Skyborn - 20/20 hours

Most of my last few hours playing Skyborn was spent on hard mode. It was definitely tougher. I died a couple of times, instead of never. However, it wasn't really tougher in an interesting way. The biggest thing I noticed was that my status-effect spells became extremely unreliable. One of the best parts of normal mode was that, unlike some of its inspirations, you'd actually have cause to use things like "slow," "defense down," and "poison" because they provided genuine utility without always being overpowering (granted, if you managed to stack a half dozen of them on the same boss, that did drop the difficulty considerably, but even so, getting to that point was a challenge in itself). You did get some collectible boss trophies by beating bosses in hard mode, but I'm not really vain enough for that to act as a draw,

Final summary of Skyborn - good, but slight. I like the characters, even if they are shallow. The world-building is thin, but it gets the job done. It looks nice, and I don't really hold the fact that it uses a lot of rpgmaker assets against it (that just shows me that it's possible to make a nice-looking game with rpgmaker). So much of this game rests on the charisma of its writing and art and on the residual goodwill from a bunch of classic games that fit a similar mold, but I don't really see that as a problem, per se. If I'd played a half-dozen games from the same company that were similarly charming, yet shallow, I'd start to take issue with their lack of innovation, but for my short time with the game, it was nice to have something comfortable and familiar that I could just chill out with and not think about too hard.