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My Tainted Life is a project that manages to avoid the traps of "To be continued" game jam entries. Where many work to do more set-up to a potential future rather than focus on providing a satisfying story within the bounds of a game jam, this project offers an adequate start to its characters' journey.
That said, I think it also does this by playing it extremely safe, offering a narrative that belongs in your average "Dragon Quest-inspired 2020s anime." That quality, and the constant use of vaguely RPG lingo in a non-videogame fantasy setting, worked to shatter my immersion. Furthermore, dialogue suffers from occasional strangeness, where modern expressions and sentences have been made "archaic" by making them more prolix. This choice is especially strange to me due to the fact that, most of the time, the characters talk in a way that's modern but not distractingly anachronistic, making those altered sentences stand out in all the worst ways.
On the visual side, there's a lot to like with the quality of assets, but there remains what I see as an insufficient employment of said art. As an example, there is an action scene where two characters engage in a duel that is enhanced by a great CG, but for most of said battle, characters stand completely still as text alone describes the scene. Blocking also suffers with awkward posing and inconsistent display of speakers, making for a poor vehicle for these excellent sprites and CGs.
All this said, the project is far from bad. As I said from the top, there is already a satisfying (if played-out) little narrative well worth the price of admission.