Witch Ring Meister

Not a lot of reviews out there, so I'll add a bit. I've played Nono's and Soul Smith, from the same developer, and while this game has similar elements, it is a bit less idle than the others.

High level overview, you manage a magic ring shop and employee crafters, who make your rings, and jewelers, who provide your material supply for crafters. Materials are a lump sum, acquired each month by jewelers and used in increasing amounts as your rings go up in quality and value. There is a balance element to employing crafters who allow you to increase value & quality while also employing jewelers who can give you the lump sum needed for the month, as well as providing passive effects. To this point, it doesn't differ greatly from Nono's or Soul Smith.

As rings become old, sales drop off almost entirely and this is where the game is a bit different. Instead of "adventuring" for new recipes and materials, as in Nono's, you can play a match game to create rings. You need to match enough "work" tiles to meet the work requirement, while also matching magic tiles that improve the 5 magic types of the ring (quality of the ring, as well as "advice" tiles, which give you points you can use on a wide range of passive traits that boost ring quality, hireable employee quality, sales, customer patience, and various aspects of the matching game.

As ring quality goes up, work tile needs also increase, so you need to continue to increase your store's "technology" rank via crafters, store facilities that can be built, and a growing catalog of your past rings that contribute to your stats.. If not, you are likely to fail the matching game and not have inventory.

You have a bit of control over the difficulty of your new rings' matching games. Retired rings can be used as samples (templates) for your new rings, so you can choose to maintain the same quality level or slowly elevate the sample quality as your stats increase.

This is a unique aspect of the game, so I felt it is worth addressing for anyone considering purchase.

There are also visual novels, but they feel a bit less connected to overall gameplay than Nono's, to me. That said, they are well developed.

The game is idle in 5 minute bursts (longer if you don't care about sales drop offs), but so far, it has been an enjoyable business management sim that allows the user to increase risk/reward at one's own pace.

I've actually purchased and tried this game's English version. For being available in English, the translation is absolutely *horrid* and the game, unlike most clickers, isn't really intuitive after the first few minutes. The interface and things aren't very well explained in the English version, which left me feeling very confused.

This game is a hybrid shop management sim, with sort of strategic Samegame arcade-puzzle gameplay for creating new stock. It mystifies me that others are calling this game an idle game, I guess my idea of management is someone else's idea of idle, haha.

I got my copy of Witch Ring Meister free through the Curator Connect thing (curating the J-Indie Arcade) and it's the third game by "Inu to Neko" I've played on Steam. I bought the first two games myself, and they were published by different publishers each time. Those games were "Let's Eat! Seaside Cafe" and "Dungeon Girl" - the first has an impenetrable translation and I don't recommend it because of that. The second is a rather decent Samegame / Dungeon traversal / crafting game.

One thing for sure - Inu to Neko games have a certain style. And that style is - mountains upon mountains of items to manage, cluttered interfaces, and reuse of the same set of characters throughout their games to form one overarching universe.

At your first Inu to Neko game, this style is overwhelming. At your third game...

Well, I came into this game, started it up, and... watched the prologue... and got to the tutorial and.... felt quite overwhelmed! Hahaha.

Let me explain: the translation for this game isn't brilliant, but it's better than "Let's Eat! Seaside Cafe"; it's clunky and the grammar is poor, but it gets the job done. It doesn't make the prologue easy to follow, but the basic story comes through.

The tutorial for this game is really not good. It's 8 pages long, and it's overlaid annotated Japanese-language screenshots. It really is huge and overwhelming. So I... closed it, clicked some things, tried creating a ring and failed because I didn't understand it yet and let its HP get to zero. Closed the game, feeling frustrated.

But I came back, maybe 2 hours later, started up the game again with a clear head, read that tutorial again to see how to create a ring. Then it clicked. And I played it non-stop for another four hours. And after that time - I think the tutorial is a little too basic! It could do with additional help screens on some of the more advanced features.

It is pretty compelling gameplay, once you get your head round it all. At least, I think so. There's a constant loop to gameplay - create a ring, put it on sale, rest for a few days to build up HP, if you've got 5 rings on sale and one is old, take it off and make a new ring to sell. You can take rings off to a) put in the catalogue - which is how you increase your stats - or b) use the ring as sample material for a new ring - influencing the stats of new rings.

You also have to recruit / manage staff, make sure there's enough MP (materials) to make new stock, and can build facilities which do various things - the "increase gem quality" one is useful, I'm not sure about the others yet (this is one part I wish there was a help guide for). You can also get "friends" (aka guests from other Inu to Neko games) to give you skills for ring creation and provide "craft chips" which improve item crafting... oh and there are also endless ongoing events in town in the game where you automatically win competitions according to various criteria.

There's *so much* going on all the time, and you need to balance it all. So people reviewing this as an "idle game" baffles me.

Other things I should mention: the graphics are nice and clean, but switching to fullscreen stretches the image for me, so I play the game windowed, which is a little annoying. Music to the game is *really quite nice*.

Overall, do I recommend this game? Well, I would say - if you haven't played an Inu to Neko game before, and you want to play this game in English - even if this game sounds good from what I've said, the translation isn't superb. As such, it is likely to be really confusing for you. I recommend you get a copy of "Dungeon Girl" and play that, it's another decent game from Inu to Neko but has a far better, more polished translation, and is imo not as complex a game. If you like that game, armed with the knowledge of playing that game, come back to this one, and you'll have a great time.