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(Ok, so I'm going to have to split this review into two parts as it turns out that I written more than I though. So, sorry if the review felt like it stop suddenly compare to the usual reviews I did.)

Derpy Review #13: Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling if you want the full name.

Micro: When it comes to playing modern video game, many gamers would like to play a game that is similar to that one game they played many times in their childhood, wanting a game that could rival the game they love playing the most or see if anyone has the capability to match that type of click that said game made on the gamer. Sadly for some gamers or series, some major developers and publishers can tend to not try to make a game similar to a belove game from many years ago and would rather do something else with the series that can leads to drastic changes that makes the series unrecognizable, for better or worse, and most time, worse. Paper Mario is such a series where if you were to ask people who play RPG Mario games and asked them what would be some of their personal favorite, probably a third of the time you'll hear someone mentioned a Paper mario game, a series of the Italian plumber that sadly hasn't exactly have been doing well in terms of getting great love from the fans since Sticker Star came in. However, that leads to what this weird monologue paragraph that's taking forever to get to. What do you do when the games of your favorite series hasn't made a game that you can say you love as much as one of the previous ones?

Shekra: ...... You go and find another series that looks similar to the games in terms of mechanics, characters, dialogue, story and love put into it?

Micro: Yup.

Shekra: ..... You got to shorten these starter paragraphs more and get to the point.

Micro: Fine, Bug Fables is the game we are finally doing a Derpy Review.

Shekra: If I got this right, you said that it was this game that gave you the idea to start this whole Derpy Review idea, correct?

Micro: Yup, I believe I mentioned this in the drawing i did with Elizant a week or two ago that I was having a discussion with JustAnArtExpert when we were talking about the concept story idea of the pokemon stories of dynamax, animal crossing, and another story major project that still on hold. I believe I told them about Bug Fables, being a few hours in the game and recommend trying the game out, and sure enough, I manage to convince someone to give the game a shot if they want a paper mario like game. We'll go more into the mechanics of this game and how it feels like paper maro later, as we have quite a bit to talk about this game.

Shekra: So, why didn't we made this game our first Derpy Review?

Micro: Several reasons. One, I didn't know what game to start off with for Derpy review and asked for suggestions, and we all know what the first game we reviewed is. Two, one of the main reason I wanted to start working on this one was, at the time of thinking of doing this game, LimitedRun games was doing a neat collector set of orders involving this game that I wanted to make one of the next review this one..... sadly that didn't happened as the order date to pre order the collector stuff ended about a week or two ago, I was busy making episode 3 of KoT, and I had a lot of things to work on, so needless to say that I was late to work on this review. And three, I wanted to replay this game and have detail notes of what to talk about as well as see how I feel about the game after finished 100% the game for many months.

Shekra: Yeah, no kidding on the notes, you wrote like four page worth of things to note.

Micro: Yeah I know, so let's hurry up and get started on the review. Oh, before I forget, another reason I wanted to wait was to make sure plenty of people who sawed one of my works on the drawing last year had plenty of chance to play the game. You know who you are when I said that, so I do hope you played the game till the end, cause we're going to spoil the sapling out of this game.

Shekra: Spoilers are abound!

Story:

Micro: In the mythical land of someone's backyard, lies Bugaria, home of intelligent and sentient bugs that manage to have some technology and magic. Many bugs came to this land, one being a ant queen name Queen Elizant, who helped lead many bugs here after traversing the harsh dangerous lands like the Forsaken lands and the Dead lands to instill peace within the kingdom of other bugs. However, one thing Elizant wanted in her travels was the mythical Everlasting Sapling, a strange artifact rumored to be created by the roaches before their, ironic considering they're roaches, disappearance. The sapling was said to give any bug eternal youth if they consume a leaf from it. Sadly, Elizant never found the sapling, but the quest for continues as in the process of searching for the artifact and clues to it, the Explorer's Association was made, helping those asking requests, exploring land and trying to find clues related to the sapling.

Shekra: Which leads us to the start of the story as we watch a green beetle name Kabbu requesting the royal guard of the current queen, Maki, to be a explorer. Maki rather refuses the request until a small commotion was made no thanks to a young bee making a rather loud fuss of getting refuse to be a explorer especially without a partner, the bee's name is Vi.

Micro: Not wanting to waste a golden opportunity of potentially being a explorer, Kabbu and Vi decided to agree to be partners so they can be explorers, provided they proof to Maki that they're tough enough to not be taken down by a lone seedling the second they walk outside the ant kingdom. Just saying this now, thank goodness Maki wasn't trying at all when he tested the two.

Shekra: The two manage to convince Maki to let them have a shot to be explorers, with the two not wasting that much time to go to their first mission, enter Snakemouth den and try to see if there is an artifact without getting eaten by anything inside like most explorers that went to that place.

Micro: One skip and a jump over rocks and weeds, the duo made it to the cave and goes as far back as they can to find the mythical treasure..... a mushroom. As well as a trapdoor that Kabbu fell in and Vi can't fly him out of it cause she's lazy to lift him up to be perfectly honest.

Shekra: Ok, to be honest, I did find that part a tad bit funny when it happened. However, thanks to this trapped, the two found a trapped mouth sleeping in a spider webs... follow by the very spider that made the web and is now hungry as it sees an all you can eat meal.

Micro: The two, after some self thinking on Vi's end if she should ditch Kabbu and the moth and high tail it out of the cave or not, manage to rescue the moth and escape the spider. The moth soon wakes up, but after some weird gibberish, it seems the moth doesn't know what exactly happened to him or what happened around him, just his name, Leif. And after getting a minor ambush from a weird flying mushroom cyclops thing, Leif accidentally, and realizes himself as well, that he can use ice magic. And with that, Leif became the third member of this marry band of a smol, greedy childish bee and lovable, warrior spirited, dorky beetle, with Leif being a bit of a deadpan yet enjoyable moth with a bottomless stomach. And with their powers combine, the three makes up a team of smart asses that don't miss a beat to pick on each other's faults in this game, and I love them because of it.

Shekra: One thing I got love about the game is that it does a great job in letting know these three's personality traits and how well they develop as the continue on their journey throughout the game. But anyways, with the team assemble, the three make their way further in the den, soon discovering the actual artifact that was hidden deep within the dungeon. Unfortunately, they set off a trap were the room starts to flood with water and to make matters worse, the giant spider is back, and with quite the jazzy boss theme that's hard to not join a swing.

Micro: One thing we will probably mentioned multiple times in this game is that the game has a great sound track to listen through, especially with the bosses and some area specific themes. Anyways, a smack with Kabbu's horn, a freeze from Leif's ice magic, and a smack from Vi's weapon, the mighty beemarang...

Shekra: Really?

Micro: Yup, that's what she really calls it, better than ADBP. A smack from the beemarang, the spider goes down just in time for the team to have a quick swimming lesson before safely washing up near the ant kingdom and not wanting to take up swimming ever again.

Shekra: With the team safe, the artifact now secure, the team make their way to the current queen, Queen Elizant II, ruling the kingdom after her mother passed away and her wanting to continue the search of the Everlasting Sapling for her mother, ruling the kingdom with a slightly less kinder personality compare to her mother. The queen thanks the team, rewarding them for finding the artifact and naming them as team Snakemouth, and immediately informs them to go to the Golden Settlement and search for a second McGuffin that can lead to the ultimate McGuffin. And thus, kick starting the game to venture out more into Bugaria as the team enters the second chapter of the game.

Micro: One thing I think we should mentioned that while the game is rather simple in the beginning of the game of the story, we will find out that there are more at works at what's going on, like why Kabbu's and Vi's reason for wanting to be explorers in the first place, why Elizant II, who we'll just refer to as Elizant from now on, wants to find the sapling, and several other things, like Leif's past for example. As it turns out, Leif is actually a lot older than he looks, old enough that he actually knew Elizant I and that he went to Snakemouth Den with his own team under the orders of the previous queen. So now we have the mystery of what exactly happened to Leif to figure out.

Shekra: I guess we should mentioned this right now that there are points of the game where some of the things Micro mentioned will be talk about, but personal stuff involving the three members are under side quests that more or less optional to do on your own, minus Kabbu's but we'll get into more about that later. We will only add the team's personal side quest in the story segment at the order we did them in the game, just to have some things be as straight to understand what happened as possible. Anyways, another thing that the team will have to deal with is that they quickly find out that they and Elizant aren't the only ones looking for the artifacts and the sapling as the team soon encounters wasps, who waste little time attacking them before the team manage to fight them off, with the wasp soldiers returning home.

Micro: Minor annoyance and hard fight aside, the team make their way to the Golden Settlements, home of several characters I can't help but love and the location that worships a goddess name Venus, with a festival ready to begin. The team had to wait until the festival is over, so they decide to have some fun. Some fun mini games of smacking many worms with Vi's beemarang so many times most of them probably have a concussion and Leif chowing down so many food down that he could make a certain miner ant blush later, and a small festival fight with the priestess to be allowed inside a sacred area later, the team traverse the area to try to reach the top of the summit of where the artifact is at.

Shekra: However, the team will soon meet a rather persistent rival team that picks a fight with them. The team is with a pop idol bug name Mothiva, a rather selfish, arrogant girl that Vi waste little time butting heads with since the two are rather stubbornly hot headed, and the second member being a wasp and Zasp, the only "friendly" wasp allowed in the ant kingdom and Explorer's Association and loyal follower of Mothiva cause, and let's be honest, guy is an absolute simp for her, though, supposedly after looking up some trivia of Zasp, apparently the two do have some sort of relationship, so maybe not entirely a simp.

Micro: Well, either way, one battle to knock Mothiva's mountain size ego down a millimeter, the team make their way up the submit, where they soon encounter the goddess Venus. She doesn't give the artifact to the team, mainly no thanks to Vi's big mouth, but after a test of dealing with her guardian plant giant monster thing, she not only kindly gives the artifact to the team, slightly begrudgingly due to Vi, but she also later is willingly to have a bud pop up somewhere in kingdom to heal the team.... for eight berries. Turns out that Aria and Venus's follwers are far too busy dedicating themselves to the plant goddess to bother getting a job to help themselves, so the berries payment is Venus's way to try to pay the followers back in kindness.

Shekra: Well, at least she's kind to support everyone in her ways. But besides that, Venus also gives some rather important information to Leif, something, while not entirely helpful to everything he wants to know, gives him some relief. Venus tells Leif that his team and him did went to Snakemouth den, but only one got left behind, which was Leif, while the rest made it out, though, I believe she said that one of them may have recently passed away. Still, it gives Leif some relief to hear his team is alright, as well as possibly meeting maybe their kids so they can find out more things of what happened.

Micro: With the second artifact collected, the team returns home. There, Elizant informs everyone that the second artifact can lead to the location of the Everlasting Sapling and the first artifact can help read the second artifact, but they still need one more artifact in order to gain the sapling, which turns out that the artifact is inside Vi's home kingdom, something she's not thrill to hear that she has to go back home and meet all the bees.

Shekra: We shortly later find out that Vi left the bee kingdom cause she got sick of being rather treated like a child and that the idea of her being an explorer instead of a worker bee, or any bee that does creative things in the kingdom, sounds either dumb or too dangerous for her to do, something Vi took greater offense when it was her sister that also join every other bee about Vi's idea of being an explorer. So, Vi left the kingdom in rather bad terms with her sister to say the least.

Micro: Well, whether the Leif and Kabbu has to drag Vi kicking and screaming back to the hive or not, everyone has to go there as well as give the queen bee materials in exchange for the artifact as it later reveal that the artifact is what powers the hive's honey factory and robots that allows the bees to pump out so much honey that they could feed all of Bugaria if they want. Sheesh, theses are some very intelligent bugs for crying out loud if they can make a factory and robots, how is it they're not the more dominating kingdom of Bugaria?

Shekra: Moving the plot along, the team had to make their way through a giant sand box, serving more like a dessert where quicksands, bandits, and bus size scorpions are running amok. What doesn't help is that the team gets ambushed by some bandits, as well as wasps, who appears to becoming more aggressive in their attacks as they are seen more in the kingdom. Well, after dealing with the wasp and entering a dessert town that is at the base of the tree where the hive is at, the team takes an elevator ride up, with Leif and Kabbu talking Vi into at least talking with the bees and maybe apologizing for being more or less a bratty child.

Micro: Once at the top, the team is rather surprise as they went through a scanner, at this point I think its safe to assume Bees are miracle scientist workers if they have scanning technology, and discover that there seems to be something in Leif. Lief discovers that he seems to have crystals inside his body, which explains why he can use ice magic. However, that's not the only thing of not as the scanners seems to detect something else inside Leif that the scanner can't tell, and there's no way to tell exactly what it is without dissecting Lief, which he understandably declines the offer.

Shekra: Well, with the minor detour done, the team meet up with the Queen of the bees, who turns out to be quite the motherly character that seems very happy to see Vi is back and proud to see her became a explorer, something that surprise Vi as she hears the compliment. Yeah, turns out most of the bees are rather cool of seeing Vi being an explorer and some of them being proved wrong. Anyways, with the material to make a replica of the artifact, don't know how in the world that works considering how powerful the thing must be to power a whole factory, but that's beside the point, Queen Bianca kindly tells everyone to take a tour of the factory to see how the honey is made as the bee scientist make the replica to switch the artifact.

Micro: Sadly, things don't go smoothly as something happens that causes the factory to go into lock down and everyone is trapped inside, with the only one to override the lock down is the overseer that is somewhere inside the factory. Fighting off the malfunctioning robots and honey monster, don't ask, the team manages to find the overseer and make their way to the core where the artifact is at to switch the thing so the lock down can be lifted, only have to deal with a very dangerous defense system that is in the way. With the artifact replaced and the lock down lifted, the team got the artifact and are ready to head back to the ant kingdom.

Shekra: However, before the team can do that, Vi does a quick side mission to pay a visit to her sister to patch things up with her. That proves harder than said as the two sisters aren't exactly in a great talking mode, but after knowing what Vi's sister wants to do a project of hers, Vi does a "quick" trade quest to get a bucket of red paint. Vi hands her sister the paint, and the two does talk a bit about how they before acted out when VI wanted to become an explorer and left, the two patching things up and Vi is welcome back. With that task done, the team goes back to the ant kingdom so Elizant can start the search for the Everlasting Sapling.

Micro: However, because this is an RPG, it turns out that the artifact the team collected is only half of one, which means every needs to find the other half of the thing before they can do anything, and fast, as the reports are that the wasp are getting more aggressive that invasion might be on the rise. The team then finds out that the only clue for where the missing half is at might be within the dessert, and that they need two keys to enter a dungeon.

Shekra: One small detour for no reason whats so ever in the Golden Settlement, the team takes a off beat path into a cave where a giant plant monster resides. The team beats it up and get a seed from it which later can given to a bee scientist in the hive to sprout a cute baby mother chomper that serves as not only an excellent pet for the team, but a fourth party member as well that the team name her Chompy.

Micro: You do know that thing isn't even remotely related to the story right.

Shekra: No way we're leaving that cute thing out the summary, so shut up before I chomp you in the neck.

Micro: The team gets some clue in Defiant roots, the town at the base of the tree, and later made they're way to a bandit hideout where a key is said to be in, only to find out that it was a trap that got the numbskulls capture. Thankfully, the team manage to not only get out, but also get the key as well as they handle the bandit's leader. During this time, the team found out from listening on one of the bandits that the wasps were the reason for the lock down in the previous chapter, no thanks to the help of the bandits. Anyways, with the team out and managing to find the other key thanks to a bee scientist, the team goes to the spot the artifact is said to be at. However, before the team can go to the area, they were ambushed by a giant scorpion, who manages to struck down Leif, causing strange tentacles to come wiggling out of his chest as Lief is in shock and hurt.

Shekra: It was only by the help of Zasp that Leif was saved, though, Leif gets some strange memories, some revering him as some strange failure and to be thrown away. Still, Leif manages to recover from the attack, now more determine to go find the artifact as he thinks it can help him discover the truth.

Micro: Something we kind of forgot to mentioned is that Leif has a rather strange reaction to the artifacts he is closed to, or anything extremely filled with magic, sparking some memories or something to the moth. Anyways, using the keys to reveal a giant sand castle that form on its on and me wishing the team stayed on the top of it so they didn't had to climb it.

Shekra: Entering the massive structure, and finding crystals everywhere that is also related to ice magic, the team made their way to a throne room, discovering a mummified roach, called the Watcher, coming alive to stop the team. After a rather tough fight, the team manage to get a strange crystal, which later turns out to be needed at Snakemouth den, as well as finding the final artifact, thus ending the team's search of the magical McGuffins.

Micro: Sadly, things don't go the way one would hope as Zasp hastily went to the team to inform them that the ant kingdom is under attack from the wasp, being lead by their ruler, the Wasp king.

Shekra: The Wasp King waste little time in demonstrating his power on everyone, defeating Elizant's forces left and right with his weapons and powers, not even our merry band team could stop him as he uses fire magic to defeat him easily. It was only by the last minute help of Maki that the Wasp king stop his attack and left the kingdom, but not without taking the artifact the team just worked hard to get... so that sucks.

Micro: Not wanting the Wasp King to figure the artifact out and risk becoming more powerful, Elizant orders the team and Maki to head north into the far Grassland where the wasp kingdom is and try to stop the king while everyone tries to recover from the attack. Kabbu strangely was rather determine to be the one to lead everyone into the Far Grassland. Maki tells the team to meet him there as he goes ahead to scout.

Shekra: With the team preparing to go, the team ask a friend about the crystal they got from the Watcher, finding out that there is more in Snakemouth Den than what they saw. The team goes back and enters a room that Vi and Kabbu missed due to them falling for a mushroom trap the first time they came to the place. Using the gem, the team delves deeper inside the area, discovering that Snakemouth den was actually a massive roach laboratory facility that conducted some rather cruel experiments on ants, beetles, bees, and moths.

Micro: As it turns out, the roachers here were conducting experiments to study crystals that you see in the game to try to replicate a fraction of the power the Everlasting Sapling emanates, only to make an abomination creature that became their death. The team dealt with the creature, with Leif finally getting his memory back and the team makes a rather shocking discovery. As it turns out, the roaches created an advanced colony of cordyceps fungi, only to consider them failures and threw them away. One cordycep survived, managing to crawl its way into a dead Leif, bonding into him and inheriting his memories. To say this gives Leif that we know a bit of a identity conflict is a bit of an understatement as he doesn't know if he can consider himself as Leif or something that is pretending to be Leif. This kind of make things awkward for Lief more as earlier, if you go to a certain part of the ant kingdom early, the team discovers that not only Leif had a wife before he died in the dungeon, but his kid had kids of their own as he sees a moth that looks like his wife, meaning that the woman is probably his great granddaughter. While Leif doesn't exactly know what to do at the moment, one thing he wants to do at least is maybe give closure to "Leif" and see his family.

Shekra: While it feels a bit awkward to say the least, the interaction actaully went well, with the family accepting Leif as part of them and welcomes him to come by any time. With this quest done, Leif thanks Kabbu and Leif as he figures he lives on so that way the memories of "Leif" still lives on while he walk with the team he is glad to call friends.

Micro: Now with the mystery of Leif solved, the team head into the Far Grassland to meet up with Maki. Once there, Kabbu tells the team that he did came further north of the land and that the only way he managed to sneak by the wasp kingdom was to take a dangerous route through the wild Swamplands, and extremely dangerous location. Entering the area, the team are greeted by native bug tribes that waste little time attacking the group and are hellbent on attacking them, only to later force the group to be separated from Maki when they try to cross a bridge, with Maki hurting his leg in the process. The team tries to get to Maki as quick as they can, Kabbu losing his cool as he bashes rocks out of his way.

Shekra: It is here we find out that Kabbu came through this swamp with two other bugs, his master and his best friend, both of who felled from a monstrous beast that easily killed them while they force Kabbu to run away. It is this very reason why Kabbu wanted to return to the swamp so he can take revenge on the beast, thinking his team and Maki might be more than enough to take the monster out. Unfortunately, and not thanks to Kabbu, the beast proves to be more dangerous than he thought and nearly destroys the team. But using the power of anime friendship, Kabbu manages to stubbornly pull through and beat the beast to save everyone as he apologies for endangering everyone.

Micro: Letting the incident slide for this one, the team get to safer grounds to celebrate their safe travels through the swamp before they focus on the mission to infiltrate the Wasp's headquarters, something that will be more difficult due to Maki still injured. However, as the team manages to break into the massive complex, they find strange sights that don't seem right, stores are run down and boarded up, some wasps are locked in cells along with some other bugs that got the unfortunate luck to get capture, with one wasp extremely scare of a pink mantis as the mantis seems more than thrilled to be capture.

Shekra: The team meets a wasp name Jayde who brought some light into the situation, telling the team that things went down hill when the Wasp King showed up from nowhere and somehow force most of the wasps to follow his demand, and to make things worse, the wasp queen is also missing as well. Taking this information in mind, the team make their way to the throne room, where they ambushed by the Wasp King's most dangerous general of the whole wasp army, General Fuff. General Fuff tries to stop the team, but our team manages to easily dispose of him with ease and enter the room behind the throne.

Micro: However, the team did not found the Wasp King, but the Queen of the Wasp, Vanessa II. Vanessa confirm the team that it was the Wasp King that easily took over her people and started this mad power trip to seek the Everlasting Sapling so he can get more power, with Vanessa telling the team that the king isn't even here in the kingdom and hasn't since he invaded the Ant kingdom. The team realizes that everyone was tricked by the Wasp king and take Vanessa with them as they rush as fast as they can to the ant kingdom before the Wasp king attacks again. Sadly, that didn't work as the Wasp king easily took down everyone and Maki with ease as he uses his fire magic once again, this time threatening Elizant that if she doesn't hand over the artifacts, he'll cut down everyone in the kingdom.

Shekra: Not wanting her people or anyone to die, Elizant hands the king the artifacts, Wasp King taking the artifacts and makes his way to the location of where the Everlasting Sapling is at, Giant's Lair. The queen felt rather distraught that her attempt of getting the sapling not only proven to failed, but everyone is now endanger of a powerful Wasp King once he gets the sapling. Its here that Lief asked Elizant why she was so determine to find the sapling in the first place. Elizant comes out and tells everyone that she wanted the sapling so she can revive her mother, Elizant I, who is still alive, but was put into a deep sleep. Elizant wanted to bring her mother back so she can give the throne back to her, feeling like she is not worthy of the throne especially due to her lack of diplomatic skills that cost some tension between the ant kingdom and another kingdom, the termite kingdom, some bugs were banned from coming inside the kingdom, and some things not going well since Elizant took over after her mother. Everyone in the room tells the queen that they actually are glad to have Elizant as their ruler, seeing how she has shown to try her best as ruler that the action she did to protect her people from the Wasp king even made Leif to respect Elizant more, considering he didn't really like Elizant compare to her mother since Lief knew Elizant personally.

Micro: Complimentary aside, everyone still need to stop the Wasp king somehow, but in order to go after the king, the team needs a boat to sail to Rubber Prison, the gate that blocks the only entrance to the Giant's Lair. In order to do that, Elizant decides its time to visit the termite kingdom, wanting to make some truth to them and patch the kingdoms relationship to stop the Wasp King. Elizant request the team to escort her through the Forsaken lands in order to reach the termite kingdom. Dealing with the danger wild life, the group manages to get to the termite kingdom, with its citizens not exactly thrill to see the queen but are willing to escort her to the king and queen since she personally came to the kingdom.

Shekra: The king and queen, mainly short stack king dingaling, are not thrill to help Elizant to give her the means to go after the Wasp King, but after some talking and Elizant more or less giving them a reality check of what would happen once the king gets the sapling, the two rulers agree to probably help her provided our team beats the coliseum. Some fights with creatures, termite guards, and a rematch with Mothiva and Zasp that stole the spotlight so they can fight team Snakemouth, the two rulers decides to give Elizant a prototype submarine that I'm just going call the bubble mobile, cause that thing is tiny.

Micro: The team takes the bubble and drops Elizant and some termites at a port so boats can be make and Elizant can summon the Explorer Association to help go after the Wasp King. Elizant ask our team to go to the rubber prison and try to slow the Wasp king's army and make as much noise as possible so everyone can get in the prison. And with that, the team sail to the rubber prison, a place that can slightly kiss my ass for some annoying back tracking of flipping some levers just to get anywhere.

Shekra: Traversing the prison, the team manages to catch up with the Wasp King, but General Fuff quickly interferes and distracts the team as the Wasp king makes his way inside the Giant's lair. After dealing General Fuff, Elizant and the Explorer Association manages to get inside the prison, getting ready to chase after the Wasp king. Before doing so, Vanessa came with everyone so she could give our trio and the adorable Chompy as broach, saying its a family heirloom that should help the team against the Wasp King's fire magic, something she used to avoid becoming a pile of ash when the king capture her. Giving the broach to the team, Vanessa tells us good luck and to take down the usurper.

Micro: Well, talk about one big massive story talk for a game story that's honestly easy to remember once you play the game, but Christ I forgot how much there is to talk about when it comes to an RPG. We haven't even talk about everything else.

Shekra: Oh its not that bad to talk about, we shouldn't have that much to talk about.

Micro: Shekra, you seen the amount of notes I took for crying out loud, we have a lot to still talk about.

Gameplay:

Micro: Ok... where to begin with this monster of a segment?

Shekra: Well, we can start with the obvious thing that anyone boots up the game and that is the aesthetic and gameplay. We mentioned earlier that this game feels a bit like paper Mario games, the first two to be exact. Well, that's mainly due to the fact that paper Mario really did influence the development of this game when the devs, Moonsprout games, were making the game, along with other series that influence development like Golden Sun, a Tales game, Xenoblade, and oddly enough Persona 5 for some reason. Similar to Paper Mario, the game is a turn based RPG where each characters take a turn to do something while the other does the same thing, where the game has simple basic stuff like the basic attacks, skills that uses Team Points, or TP for short, and a few other usual bells and whistle that you would see in a turn base RPG. You can even manage to get an extra sneak attack on the enemy if you hit them in the over world before making actual contact on the enemy. Just be advice that the same can be said for the enemy if they hit you first.

Micro: However, and this is where the similarities and inspiration of Paper Mario shows up, which get use to us compare some of the thing in this game to Paper Mario as its the best way we can describe some of the things in this game without causing a major headache on out end. Similar to Paper Mario, when you try to do something, you have also to some timed button pressing to be able to maximize your attacks, or even hold something long enough before letting go of a button or pressing the right button when said button flashes on the screen. For example, Vi uses her beemarang to attack her foes, but when you use her, you have a bar with a arrow going back and forth as you need to press the button in the right spot of the bar or else Vi will drop her beemarang and the thing will do pitiful damage that might even flinch the enemy. Kabbu's attack is easy to do as you just need to hold the stick down for a second before letting go. And Leif involves you waiting for the screen to show the button you need to press.

Shekra: The same thing applies to something like using a character's skill, like Vi using a skill call the tornado toss where you hit the button multiple times in the right spot for Vi to hit the enemy multiple times. Each characters has unique skills that they can do, with some focusing on specific things, like Vi has skills that can hit an enemy multiple times like I mentioned, but she also has some skills that can do some minor healing to the party. Kabbu is a bit more focus on hitting the enemy harder or charging at multiple enemies at once while he can at least pierce through an enemy's defense, more on that in a moment. And Leif, I honestly find Lief to be more of a support character than a damage dealing character. Leif's skills can hit multiple enemies at once and even freeze some enemies that can allow you to deal extra damage or make the enemy waste a turn, however, Leif also has skills that can make a party member or the whole party invincible for one turn, a move that can buff a party member's attack or defense for a few turn while weakening enemies. And there's Chompy that I mentioned a few times already, where she can walk up to an enemy and bite to deal some damage. On top of that, you can change a party member's position where someone in the front can deal more damage to the enemy at the exchange of getting hit more than the others. You can have items from a limited inventory that slowly grows more for either healing, dealing damage, or buffing up someone while reviving someone. You can even use something call spy to get a description on enemies as well as some commentary from the team. In all honestly, the team has quite the move sets for dealing with enemies.

Micro: That would be true except let's talk about some problem with the combat with the characters, specifically, Kabbu, Leif and Chompy. Starting with Leif, he isn't exactly a damage dealer to say the least, which can be a problem if an enemy has some defense, which can either mean that the enemy will take less damage than usual, or no damage at all from someone like Lief or Vi if they are in the back of the team and the enemy didn't got their defense lowered. On top of that, Lief's basic attacks only works on enemies that are on the ground and not in the air. Leif's basic attack is mostly useful in bringing out enemies that are buried in the ground, something that some enemies will do and Vi and Kabbu won't be able to attack unless uses his basic attack to pop them out or Kabbu uses a skill that he gets mid way of the game. Leif's magic skill can deal heavy damage, especially if someone is frozen, but skill might be useless if an enemy has a defense of three, which is a pretty high number in this game in case you are wondering. And as for Kabbu and Chompy, both a similiar problem in that they can only hit enemies that are not only on the ground, but also at the front of the enemies' party instead of whatever position. Vi and Leif can hit any enemy in the other side, minus air for Leif, but Kabbu and Chompy are stuck hitting whoever is at front unless Kabbu uses a skill that hits multiple enemies at once, or uses a pebble. However, Chompy might have slightly worse than Kabbu, but let's talk about the adorable plant first before we talk about the bad part.

Shekra: Well, for starters, Chompy is the fourth party member of the group that you can get after defeating an optional boss. However, unlike everyone else, you don't need to worry about Chompy's health as she is completely free from getting hit from anything, so you just need to worry with the main three. Her attacks can do some decent damage, more so if you give her a ribbon, and Chompy also get other different type of ribbons that does different things, like restore TP for every successful bite, poison attacks, ect.

Micro: However, here's the problem with the ribbons. You can only put one ribbon on Chompy, and the rest are locked away by doing various stuff, three of which enoughs having enough game coins from an arcade that doesn't show up until the end of game. On top of that, without a way to deal damage to to enemies in the air to knock them into the ground, something Vi can easily do, Chompy might be very situational as well as Kabbu do them no having a real way of dealing damage to enemies in the air.

Shekra: True, however, that is one of the great things about Bug Fables is that there are plenty of way to do this game, For starters, we talk about items before, but what we don't mentioned is that you can actually cook stuff.

Micro: Throughout some of the kingdoms and towns, you can find chiefs that if you give them an item or two, they can make something even better... or make a mistake that you'll regret making. The list of things you can bake is massive, so many combinations you can make that can create food that can heal your team as well as restore TP, items that can boost and buff the party, you can even make items that are bombs that you can use to damage enemies while potentially risking to harm yourself depending on the bomb. You can even do a quest that can give you the ultimate dish that can heal a lot of the team's health and TP at once.

Shekra: We defiantly recommend that you look up some recipes in this game to see what might catch your interest and might want to think about using with the next boss you will encounter. Now, one problem about making items is that you have a rather limited inventory space, starting at nine or ten, I believe. However, the inventory actually increases after the party levels up to certain ranks, reaching the max inventory space of fifteen even after you reach a max rank level of twenty seven..... why twenty seven and not twenty five or thirty?

Micro: Leveling in this game is almost the same as Paper Mario and not like most RPGs where you have to grind ludicrous of xp to level up, thank goodness. Each level up points requires at the beginning of the game starts around one hundred, and after every level, the point restart to Zero and continues on with only the require points needed to level up barely going up by a point or two. So in other words, this game really doesn't ask you to grind on enemies for hours. Though, you might still plan on grinding once you discover the golden Seedling, an enemy that has only very little health and give ridiculous amount of xp but can only take one damage per attack from a character, so you best hope that you can freeze or stun the little bastard, cause they won't hesitate to run away. Here's a tip, use Kabbu's taunt ability to make the golden seedling to attack Kabbu. Don't worry if Kabbu is done for the count, as if the team gets a level up, then the whole party levels up no matter what, and on top of that, you get to choose between raising your party's health by one, raising the amount of TP, or something call medal points which we will talk about in a bit. On top of that, you also get a little tangy berry to get for beating the golden seedling.

Shekra: However, grinding for golden seedlings may not be necessary as there are plenty of side quest that can reward you for completing. As well as areas that houses some neat stuff for exploring.

Micro: That's something I want to talk a bit, something I love about this game is that it rewards you for exploring every knock and cranny in the game. You may find some items that might not be useful now but might be later when a quest pops up, lore books that's part of a long quest that you can read each book to find out more of Bugaria and somewhat know how the bugs became sentient and intelligent. You might look around and find something call medals, something we will go in depth in a moment. You might even something call crystal berries that you can collect for now but can't spend yet, but if you do a certain side quest, you can gain access to a little shady side that even Vi is familiar with, but got kick out for some reason, and spend the crystal berries on rare medals. This is also where you can go to start a very optional quest where you can get rewarded by having a very cheap discount to a optional area call Metal Island. This optional quest is involves a mini game call spy cards, a minigame that makes use of the spy option in battle, so more reason to spy on enemies. The minigame is very simple, pick one boss card, two miniboss cards, and whatever basic enemy cards you can pick, choose some cards you think will allow you to have the higher score in the turn and knock a player health down to zero and win. There's more to the mini game, but its easy to understand once you get into, and I do recommend trying the mini game out when you get the chance, its actually quite fun to be honest.

Shekra: This game loves rewarding you one way or another for exploring everywhere as well as talking to everyone, you can even find someone in Defiant Roots that can charm you which can some times help in battle. Though, some exploration in this game might require some puzzle solving that may be a slight headache due to most of the puzzles seems to revolve around Vi's beemarang, something we had heard some complains about due to the puzzles involving that thing be awkward, but we really didn't had much of a difficult time with the puzzles. Now some exploring might bite you in the butt if you make a turn and bump into a boss, but I still say its worth it when you look around and find medals.

Micro: Medals are very interesting to talk about in this game, and there's quite a bit to talk about. Medals in this game serves to be like the badges in Paper Mario, you go into the menu and pick medals you want on you team that may help you in battle. Medals can give the party a sort of boost in something or add something that can change the party. For example, you can apply medals that can give some party members extra health per health plus medals, you can increase the TP you have with TP plus medals, or you can apply medals that can restore some TP and health every two turns. However, that's just scratching the mere surface of the potential of what you can do with medals. There are medals where you can drain health from enemies with basic attacks but you lose one point in attack damage, you have it where if someone gets hit from an enemy, then the rest of the party member gets a charge that increases their attack in the next turn allowing you to deal more damage, you can find medals that can give you resistance to poison, being frozen, burn or shocked. There is a lot of medals to choose from, and the thing is, you can combine a lot of these medals.

Shekra: Keep in mind that you are limited of how many medals you can have on depending on the MP you have, which you can increase if you want after leveling up. But besides that, yeah, there is a massive combination of stuff you can strategize on using on bosses that might give you a hard time or want to experiment with. Funny enough, there is even medals that can reward you more with berries to spend and xp to get at the cost of making the game harder if the medal is apply. In fact, the game even gives you a hard mode medal to use if you want where the enemies give slightly more xp, but might hit harder or have more defense. Though, I recommend not playing Bug Fables on hard mode your first time playing the game like Micro did last, hard mode isn't exactly pulling any punches in the first ten hours of the game. Now granted, if you beat certain minibosses and regular bosses with the hard mode on, you can get a special medal from someone in the Explorer Associations as a reward.

Micro: With that said, we're not done talking about the medals yet as I would like to mention that some medals, like character specific medals. Some medals can only apply to specific characters in the team, like Kabbu can have a medal that let's him throw a pebble that can knock enemies in the air down.

Shekra: Wow.... creative way for Kabbu to knock something in the air down...

Micro: There is a medal that can let Kabbu's taunt make the enemy more aggressive and hit harder, but knocks down their defense a bit. Leif can have medals that do more status affect skills that can boost the whole team or debuff an boss heavily. And Vi can have specific medals that can boost her beemarang that either allows her to hit a enemy more or lets her use poison or shock attack to also apply status on enemies with her attacks. And it is at this point I want to take a moment of talking about on how Vi takes this ball-point hammer and just breaks this game into many pieces with her stubby hands

Shekra: If you want to make this game painfully easy or want to give a boss the bird, give Vi poison attacker, weak stomach, reverse toxin, life cast, and two power exchange medals and watch as Vi becomes a small destructive bee to smol angel of destruction as she rips a boss into shreads with her tornado toss ability while Kabbu distracts the enemy and Leif buffs Vi to hit even harder. Seriously, Vi can potentionally take away 35 HP from a boss, maybe even more, with just one single tornado toss and having those medals on her. She disgustingly breaks this game into pieces with that type of combination to the point that some will call her Danger Vi, and we can't help but love her because of that.

Micro: There's a lot more things we could talk about the gameplay, like some of the minor ways the group traverse specific terrains or specific locations like digging underground, summoning ice pillars to walk across water or Vi amusingly carries Kabbu across a gap while Leif chills on a floating block of ice, but we pretty much gave the general gist of what's there in the gameplay department, and we would like you try to explore some of these on your own. But we still would like to talk about some of the casts.

(Look for the second part of this Derpy Review, link right here: DR#13 Bug Fables pt.2 )

Description

(Ok, so I'm going to have to split this review into two parts as it turns out that I written more than I though. So, sorry if the review felt like it stop suddenly compare to the usual reviews I did.)

Derpy Review #13: Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling if you want the full name.

Micro: When it comes to playing modern video game, many gamers would like to play a game that is similar to that one game they played many times in their childhood, wanting a game that could rival the game they love playing the most or see if anyone has the capability to match that type of click that said game made on the gamer. Sadly for some gamers or series, some major developers and publishers can tend to not try to make a game similar to a belove game from many years ago and would rather do something else with the series that can leads to drastic changes that makes the series unrecognizable, for better or worse, and most time, worse. Paper Mario is such a series where if you were to ask people who play RPG Mario games and asked them what would be some of their personal favorite, probably a third of the time you'll hear someone mentioned a Paper mario game, a series of the Italian plumber that sadly hasn't exactly have been doing well in terms of getting great love from the fans since Sticker Star came in. However, that leads to what this weird monologue paragraph that's taking forever to get to. What do you do when the games of your favorite series hasn't made a game that you can say you love as much as one of the previous ones?

Shekra: ...... You go and find another series that looks similar to the games in terms of mechanics, characters, dialogue, story and love put into it?

Micro: Yup.

Shekra: ..... You got to shorten these starter paragraphs more and get to the point.

Micro: Fine, Bug Fables is the game we are finally doing a Derpy Review.

Shekra: If I got this right, you said that it was this game that gave you the idea to start this whole Derpy Review idea, correct?

Micro: Yup, I believe I mentioned this in the drawing i did with Elizant a week or two ago that I was having a discussion with JustAnArtExpert when we were talking about the concept story idea of the pokemon stories of dynamax, animal crossing, and another story major project that still on hold. I believe I told them about Bug Fables, being a few hours in the game and recommend trying the game out, and sure enough, I manage to convince someone to give the game a shot if they want a paper mario like game. We'll go more into the mechanics of this game and how it feels like paper maro later, as we have quite a bit to talk about this game.

Shekra: So, why didn't we made this game our first Derpy Review?

Micro: Several reasons. One, I didn't know what game to start off with for Derpy review and asked for suggestions, and we all know what the first game we reviewed is. Two, one of the main reason I wanted to start working on this one was, at the time of thinking of doing this game, LimitedRun games was doing a neat collector set of orders involving this game that I wanted to make one of the next review this one..... sadly that didn't happened as the order date to pre order the collector stuff ended about a week or two ago, I was busy making episode 3 of KoT, and I had a lot of things to work on, so needless to say that I was late to work on this review. And three, I wanted to replay this game and have detail notes of what to talk about as well as see how I feel about the game after finished 100% the game for many months.

Shekra: Yeah, no kidding on the notes, you wrote like four page worth of things to note.

Micro: Yeah I know, so let's hurry up and get started on the review. Oh, before I forget, another reason I wanted to wait was to make sure plenty of people who sawed one of my works on the drawing last year had plenty of chance to play the game. You know who you are when I said that, so I do hope you played the game till the end, cause we're going to spoil the sapling out of this game.

Shekra: Spoilers are abound!

Story:

Micro: In the mythical land of someone's backyard, lies Bugaria, home of intelligent and sentient bugs that manage to have some technology and magic. Many bugs came to this land, one being a ant queen name Queen Elizant, who helped lead many bugs here after traversing the harsh dangerous lands like the Forsaken lands and the Dead lands to instill peace within the kingdom of other bugs. However, one thing Elizant wanted in her travels was the mythical Everlasting Sapling, a strange artifact rumored to be created by the roaches before their, ironic considering they're roaches, disappearance. The sapling was said to give any bug eternal youth if they consume a leaf from it. Sadly, Elizant never found the sapling, but the quest for continues as in the process of searching for the artifact and clues to it, the Explorer's Association was made, helping those asking requests, exploring land and trying to find clues related to the sapling.

Shekra: Which leads us to the start of the story as we watch a green beetle name Kabbu requesting the royal guard of the current queen, Maki, to be a explorer. Maki rather refuses the request until a small commotion was made no thanks to a young bee making a rather loud fuss of getting refuse to be a explorer especially without a partner, the bee's name is Vi.

Micro: Not wanting to waste a golden opportunity of potentially being a explorer, Kabbu and Vi decided to agree to be partners so they can be explorers, provided they proof to Maki that they're tough enough to not be taken down by a lone seedling the second they walk outside the ant kingdom. Just saying this now, thank goodness Maki wasn't trying at all when he tested the two.

Shekra: The two manage to convince Maki to let them have a shot to be explorers, with the two not wasting that much time to go to their first mission, enter Snakemouth den and try to see if there is an artifact without getting eaten by anything inside like most explorers that went to that place.

Micro: One skip and a jump over rocks and weeds, the duo made it to the cave and goes as far back as they can to find the mythical treasure..... a mushroom. As well as a trapdoor that Kabbu fell in and Vi can't fly him out of it cause she's lazy to lift him up to be perfectly honest.

Shekra: Ok, to be honest, I did find that part a tad bit funny when it happened. However, thanks to this trapped, the two found a trapped mouth sleeping in a spider webs... follow by the very spider that made the web and is now hungry as it sees an all you can eat meal.

Micro: The two, after some self thinking on Vi's end if she should ditch Kabbu and the moth and high tail it out of the cave or not, manage to rescue the moth and escape the spider. The moth soon wakes up, but after some weird gibberish, it seems the moth doesn't know what exactly happened to him or what happened around him, just his name, Leif. And after getting a minor ambush from a weird flying mushroom cyclops thing, Leif accidentally, and realizes himself as well, that he can use ice magic. And with that, Leif became the third member of this marry band of a smol, greedy childish bee and lovable, warrior spirited, dorky beetle, with Leif being a bit of a deadpan yet enjoyable moth with a bottomless stomach. And with their powers combine, the three makes up a team of smart asses that don't miss a beat to pick on each other's faults in this game, and I love them because of it.

Shekra: One thing I got love about the game is that it does a great job in letting know these three's personality traits and how well they develop as the continue on their journey throughout the game. But anyways, with the team assemble, the three make their way further in the den, soon discovering the actual artifact that was hidden deep within the dungeon. Unfortunately, they set off a trap were the room starts to flood with water and to make matters worse, the giant spider is back, and with quite the jazzy boss theme that's hard to not join a swing.

Micro: One thing we will probably mentioned multiple times in this game is that the game has a great sound track to listen through, especially with the bosses and some area specific themes. Anyways, a smack with Kabbu's horn, a freeze from Leif's ice magic, and a smack from Vi's weapon, the mighty beemarang...

Shekra: Really?

Micro: Yup, that's what she really calls it, better than ADBP. A smack from the beemarang, the spider goes down just in time for the team to have a quick swimming lesson before safely washing up near the ant kingdom and not wanting to take up swimming ever again.

Shekra: With the team safe, the artifact now secure, the team make their way to the current queen, Queen Elizant II, ruling the kingdom after her mother passed away and her wanting to continue the search of the Everlasting Sapling for her mother, ruling the kingdom with a slightly less kinder personality compare to her mother. The queen thanks the team, rewarding them for finding the artifact and naming them as team Snakemouth, and immediately informs them to go to the Golden Settlement and search for a second McGuffin that can lead to the ultimate McGuffin. And thus, kick starting the game to venture out more into Bugaria as the team enters the second chapter of the game.

Micro: One thing I think we should mentioned that while the game is rather simple in the beginning of the game of the story, we will find out that there are more at works at what's going on, like why Kabbu's and Vi's reason for wanting to be explorers in the first place, why Elizant II, who we'll just refer to as Elizant from now on, wants to find the sapling, and several other things, like Leif's past for example. As it turns out, Leif is actually a lot older than he looks, old enough that he actually knew Elizant I and that he went to Snakemouth Den with his own team under the orders of the previous queen. So now we have the mystery of what exactly happened to Leif to figure out.

Shekra: I guess we should mentioned this right now that there are points of the game where some of the things Micro mentioned will be talk about, but personal stuff involving the three members are under side quests that more or less optional to do on your own, minus Kabbu's but we'll get into more about that later. We will only add the team's personal side quest in the story segment at the order we did them in the game, just to have some things be as straight to understand what happened as possible. Anyways, another thing that the team will have to deal with is that they quickly find out that they and Elizant aren't the only ones looking for the artifacts and the sapling as the team soon encounters wasps, who waste little time attacking them before the team manage to fight them off, with the wasp soldiers returning home.

Micro: Minor annoyance and hard fight aside, the team make their way to the Golden Settlements, home of several characters I can't help but love and the location that worships a goddess name Venus, with a festival ready to begin. The team had to wait until the festival is over, so they decide to have some fun. Some fun mini games of smacking many worms with Vi's beemarang so many times most of them probably have a concussion and Leif chowing down so many food down that he could make a certain miner ant blush later, and a small festival fight with the priestess to be allowed inside a sacred area later, the team traverse the area to try to reach the top of the summit of where the artifact is at.

Shekra: However, the team will soon meet a rather persistent rival team that picks a fight with them. The team is with a pop idol bug name Mothiva, a rather selfish, arrogant girl that Vi waste little time butting heads with since the two are rather stubbornly hot headed, and the second member being a wasp and Zasp, the only "friendly" wasp allowed in the ant kingdom and Explorer's Association and loyal follower of Mothiva cause, and let's be honest, guy is an absolute simp for her, though, supposedly after looking up some trivia of Zasp, apparently the two do have some sort of relationship, so maybe not entirely a simp.

Micro: Well, either way, one battle to knock Mothiva's mountain size ego down a millimeter, the team make their way up the submit, where they soon encounter the goddess Venus. She doesn't give the artifact to the team, mainly no thanks to Vi's big mouth, but after a test of dealing with her guardian plant giant monster thing, she not only kindly gives the artifact to the team, slightly begrudgingly due to Vi, but she also later is willingly to have a bud pop up somewhere in kingdom to heal the team.... for eight berries. Turns out that Aria and Venus's follwers are far too busy dedicating themselves to the plant goddess to bother getting a job to help themselves, so the berries payment is Venus's way to try to pay the followers back in kindness.

Shekra: Well, at least she's kind to support everyone in her ways. But besides that, Venus also gives some rather important information to Leif, something, while not entirely helpful to everything he wants to know, gives him some relief. Venus tells Leif that his team and him did went to Snakemouth den, but only one got left behind, which was Leif, while the rest made it out, though, I believe she said that one of them may have recently passed away. Still, it gives Leif some relief to hear his team is alright, as well as possibly meeting maybe their kids so they can find out more things of what happened.

Micro: With the second artifact collected, the team returns home. There, Elizant informs everyone that the second artifact can lead to the location of the Everlasting Sapling and the first artifact can help read the second artifact, but they still need one more artifact in order to gain the sapling, which turns out that the artifact is inside Vi's home kingdom, something she's not thrill to hear that she has to go back home and meet all the bees.

Shekra: We shortly later find out that Vi left the bee kingdom cause she got sick of being rather treated like a child and that the idea of her being an explorer instead of a worker bee, or any bee that does creative things in the kingdom, sounds either dumb or too dangerous for her to do, something Vi took greater offense when it was her sister that also join every other bee about Vi's idea of being an explorer. So, Vi left the kingdom in rather bad terms with her sister to say the least.

Micro: Well, whether the Leif and Kabbu has to drag Vi kicking and screaming back to the hive or not, everyone has to go there as well as give the queen bee materials in exchange for the artifact as it later reveal that the artifact is what powers the hive's honey factory and robots that allows the bees to pump out so much honey that they could feed all of Bugaria if they want. Sheesh, theses are some very intelligent bugs for crying out loud if they can make a factory and robots, how is it they're not the more dominating kingdom of Bugaria?

Shekra: Moving the plot along, the team had to make their way through a giant sand box, serving more like a dessert where quicksands, bandits, and bus size scorpions are running amok. What doesn't help is that the team gets ambushed by some bandits, as well as wasps, who appears to becoming more aggressive in their attacks as they are seen more in the kingdom. Well, after dealing with the wasp and entering a dessert town that is at the base of the tree where the hive is at, the team takes an elevator ride up, with Leif and Kabbu talking Vi into at least talking with the bees and maybe apologizing for being more or less a bratty child.

Micro: Once at the top, the team is rather surprise as they went through a scanner, at this point I think its safe to assume Bees are miracle scientist workers if they have scanning technology, and discover that there seems to be something in Leif. Lief discovers that he seems to have crystals inside his body, which explains why he can use ice magic. However, that's not the only thing of not as the scanners seems to detect something else inside Leif that the scanner can't tell, and there's no way to tell exactly what it is without dissecting Lief, which he understandably declines the offer.

Shekra: Well, with the minor detour done, the team meet up with the Queen of the bees, who turns out to be quite the motherly character that seems very happy to see Vi is back and proud to see her became a explorer, something that surprise Vi as she hears the compliment. Yeah, turns out most of the bees are rather cool of seeing Vi being an explorer and some of them being proved wrong. Anyways, with the material to make a replica of the artifact, don't know how in the world that works considering how powerful the thing must be to power a whole factory, but that's beside the point, Queen Bianca kindly tells everyone to take a tour of the factory to see how the honey is made as the bee scientist make the replica to switch the artifact.

Micro: Sadly, things don't go smoothly as something happens that causes the factory to go into lock down and everyone is trapped inside, with the only one to override the lock down is the overseer that is somewhere inside the factory. Fighting off the malfunctioning robots and honey monster, don't ask, the team manages to find the overseer and make their way to the core where the artifact is at to switch the thing so the lock down can be lifted, only have to deal with a very dangerous defense system that is in the way. With the artifact replaced and the lock down lifted, the team got the artifact and are ready to head back to the ant kingdom.

Shekra: However, before the team can do that, Vi does a quick side mission to pay a visit to her sister to patch things up with her. That proves harder than said as the two sisters aren't exactly in a great talking mode, but after knowing what Vi's sister wants to do a project of hers, Vi does a "quick" trade quest to get a bucket of red paint. Vi hands her sister the paint, and the two does talk a bit about how they before acted out when VI wanted to become an explorer and left, the two patching things up and Vi is welcome back. With that task done, the team goes back to the ant kingdom so Elizant can start the search for the Everlasting Sapling.

Micro: However, because this is an RPG, it turns out that the artifact the team collected is only half of one, which means every needs to find the other half of the thing before they can do anything, and fast, as the reports are that the wasp are getting more aggressive that invasion might be on the rise. The team then finds out that the only clue for where the missing half is at might be within the dessert, and that they need two keys to enter a dungeon.

Shekra: One small detour for no reason whats so ever in the Golden Settlement, the team takes a off beat path into a cave where a giant plant monster resides. The team beats it up and get a seed from it which later can given to a bee scientist in the hive to sprout a cute baby mother chomper that serves as not only an excellent pet for the team, but a fourth party member as well that the team name her Chompy.

Micro: You do know that thing isn't even remotely related to the story right.

Shekra: No way we're leaving that cute thing out the summary, so shut up before I chomp you in the neck.

Micro: The team gets some clue in Defiant roots, the town at the base of the tree, and later made they're way to a bandit hideout where a key is said to be in, only to find out that it was a trap that got the numbskulls capture. Thankfully, the team manage to not only get out, but also get the key as well as they handle the bandit's leader. During this time, the team found out from listening on one of the bandits that the wasps were the reason for the lock down in the previous chapter, no thanks to the help of the bandits. Anyways, with the team out and managing to find the other key thanks to a bee scientist, the team goes to the spot the artifact is said to be at. However, before the team can go to the area, they were ambushed by a giant scorpion, who manages to struck down Leif, causing strange tentacles to come wiggling out of his chest as Lief is in shock and hurt.

Shekra: It was only by the help of Zasp that Leif was saved, though, Leif gets some strange memories, some revering him as some strange failure and to be thrown away. Still, Leif manages to recover from the attack, now more determine to go find the artifact as he thinks it can help him discover the truth.

Micro: Something we kind of forgot to mentioned is that Leif has a rather strange reaction to the artifacts he is closed to, or anything extremely filled with magic, sparking some memories or something to the moth. Anyways, using the keys to reveal a giant sand castle that form on its on and me wishing the team stayed on the top of it so they didn't had to climb it.

Shekra: Entering the massive structure, and finding crystals everywhere that is also related to ice magic, the team made their way to a throne room, discovering a mummified roach, called the Watcher, coming alive to stop the team. After a rather tough fight, the team manage to get a strange crystal, which later turns out to be needed at Snakemouth den, as well as finding the final artifact, thus ending the team's search of the magical McGuffins.

Micro: Sadly, things don't go the way one would hope as Zasp hastily went to the team to inform them that the ant kingdom is under attack from the wasp, being lead by their ruler, the Wasp king.

Shekra: The Wasp King waste little time in demonstrating his power on everyone, defeating Elizant's forces left and right with his weapons and powers, not even our merry band team could stop him as he uses fire magic to defeat him easily. It was only by the last minute help of Maki that the Wasp king stop his attack and left the kingdom, but not without taking the artifact the team just worked hard to get... so that sucks.

Micro: Not wanting the Wasp King to figure the artifact out and risk becoming more powerful, Elizant orders the team and Maki to head north into the far Grassland where the wasp kingdom is and try to stop the king while everyone tries to recover from the attack. Kabbu strangely was rather determine to be the one to lead everyone into the Far Grassland. Maki tells the team to meet him there as he goes ahead to scout.

Shekra: With the team preparing to go, the team ask a friend about the crystal they got from the Watcher, finding out that there is more in Snakemouth Den than what they saw. The team goes back and enters a room that Vi and Kabbu missed due to them falling for a mushroom trap the first time they came to the place. Using the gem, the team delves deeper inside the area, discovering that Snakemouth den was actually a massive roach laboratory facility that conducted some rather cruel experiments on ants, beetles, bees, and moths.

Micro: As it turns out, the roachers here were conducting experiments to study crystals that you see in the game to try to replicate a fraction of the power the Everlasting Sapling emanates, only to make an abomination creature that became their death. The team dealt with the creature, with Leif finally getting his memory back and the team makes a rather shocking discovery. As it turns out, the roaches created an advanced colony of cordyceps fungi, only to consider them failures and threw them away. One cordycep survived, managing to crawl its way into a dead Leif, bonding into him and inheriting his memories. To say this gives Leif that we know a bit of a identity conflict is a bit of an understatement as he doesn't know if he can consider himself as Leif or something that is pretending to be Leif. This kind of make things awkward for Lief more as earlier, if you go to a certain part of the ant kingdom early, the team discovers that not only Leif had a wife before he died in the dungeon, but his kid had kids of their own as he sees a moth that looks like his wife, meaning that the woman is probably his great granddaughter. While Leif doesn't exactly know what to do at the moment, one thing he wants to do at least is maybe give closure to "Leif" and see his family.

Shekra: While it feels a bit awkward to say the least, the interaction actaully went well, with the family accepting Leif as part of them and welcomes him to come by any time. With this quest done, Leif thanks Kabbu and Leif as he figures he lives on so that way the memories of "Leif" still lives on while he walk with the team he is glad to call friends.

Micro: Now with the mystery of Leif solved, the team head into the Far Grassland to meet up with Maki. Once there, Kabbu tells the team that he did came further north of the land and that the only way he managed to sneak by the wasp kingdom was to take a dangerous route through the wild Swamplands, and extremely dangerous location. Entering the area, the team are greeted by native bug tribes that waste little time attacking the group and are hellbent on attacking them, only to later force the group to be separated from Maki when they try to cross a bridge, with Maki hurting his leg in the process. The team tries to get to Maki as quick as they can, Kabbu losing his cool as he bashes rocks out of his way.

Shekra: It is here we find out that Kabbu came through this swamp with two other bugs, his master and his best friend, both of who felled from a monstrous beast that easily killed them while they force Kabbu to run away. It is this very reason why Kabbu wanted to return to the swamp so he can take revenge on the beast, thinking his team and Maki might be more than enough to take the monster out. Unfortunately, and not thanks to Kabbu, the beast proves to be more dangerous than he thought and nearly destroys the team. But using the power of anime friendship, Kabbu manages to stubbornly pull through and beat the beast to save everyone as he apologies for endangering everyone.

Micro: Letting the incident slide for this one, the team get to safer grounds to celebrate their safe travels through the swamp before they focus on the mission to infiltrate the Wasp's headquarters, something that will be more difficult due to Maki still injured. However, as the team manages to break into the massive complex, they find strange sights that don't seem right, stores are run down and boarded up, some wasps are locked in cells along with some other bugs that got the unfortunate luck to get capture, with one wasp extremely scare of a pink mantis as the mantis seems more than thrilled to be capture.

Shekra: The team meets a wasp name Jayde who brought some light into the situation, telling the team that things went down hill when the Wasp King showed up from nowhere and somehow force most of the wasps to follow his demand, and to make things worse, the wasp queen is also missing as well. Taking this information in mind, the team make their way to the throne room, where they ambushed by the Wasp King's most dangerous general of the whole wasp army, General Fuff. General Fuff tries to stop the team, but our team manages to easily dispose of him with ease and enter the room behind the throne.

Micro: However, the team did not found the Wasp King, but the Queen of the Wasp, Vanessa II. Vanessa confirm the team that it was the Wasp King that easily took over her people and started this mad power trip to seek the Everlasting Sapling so he can get more power, with Vanessa telling the team that the king isn't even here in the kingdom and hasn't since he invaded the Ant kingdom. The team realizes that everyone was tricked by the Wasp king and take Vanessa with them as they rush as fast as they can to the ant kingdom before the Wasp king attacks again. Sadly, that didn't work as the Wasp king easily took down everyone and Maki with ease as he uses his fire magic once again, this time threatening Elizant that if she doesn't hand over the artifacts, he'll cut down everyone in the kingdom.

Shekra: Not wanting her people or anyone to die, Elizant hands the king the artifacts, Wasp King taking the artifacts and makes his way to the location of where the Everlasting Sapling is at, Giant's Lair. The queen felt rather distraught that her attempt of getting the sapling not only proven to failed, but everyone is now endanger of a powerful Wasp King once he gets the sapling. Its here that Lief asked Elizant why she was so determine to find the sapling in the first place. Elizant comes out and tells everyone that she wanted the sapling so she can revive her mother, Elizant I, who is still alive, but was put into a deep sleep. Elizant wanted to bring her mother back so she can give the throne back to her, feeling like she is not worthy of the throne especially due to her lack of diplomatic skills that cost some tension between the ant kingdom and another kingdom, the termite kingdom, some bugs were banned from coming inside the kingdom, and some things not going well since Elizant took over after her mother. Everyone in the room tells the queen that they actually are glad to have Elizant as their ruler, seeing how she has shown to try her best as ruler that the action she did to protect her people from the Wasp king even made Leif to respect Elizant more, considering he didn't really like Elizant compare to her mother since Lief knew Elizant personally.

Micro: Complimentary aside, everyone still need to stop the Wasp king somehow, but in order to go after the king, the team needs a boat to sail to Rubber Prison, the gate that blocks the only entrance to the Giant's Lair. In order to do that, Elizant decides its time to visit the termite kingdom, wanting to make some truth to them and patch the kingdoms relationship to stop the Wasp King. Elizant request the team to escort her through the Forsaken lands in order to reach the termite kingdom. Dealing with the danger wild life, the group manages to get to the termite kingdom, with its citizens not exactly thrill to see the queen but are willing to escort her to the king and queen since she personally came to the kingdom.

Shekra: The king and queen, mainly short stack king dingaling, are not thrill to help Elizant to give her the means to go after the Wasp King, but after some talking and Elizant more or less giving them a reality check of what would happen once the king gets the sapling, the two rulers agree to probably help her provided our team beats the coliseum. Some fights with creatures, termite guards, and a rematch with Mothiva and Zasp that stole the spotlight so they can fight team Snakemouth, the two rulers decides to give Elizant a prototype submarine that I'm just going call the bubble mobile, cause that thing is tiny.

Micro: The team takes the bubble and drops Elizant and some termites at a port so boats can be make and Elizant can summon the Explorer Association to help go after the Wasp King. Elizant ask our team to go to the rubber prison and try to slow the Wasp king's army and make as much noise as possible so everyone can get in the prison. And with that, the team sail to the rubber prison, a place that can slightly kiss my ass for some annoying back tracking of flipping some levers just to get anywhere.

Shekra: Traversing the prison, the team manages to catch up with the Wasp King, but General Fuff quickly interferes and distracts the team as the Wasp king makes his way inside the Giant's lair. After dealing General Fuff, Elizant and the Explorer Association manages to get inside the prison, getting ready to chase after the Wasp king. Before doing so, Vanessa came with everyone so she could give our trio and the adorable Chompy as broach, saying its a family heirloom that should help the team against the Wasp King's fire magic, something she used to avoid becoming a pile of ash when the king capture her. Giving the broach to the team, Vanessa tells us good luck and to take down the usurper.

Micro: Well, talk about one big massive story talk for a game story that's honestly easy to remember once you play the game, but Christ I forgot how much there is to talk about when it comes to an RPG. We haven't even talk about everything else.

Shekra: Oh its not that bad to talk about, we shouldn't have that much to talk about.

Micro: Shekra, you seen the amount of notes I took for crying out loud, we have a lot to still talk about.

Gameplay:

Micro: Ok... where to begin with this monster of a segment?

Shekra: Well, we can start with the obvious thing that anyone boots up the game and that is the aesthetic and gameplay. We mentioned earlier that this game feels a bit like paper Mario games, the first two to be exact. Well, that's mainly due to the fact that paper Mario really did influence the development of this game when the devs, Moonsprout games, were making the game, along with other series that influence development like Golden Sun, a Tales game, Xenoblade, and oddly enough Persona 5 for some reason. Similar to Paper Mario, the game is a turn based RPG where each characters take a turn to do something while the other does the same thing, where the game has simple basic stuff like the basic attacks, skills that uses Team Points, or TP for short, and a few other usual bells and whistle that you would see in a turn base RPG. You can even manage to get an extra sneak attack on the enemy if you hit them in the over world before making actual contact on the enemy. Just be advice that the same can be said for the enemy if they hit you first.

Micro: However, and this is where the similarities and inspiration of Paper Mario shows up, which get use to us compare some of the thing in this game to Paper Mario as its the best way we can describe some of the things in this game without causing a major headache on out end. Similar to Paper Mario, when you try to do something, you have also to some timed button pressing to be able to maximize your attacks, or even hold something long enough before letting go of a button or pressing the right button when said button flashes on the screen. For example, Vi uses her beemarang to attack her foes, but when you use her, you have a bar with a arrow going back and forth as you need to press the button in the right spot of the bar or else Vi will drop her beemarang and the thing will do pitiful damage that might even flinch the enemy. Kabbu's attack is easy to do as you just need to hold the stick down for a second before letting go. And Leif involves you waiting for the screen to show the button you need to press.

Shekra: The same thing applies to something like using a character's skill, like Vi using a skill call the tornado toss where you hit the button multiple times in the right spot for Vi to hit the enemy multiple times. Each characters has unique skills that they can do, with some focusing on specific things, like Vi has skills that can hit an enemy multiple times like I mentioned, but she also has some skills that can do some minor healing to the party. Kabbu is a bit more focus on hitting the enemy harder or charging at multiple enemies at once while he can at least pierce through an enemy's defense, more on that in a moment. And Leif, I honestly find Lief to be more of a support character than a damage dealing character. Leif's skills can hit multiple enemies at once and even freeze some enemies that can allow you to deal extra damage or make the enemy waste a turn, however, Leif also has skills that can make a party member or the whole party invincible for one turn, a move that can buff a party member's attack or defense for a few turn while weakening enemies. And there's Chompy that I mentioned a few times already, where she can walk up to an enemy and bite to deal some damage. On top of that, you can change a party member's position where someone in the front can deal more damage to the enemy at the exchange of getting hit more than the others. You can have items from a limited inventory that slowly grows more for either healing, dealing damage, or buffing up someone while reviving someone. You can even use something call spy to get a description on enemies as well as some commentary from the team. In all honestly, the team has quite the move sets for dealing with enemies.

Micro: That would be true except let's talk about some problem with the combat with the characters, specifically, Kabbu, Leif and Chompy. Starting with Leif, he isn't exactly a damage dealer to say the least, which can be a problem if an enemy has some defense, which can either mean that the enemy will take less damage than usual, or no damage at all from someone like Lief or Vi if they are in the back of the team and the enemy didn't got their defense lowered. On top of that, Lief's basic attacks only works on enemies that are on the ground and not in the air. Leif's basic attack is mostly useful in bringing out enemies that are buried in the ground, something that some enemies will do and Vi and Kabbu won't be able to attack unless uses his basic attack to pop them out or Kabbu uses a skill that he gets mid way of the game. Leif's magic skill can deal heavy damage, especially if someone is frozen, but skill might be useless if an enemy has a defense of three, which is a pretty high number in this game in case you are wondering. And as for Kabbu and Chompy, both a similiar problem in that they can only hit enemies that are not only on the ground, but also at the front of the enemies' party instead of whatever position. Vi and Leif can hit any enemy in the other side, minus air for Leif, but Kabbu and Chompy are stuck hitting whoever is at front unless Kabbu uses a skill that hits multiple enemies at once, or uses a pebble. However, Chompy might have slightly worse than Kabbu, but let's talk about the adorable plant first before we talk about the bad part.

Shekra: Well, for starters, Chompy is the fourth party member of the group that you can get after defeating an optional boss. However, unlike everyone else, you don't need to worry about Chompy's health as she is completely free from getting hit from anything, so you just need to worry with the main three. Her attacks can do some decent damage, more so if you give her a ribbon, and Chompy also get other different type of ribbons that does different things, like restore TP for every successful bite, poison attacks, ect.

Micro: However, here's the problem with the ribbons. You can only put one ribbon on Chompy, and the rest are locked away by doing various stuff, three of which enoughs having enough game coins from an arcade that doesn't show up until the end of game. On top of that, without a way to deal damage to to enemies in the air to knock them into the ground, something Vi can easily do, Chompy might be very situational as well as Kabbu do them no having a real way of dealing damage to enemies in the air.

Shekra: True, however, that is one of the great things about Bug Fables is that there are plenty of way to do this game, For starters, we talk about items before, but what we don't mentioned is that you can actually cook stuff.

Micro: Throughout some of the kingdoms and towns, you can find chiefs that if you give them an item or two, they can make something even better... or make a mistake that you'll regret making. The list of things you can bake is massive, so many combinations you can make that can create food that can heal your team as well as restore TP, items that can boost and buff the party, you can even make items that are bombs that you can use to damage enemies while potentially risking to harm yourself depending on the bomb. You can even do a quest that can give you the ultimate dish that can heal a lot of the team's health and TP at once.

Shekra: We defiantly recommend that you look up some recipes in this game to see what might catch your interest and might want to think about using with the next boss you will encounter. Now, one problem about making items is that you have a rather limited inventory space, starting at nine or ten, I believe. However, the inventory actually increases after the party levels up to certain ranks, reaching the max inventory space of fifteen even after you reach a max rank level of twenty seven..... why twenty seven and not twenty five or thirty?

Micro: Leveling in this game is almost the same as Paper Mario and not like most RPGs where you have to grind ludicrous of xp to level up, thank goodness. Each level up points requires at the beginning of the game starts around one hundred, and after every level, the point restart to Zero and continues on with only the require points needed to level up barely going up by a point or two. So in other words, this game really doesn't ask you to grind on enemies for hours. Though, you might still plan on grinding once you discover the golden Seedling, an enemy that has only very little health and give ridiculous amount of xp but can only take one damage per attack from a character, so you best hope that you can freeze or stun the little bastard, cause they won't hesitate to run away. Here's a tip, use Kabbu's taunt ability to make the golden seedling to attack Kabbu. Don't worry if Kabbu is done for the count, as if the team gets a level up, then the whole party levels up no matter what, and on top of that, you get to choose between raising your party's health by one, raising the amount of TP, or something call medal points which we will talk about in a bit. On top of that, you also get a little tangy berry to get for beating the golden seedling.

Shekra: However, grinding for golden seedlings may not be necessary as there are plenty of side quest that can reward you for completing. As well as areas that houses some neat stuff for exploring.

Micro: That's something I want to talk a bit, something I love about this game is that it rewards you for exploring every knock and cranny in the game. You may find some items that might not be useful now but might be later when a quest pops up, lore books that's part of a long quest that you can read each book to find out more of Bugaria and somewhat know how the bugs became sentient and intelligent. You might look around and find something call medals, something we will go in depth in a moment. You might even something call crystal berries that you can collect for now but can't spend yet, but if you do a certain side quest, you can gain access to a little shady side that even Vi is familiar with, but got kick out for some reason, and spend the crystal berries on rare medals. This is also where you can go to start a very optional quest where you can get rewarded by having a very cheap discount to a optional area call Metal Island. This optional quest is involves a mini game call spy cards, a minigame that makes use of the spy option in battle, so more reason to spy on enemies. The minigame is very simple, pick one boss card, two miniboss cards, and whatever basic enemy cards you can pick, choose some cards you think will allow you to have the higher score in the turn and knock a player health down to zero and win. There's more to the mini game, but its easy to understand once you get into, and I do recommend trying the mini game out when you get the chance, its actually quite fun to be honest.

Shekra: This game loves rewarding you one way or another for exploring everywhere as well as talking to everyone, you can even find someone in Defiant Roots that can charm you which can some times help in battle. Though, some exploration in this game might require some puzzle solving that may be a slight headache due to most of the puzzles seems to revolve around Vi's beemarang, something we had heard some complains about due to the puzzles involving that thing be awkward, but we really didn't had much of a difficult time with the puzzles. Now some exploring might bite you in the butt if you make a turn and bump into a boss, but I still say its worth it when you look around and find medals.

Micro: Medals are very interesting to talk about in this game, and there's quite a bit to talk about. Medals in this game serves to be like the badges in Paper Mario, you go into the menu and pick medals you want on you team that may help you in battle. Medals can give the party a sort of boost in something or add something that can change the party. For example, you can apply medals that can give some party members extra health per health plus medals, you can increase the TP you have with TP plus medals, or you can apply medals that can restore some TP and health every two turns. However, that's just scratching the mere surface of the potential of what you can do with medals. There are medals where you can drain health from enemies with basic attacks but you lose one point in attack damage, you have it where if someone gets hit from an enemy, then the rest of the party member gets a charge that increases their attack in the next turn allowing you to deal more damage, you can find medals that can give you resistance to poison, being frozen, burn or shocked. There is a lot of medals to choose from, and the thing is, you can combine a lot of these medals.

Shekra: Keep in mind that you are limited of how many medals you can have on depending on the MP you have, which you can increase if you want after leveling up. But besides that, yeah, there is a massive combination of stuff you can strategize on using on bosses that might give you a hard time or want to experiment with. Funny enough, there is even medals that can reward you more with berries to spend and xp to get at the cost of making the game harder if the medal is apply. In fact, the game even gives you a hard mode medal to use if you want where the enemies give slightly more xp, but might hit harder or have more defense. Though, I recommend not playing Bug Fables on hard mode your first time playing the game like Micro did last, hard mode isn't exactly pulling any punches in the first ten hours of the game. Now granted, if you beat certain minibosses and regular bosses with the hard mode on, you can get a special medal from someone in the Explorer Associations as a reward.

Micro: With that said, we're not done talking about the medals yet as I would like to mention that some medals, like character specific medals. Some medals can only apply to specific characters in the team, like Kabbu can have a medal that let's him throw a pebble that can knock enemies in the air down.

Shekra: Wow.... creative way for Kabbu to knock something in the air down...

Micro: There is a medal that can let Kabbu's taunt make the enemy more aggressive and hit harder, but knocks down their defense a bit. Leif can have medals that do more status affect skills that can boost the whole team or debuff an boss heavily. And Vi can have specific medals that can boost her beemarang that either allows her to hit a enemy more or lets her use poison or shock attack to also apply status on enemies with her attacks. And it is at this point I want to take a moment of talking about on how Vi takes this ball-point hammer and just breaks this game into many pieces with her stubby hands

Shekra: If you want to make this game painfully easy or want to give a boss the bird, give Vi poison attacker, weak stomach, reverse toxin, life cast, and two power exchange medals and watch as Vi becomes a small destructive bee to smol angel of destruction as she rips a boss into shreads with her tornado toss ability while Kabbu distracts the enemy and Leif buffs Vi to hit even harder. Seriously, Vi can potentionally take away 35 HP from a boss, maybe even more, with just one single tornado toss and having those medals on her. She disgustingly breaks this game into pieces with that type of combination to the point that some will call her Danger Vi, and we can't help but love her because of that.

Micro: There's a lot more things we could talk about the gameplay, like some of the minor ways the group traverse specific terrains or specific locations like digging underground, summoning ice pillars to walk across water or Vi amusingly carries Kabbu across a gap while Leif chills on a floating block of ice, but we pretty much gave the general gist of what's there in the gameplay department, and we would like you try to explore some of these on your own. But we still would like to talk about some of the casts.

(Look for the second part of this Derpy Review, link right here: DR#13 Bug Fables pt.2 )