RNGJesus would be proud.
A decent battle RPG game, with an attempt to twist the dreaded RPS formula. The story as it is a bit confusing and mishmashy, but it does have a clear motive, though obviously, i wish it would've been expanded during battles (the game doesn't even have an ending, so there's that). The characters are alright and distinct (love the bosses, especially Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Kaiser Wilhelm), and i love their design. The art in general is quite fine. The whole idea of time travelling to different places isn't new, but again, does the job for the sake of the plot. The game even has an unlockable character (though he's a bit boring for all the effort).
But the gameplay, and especially combat, is thought out somewhat poorly. Contrary to what the tutorial might imply, the random essence of the fighting itself makes it impossible to device a reliable strategy. You can't really plan your next move and anticipate attacks, so essentially, you are stuck with a bunch of 50/50, or, in the worse case of an enemy that has an attack multiplier, 33/66 scenarios: even if your enemy is out of def. points, either you're hit with an (quite worse if it's an x4) attack, or an SP, so the tides can turn on a whim. Because the enemies have way more HP than you do, the items, and the process of farming them quite frankly, are absolutely essential. And, because the items are essential, so is the farming of them.
The travelling mechanic is absolutely annoying. I get the intent: landing on a random level may incentivise you to farm, but, because the items are predetermined on each level, if you're set to farm specific items, it becomes a major annoyance. There's Helm, but it's strange to feature a weaker guy whose sole ability is to travel between levels on your command, if you can just leave said level.
The game has a very peculiar oversight: you may grab items from the level's scenery, and the items respawn sometimes when you reenter them. So, my (incredibly cheap, quite frankly) strategy involved just farming items with Helm (in particular, bread in Babylon (even Satoshi Kojima doesn't appreciate bread as much as me since I've completed the game) and Moly (the effect of which lasts the entire battle: is this a bug? ), reentering the levels several items until I've farmed like 10 or so of each. Other items, bar maybe the ankh, are quite useless to me. There's no point in meat, if you can just revive on the go with your whole hp being restored. Thanks to both of the aforementioned items, I've managed to outdefend my adversaries and, when their shield reaches zero, amassing an instant x9 attack multiplier and simply pounding some thug grunt motherfuckers with Shakal without any fear of an SP attack breaking the flow. You absolutely should make sure that Moly doesn't last an entire battle.
If i was about to tweak something else, i'd make it so that your attack multiplier just drops to 1 instead of decreasing by 1, adding stricter rules to SP usage (to minimize 33/66 scenarios as much as possible) and maybe consider adding some patterns or telegraphing enemies' next moves, to make it more skillful and so you can feel in control, instead of relying on your stack of ankhs. There are also some bugs: from health regenerating during your turn (in theory, you can wait for your health to regenerate, but the process is slow), to health not regenerating if you enter the battle again without reentering the time machine (which almost cost me during boss battles), but they aren't that gamebreaking.
Overall, for some decent art and a story that can absolutely be expended, we have a somewhat weak gameplay plagued by random elements and the potential for abuse. Considering that i've completed it in an hour, most of time being spent on mindless farming, i had at least some fun playing it, so, i'll wait for the updated, expanded and tweaked version. 5/10.