Switch Time Played: 25 hours Status: Beaten I knew of Bug Fables back around the time it released, and ended up purchasing the physical edition by Limited Run Games back when it went up for pre-order in April 2021, but have somehow never ended up getting around to it, despite my undying love for the first two Paper Mario games. But with the remake of The Thousand-Year Door close on the horizon, I decided to finally play this love letter to some of my favorite games of all time, and I was not disappointed. Of course, playing so similarly to Paper Mario 64 and TTYD will of course draw comparisons between those games and Bug Fables, but honestly, Bug Fables does a pretty stand-up job at taking Intelligent Systems' original formula and building on top of it while still sticking to what made that formula fun and memorable to begin with. The biggest way that Bug Fables changes up the formula is by having three key party members, instead of one key party member and a bunch of partners that serve more as assists rather than actual party members in most RPGs (although this is less so in TTYD). Here, each of the three pivotal characters, Vi the bee, Kabbu the beetle, and Leif the ice moth all work together as one unit, allowing for you as the player to join along on their journey and feel like a part of it yourself while watching these three grow while also learning about who they are, but we'll get back to their stories in a minute. Having these three characters have equal abilities while also having unique attacks that are needed for certain circumstances. Being able to pick the order of either of the three members' turns on the fly feels great, with the actual order of the team coming into play as well. Even being able to grant another member a turn so that they can gain another is awesome and really comes in handy. Besides all of that, typical Paper Mario mechanics like unique action commands, HP and FP (called TP in this game), and Medals replacing Badges. Similar to the Paper Mario games, depending on your playstyle (aka referring to my individual playthrough) most numbers seen in combat like HP, TP, and overall damage dealt to enemies and your party are usually within the single digits. By the end of the game Vi and Leif had 16 HP, Kabbu had 19 HP, my party had 40 TP overall, and I was on average doing 3-6 damage with Kabbu, 3-4 with Leif, and 1-2 with Vi, with my optional partner (the only Paper Mario like partner in the whole game) Chompy doing 2-3 damage. The overall look and esthetic of the game is very similar to that of Paper Mario 64, with non-shaded, flat 2D characters walking throughout a lower poly 3D environment, with a storybook aesthetic slightly hinted at, but not as much as the Paper Mario games. Honestly, it took me a while to really appreciate this game's aesthetic, as a lot of the assets don't look like anything masterful, like how Born of Bread, another game heavily inspired by Paper Mario, looks for instance. But after getting around halfway through the game, I slowly began to truly appreciate the expressiveness of the characters, the uniqueness of their designs, and honestly just how cool and charming everything looked. And for only two core people having worked on this project, that's pretty damn impressive. And that's not even getting into the absolutely phenomenal world-building that this game employs throughout the entire experience. Each and every species and race of bug has their own origins, kingdoms, hierarchies, political relationships with other kingdoms, dark and forgotten secrets, etc. I really liked how the game's lore was more of an optional thing to learn while doing the main story, with the Lore Book side quest among others diving deeper into Bugaria's background. Leif's entire backstory is one of these many pieces of worldbuilding that ended up being so awesome and definitely made him my favorite of the trio. Having his origins be directly tied to the disappearance of the roaches, and making him some unique hybrid creature that's actually a cordyceps living inside of a dead moth but retaining the same memories, wants, and desires as the original host was crazy. Kabbu never got any backstory or origins as cool as that, but seeing what happened with him in Chapter 5 was nice to finally see his point of motivation. Meanwhile Vi is just kinda in it for the money and nothing else, and her only real growth is just gaining the ability to trust and care for others and be a part of the team. Sure she gets her own little side story involving her sister and her having a falling out, but the overall lack of depth in her character remains a nitpick of mine. I also liked how as the story went on, it evolved from being more of a fetch quest for the mystical McGuffins to unlock the titular McGuffin into being a genuine fight between kingdoms in order to get to and destroy The Everlasting Sapling in order to stop the tyrannical Wasp King's reign. It allowed the first four to five chapters of the game the ability to let the trio grow together, and by the time they have been individually fleshed out, and once you enter the Wasp Kingdom in the middle of Chapter 5, the story only goes on from there as the stakes only get higher and higher for these heroes and side characters that you've grown to care about throughout your journey. The last thing I wanted to talk about was overworld movement. Throughout the course of the story, each of the trio learns different ways to traverse the overworld, whether it be learning abilities to overcome new obstacles or just things that also make traversal easier like Vi's Beemerang staying in place to move cogs, Kabbu's dash which allows for faster traversal while also destroying boulders, or his dig ability to hide from enemies or dig underneath obstacles. Leif has some really cool abilities, like freezing falling water or enemies into blocks of ice that Kabbu can move around or being able to create an energy shield for the party to walk over spiked or electrified surfaces, with Vi's flying ability coming in handy to boot. I will say that there were a couple of times or two where overworld traversal was a bit cumbersome, especially in Chapter 2 when having to angle Vi's Beemerang while the platforms that moved up and down had weird hitboxes that made it hard to move around. Besides that, everything gameplay wise was fairly sound and didn't prove to be any major issue. One issue I did have with combat though was a small lack of that feeling of progression when it came to the amount of damage I could dish out at once. By the end of the game, I was still dishing out, on average, the same amount of damage that I was at the beginning of the game, with my specials and overall strategies taking use of Leif's ability to freeze enemies to gain one extra hit point on an enemy. Vi always felt so useless as I kept her in the back of my order, so she was always only dealing out one or two hits at a time compared to how much I relied on my other party members. And sure there are Medals that increase the equipped party member's attack, but only by taking way the same amount in defense, and enemies hit hard in this game (which is mediated by the optimized blocking system which I really liked). Anyway, I just wish that it was easier to upgrade your damage output in this game, that's all. Overall, I really enjoyed my time with Bug Fables. The central cast, the writing, the worldbuilding and story, the Paper Mario esc gameplay and art style, all merged together into a really awesome experience that only leaves me craving more. So while I'm now off to play the long-awaited remake of The Thousand-Year Door, and Born of Bread now in my backlog, I still hope that we end up seeing an eventual sequel to this game, as Moonsprout Games made something really special here that will be hard to replicate.