Thank You Myroid-Type Comics for submitting through our Steam Curator!

So I’ve been playing Myroid-Type Comic’s official games for quite some time. I believe his first game available on Steam, Zeran’s Folly, was the third or fourth game I’ve ever played and reviewed for CCG. A rather innocent-looking game that “betrays” its visuals with very edgy content, targeting an adult audience. Specifically the type of people who grew up during the early ages of the internet when everything was crazy, but not taken in a very serious manner like today.

Anyways, Johnny Lionface is Myroid-Type’s third game released on Steam and it’s a spiritual sequel to Zeran’s Folly and Leowald. While it makes references to the former games as it takes place in the same world, the overall experience is divorced from them. You are not required to play either game to understand this entry. Johnny Lionface stars the titular character who dreams of becoming a gladiator for his hometown of Tenfolk. Unfortunately, the people in charge of deciding who becomes a gladiator or not seem to have it out against Johnny. No matter how well he does, he always seems to fail the test. After an encounter with a ghost, he sets out to obtain a mystical ancient sword. Of course, the sword turns out to be evil and cursed, and Johnny accidentally releases Ogg’akesh, a servant of Hell. What went from a simple “trying to pass a rigged test” plotline evolves into the typical “save the world from evil and become real heroes.”

Johnny Lionface is an action role-playing game so it plays very differently from Myroid-Type’s previous games. You have three characters on the field at once, chosen from a rather large pool of twelve (two of them being optional). Each character has a basic attack on a short cooldown and up to eight abilities that can be equipped in battle. The two characters you don’t control manually are AI-controlled, but you can switch between characters at any time during battle. There is also a tactics menu for your characters that determines how the AI acts in battle, either making them more aggressive or passive depending on the option chosen. It mixes in aspects of real-time and turn-based combat as by default, targeting, using abilities, and using items pauses time to give the player a sort of breather to conduct their next action.

All the characters have a unique playstyle from each other. Johnny, for example, uses the resource “pulse” to use his abilities. He is reliant on landing his basic attacks and getting hit by enemies to build up said resource. This means that Johnny can best be played as a “tank” like in an MMORPG, diverting the attention away from his teammates, getting into the thick of battle using high-damaging moves and some supportive options to soak up damage. There are many characters that focus on things such as damage-over-time (DoT), buffs, debuffs, and healing. Characters are also introduced at a quick rate so if you happen to not like how Johnny plays, you don’t have to use him. In fact, once you get four characters, you don’t need him in the party at all. 

Johnny Lionface introduces a lot of mechanics to you at once and due to the rather short length of the experience (for RPG standards), it can be pretty overwhelming to a player as you have to keep in mind what the various buffs and debuffs do and the abilities that you have equipped. There will be moments where you find yourself losing to something that you weren’t aware of. Something to help out in this regard is the rune system in which you have up to twelve runes equipped to a character. These runes can vary greatly such as granting you extra stats to outright immunity to certain debuffs and DoTs. However, there are three specific slots that are shared among the entire party so if you happen to equip “burning resistance” maxed out to one of those three slots, all of your characters will be immune to the burning status. Usually, each area will have a theme of sorts when it comes to buffs, debuffs, and the types of damage they deal. As long as you pay attention, a player should prevail through any encounter. 

The characters of Johnny Lionface are quirky and pretty diverse in terms of visuals and personality. Some of your party members include an insomniac alchemist mouse named Claire wielding a shotgun of all things. She has an interesting speech pattern that has her rhyme the ends of her sentences with a random word unrelated to the topic of discussion. There’s also Brother Edmond, a cleric with an extreme devotion to God who joins Johnny’s quest to become a saint for his church/community, although he is less than thrilled about some of the characters he is joined with. This brings us to Sunny, a specter who becomes attached to Johnny’s soul after he frees her from a forest. There are of course many more characters, but with the large party at hand, this does mean that some of them more or less become irrelevant in the narrative the moment you recruit them.

The art style is very cartoonish in nature. It keeps the same style Myroid-Type Comics has had for decades, but it is at its most refined yet. The animations are smoother and the characters have slightly more detail in their models. There isn’t much to talk about in terms of sound design and music. It is overall solid and competent, but a lot of it is reused from previous games. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing as game development is very time-consuming and I can be more forgiving of it as Johnny Lionface takes place in the same world as Zeran’s Folly and Leowald so it makes sense all things considered. 

Now, there are some flaws within Johnny Lionface, which is to be expected from a developer going from platformers to an ARPG. The targeting system is pretty janky, especially when characters and enemies start to group together. At times, it makes it hard to either target a specific enemy you want or even your allies. The user interface and menu navigation also become more bloated as more abilities, runes, and key items are unlocked meaning you’ll have to slowly scroll through these the later you get into the game when you want to change things up. There are also plenty of minor glitches and bugs. Many of them are visual-based, but the most annoying ones are a soft lock that happens if all your characters get downed or KO’d at the same time, forcing you to load from a previous save file and a tactics glitch that makes your AI attack enemies even if you have it set as “don’t attack.” The level design, especially toward the beginning, can also lead to lots of confusion as it isn’t straightforward and there is a lack of distinct landmarks making it hard to remember if you went down certain paths or not. It gets better as the game goes on, but the early levels are definitely what I would consider weak.

One of the most important aspects that I feel should have been introduced much earlier is the Clearstal items. Every time you fully clear a room of enemies once, the last enemy will drop said item. These items, when shown to a specific cat-like non-playable character can grant you many quality-of-life features such as team customization at any point outside of battle instead of at save points. The thing is that he’s introduced halfway through the game so you end up collecting all of these items with no real benefit until that moment. And believe me, some of these QoL features needed to be enabled earlier in the adventure. 

Let’s get to everyone’s favorite part, the morality section. Johnny Lionface is a bit different as there are two settings. The original “intended experience” that keeps all the degeneracy and debauchery intact, and the “family-friendly experience” that removes all of the sexual dialogue, nudity, and most language. The only one that can’t be changed after starting the game is the dialogue as it changes a lot of the narrative and even removes some characters. I played Johnny Lionface twice and will list two separate morality scores at the end due to how significant the changes are, but I’ll be mostly going over the intended experience specifically.

Violence and violent content cannot be altered, but it consists of killing human-like and fantasy creatures. Some of these enemies explode into chunks of bone when killed while most of them just have their bodies lying on the ground. Claire’s introduction actually involves her blowing a man’s head off after he refuses to pay her money for her alchemy services and threatens her. Language is all over the place, not only is every swear used throughout, there is tons of sexual dialogue referencing sexual fluids, actions such as orgies and rape, and plenty of jokes that revolve around such things. The phrase “Oh my God” is used a few times throughout. When language is altered, the only language I spotted were mild swears such as "d*mn" and various forms of "*ss."

While the act of sex itself is never shown on screen, there is plenty of nudity in the intended experience, mostly pertaining to boobs from enemies such as gorgons and harpies, and even a few times from a couple of your playable characters (Nadine the nymph has a fully nude “costume” that can be equipped). There is one enemy type early in the game that has ”something” hanging between his legs (I seriously can’t tell if it’s meant to be his male organ or testicles). Johnny himself is a good person overall, but he also has a tendency to sleep around with many women. His introduction (and the introduction of the game in general) is the aftermath of an intimate night with one of his many female admirers as he is considered highly attractive in universe. Later in the game, the town of Phylia even has a plot point revolving around how sexually frustrated the satyr and nymph people get when there is an imbalance of male-to-female ratio. They proceed to act out on their impulses rather aggressively. It was pretty wild to experience, especially the “family-friendly” version with how the context changed from graphic sexual assault to kissing.

Occult and Supernatural are mostly kept to fantasy. While alchemy itself can tend to conflict with Christian beliefs, it is kept to its most basic form in Johnny Lionface, only diving into the most basic and scientific aspects of it. But in general, there are many creatures taken from mythology and mythos like the aforementioned harpies. Toward the end of the game as you storm Ogg’akesh’s castle, more satanic and demonic imagery will appear such as inverted pentagrams and demons (good thing you have a servant of God on your side). And in terms of ethics, it all comes down to crude humor, directly relating to the sexual humor and jokes said. While Johnny has some questionable allies, they all make the right and noble decisions.

Johnny Lionface has flaws—quite a lot of them to be frank. Plenty of them are minor ones that can surely be fixed with future updates, but it does have quite the hurdle to jump over at the beginning. Once you do, you’ll find an interesting nine-to-fifteen-hour experience with a ton of party customization and versatile gameplay. It also has one of the best implementations of a new game plus feature I’ve seen as it not only takes from any save file you have on hand, but you also get to choose what you want to take or leave behind when going into the feature. For example, if you want to keep your levels in a new playthrough but not your currency or items, you can do just that. And if you want more, there is an extra (brutally hard) dungeon unlocked once you gather all the Clearstals. In its intended experience, definitely proceed with caution as it is filled with adult content. Although, if you choose the “family-friendly” experience—in ESRB terms, it changes the content from a heavy Mature to a light-moderate Teen rating. The content changed is that nudity is removed or censored, and dialogue is greatly altered. It is pretty light on the story so people who play role-playing games for that aspect may end up disappointed. However, I believe Johnny Lionface appeals best to people with a bit of patience who grew up during that “Wild West” era of the internet.