The Sacred Tears TRUE is a recently translated JRPG released by Nyu Media for Steam. While some may overlook it as “just” a RPG Maker title, what lies within is a pretty good game.
The Sacred Tears TRUE revolves around Seil and Seana, two thieves working for a local guild. You will follow them as they go on a variety of missions ranging from rescuing a cat to stopping an assassination attempt. The story is fairly good, as is the character development. Unfortunately, some of the story falls into a ‘hard to follow’ realm as the title is absolutely riddled with grammar issues and typos. You’ll find some interesting typos such as “The fever Is gone” in the game. Fortunately though, you can still make sense of most of it, and on top of that the character development is actually pretty good.
The combat system looks simple at first glance. You have a set of cards ranging from 1-4 (on the rare occasion you will be granted a 5) and things go down in a “what beats what as a higher number” style. When the numbers are tied you will go into a rock-paper-scissors scenario as each type of attack is weak, equal, or strong against another type. Unfortunately you can’t really control what numbers (or types) come in, so there is a fair amount of RNG involved. Some fights end up 
becoming far more difficult than they should as you constantly get thrown 1’s and 2’s. Also, should you find yourself needing healing you have two options – healing potions (I’ll talk more of those later) or Seana’s Heal. Of course, you guessed it, there’s RNG on if a Magic card will even appear and then if she’ll even use Heal! We all love RNG, right?
With the amount of RNG in battles, you’d think they wouldn’t throw difficulty spikes at you, right? Well, they do. Normal battles are typically fairly easy (though some will still try and kill you should you get bad luck), but bosses just come to be flat out unfair. You could grind but have fun. Battles are extremely unrewarding, giving you absolutely no money, barely any experience and rarely an item. Even when they do “give’ an item, you sometimes won’t even get it. When you do get to those bosses you’ll likely find yourself constantly having to load your save just to slightly tweak your skill points to hope to win.
There are items to find, collect, and use in the game, but good luck with that. They are extremely spread out, sometimes fairly well hidden. You’ll also have to keep an eye out as things will change between each chapter and some things that might be available in one won’t be available in another. The same goes with different times of day. Of course to actually get any real usable items you need to pretty much craft them. To craft them you need to find those collectibles. There are “healing potions” in the game but pretty much the only way to get them is through random chance in battle. I found myself typically going through them much faster than I could find them, typically causing battles to go south.
The Sacred Tears TRUE isn’t without glitches unfortunately. There are three main ones I found. The first is that well… your dash meter hardly seems needed. Even when it’s empty you can still dash. This seems to tie into the second glitch – the game doesn’t seem to be able to properly track your characters HP between battles. Why this is tied to your dash meter? Who knows. It seems though that whenever you keep your dash meter high and go into a battle, you will have
full (or near full) HP, regardless of how you ended the last battle. Should it not be full (especially empty), you will be missing HP. I can’t count how many healing potions I wasted only to have it eaten by this bug. The final one I’ve found is that it seems if there’s an enemy on a layer above you, if it is near the edge you can engage combat with it. This mainly seems to happen when they are near the top or right edge – I’ve noticed it less by the left and bottom edges.
While The Sacred Tears TRUE has it’s issues, it’s still a title to look into should you be interested in a difficulty JRPG. I would definitely recommend it to fans of the genre so long as they are ready for said difficulty and the RNG of the cards. The title definitely seems to push the limits of what one can truly do with a RPG Maker title and it feels unfair to judge it just because it is one.
The Sacred Tears TRUE Review Score
4/5
A difficult title to be sure but still good. However, the random grammar issues and typos hurt it a little, as do the glitches.
The Sacred Tears TRUE is available now on Steam.
I would like to thank Nyu Media for providing me with a copy of the game for review.
