Epic Battle Fantasy 5

Epic Battle Fantasy 5 has 3,086 English reviews and 33 of them are negative. I read all 33, which makes this one of the few games where the criticism can be described exhaustively rather than sampled.

Here is the whole of it: six say it's too much like the previous games, six mention difficulty, five mention length, four mention the sliding puzzles, four the humour. That's essentially the entire case against a game with a 98.9% rating.

What it actually is

A turn-based RPG that looks like a Flash game and plays like something considerably more serious.

The combat is the reason to be here. Every attack carries elemental and status properties, enemies carry resistances and weaknesses that matter, buffs and debuffs stack in ways you have to plan around, and on higher difficulties an unconsidered turn will get your party killed. Layered on top: equipment with its own skill trees, a monster-catching system, crafting, and secrets hidden behind environmental puzzles.

The scale is unusual for one developer. 133 achievements, with the most common at 88.1% and the median still at 35.7% — a curve showing people play deep into it rather than bouncing. Recent reviewers have a 59-hour median.

For NZ$29.99 with a single optional extra and no in-game purchases, that's a lot of RPG.

The complaint that recurs

It's a sequel complaint, and it's the honest kind. A 27-hour reviewer: "the gameplay is identical to EBF3 and 4, they try to change things up by adding No Legs as a character and adding weather conditions; but even on Epic difficulty those things can be ignored."

That's the eighth game today whose critics measure it against one specific other game — but unlike Keep on Mining! - Worlds, where sameness came with a twelve-point ratings drop, here the audience mostly considers it a virtue. The series has an established formula and the fifth entry refines rather than reinvents it. Originality scores a 6.5 for that reason; nothing else does.

The two mechanical complaints are more specific and worth knowing. Sliding puzzles: a 36-hour player writes "Too many damned sliding puzzles, completely ruined the game for me and I finally had to just throw in the towel". And combat fatigue: the same reviewer describes "constantly being thrown into 2-5 waves of combat with each encounter". If long random-encounter chains wear you down, this game has a lot of them.

The part that will decide it for most people

The presentation. This is a game built on video-game references, juvenile jokes and anime fanservice, and the store page is upfront about all three. Humour appears in four of the 33 negatives — "Not my cup of memes," writes one, in full — and that's the shortest fair review anyone has given it.

It isn't a hidden flaw and I won't treat it as one. But it's the single biggest predictor of whether you'll enjoy this, and it's more prominent than the trailers alone suggest. Look at the screenshots properly before buying.

Still alive

Matt Roszak is still around: mod support posts in 2023 and 2026, an EBF Collection release, and side projects announced through early 2026. The game itself received free content updates after launch and is content-complete now — appropriate for a finished RPG rather than a sign of neglect.

Negatives by year are almost flat — 5, 5, 4, 2, 4, 5, 3, 4, 1 — which is what a stable, finished, well-liked game looks like across eight years.

The verdict

Epic Battle Fantasy 5 earns an 8. The combat system is legitimately excellent and deserves to be taken more seriously than its art style invites, the content-to-price ratio is among the best in this library, and one person built all of it.

It stops short of higher marks because it is, by its own fans' description, a refinement of a formula rather than a new one; because sliding puzzles and multi-wave encounters pad a game that didn't need padding; and because the humour and fanservice will simply decide the matter for a lot of people before the combat gets a chance.

If you want a mechanically dense turn-based RPG and the presentation doesn't repel you, this is sixty hours very well spent. If the screenshots make you wince, believe them.