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Ah, another portmanteau! …I’m just happy I got to use that word again.
LiEat is actually 3 games in one, all featuring Efina, a very mysterious girl. Born only just a little while before the beginning of the first game, she is brought into town by a roaming traveler. While she refers to the traveler as “papa,” she’s not related to him at all. In fact, Efina is a dragon.
It quickly becomes apparent though, that even for a dragon, Efina is strange. In the world of LiEat, all dragons have special diets. Efina’s… is lies. You heard corectly, Efina sustains herself by eating lies. While the combat in LiEat is just your standard take-turn RPG slug-fest, this strange aspect of Efina makes the game worth playing. Suddenly, the game becomes much less focused on grinding and more on the story of Efina. Being able to detect when a person is lying or not due to a little black monster coming out is fun; it’s kind of like Phoenix Wright.
For instance, at one point you had to listen to a couple lines of dialogue that one of the residents of Vermilion gave and determine which statement was false so that Efina could eat it. This lead to a sort of detective sequence where you had to traipse about his house, using logic and reasoning to figure out what part of what he said was true or false. Bookmark in the book? Yeah, he probably was reading. Broom out of the cupboard? Yeah, he was cleaning. Spotless dishes and an unused sink? Nah, he wasn’t cooking.
It sounds weird, but I’m putting this in Tier 1. There’s not really a good reason for this other than I’ve never played a game with a lie-eating dragon before. I think it sounds cool. The art helps push things along as well–while the environments look like a red-and-white monochrome gameboy game, I like the character portraits and the constant cuts to animated scenes bring life to the characters. Now that I think of it, a game like this would have easily found its home during the GBA era; a time of gaming I have a bit of a soft spot for.
