This is a bare bones, badly written, JRPG with a poor combat system and nothing unique going for it. I've played fan-made RPG maker games that are better.
Unfortunately, people seem to look at classic JRPGs and remember the grindy level up/progression systems first and disregard the often unique, weird, or existential stories. It's obvious that the creators had a grindy progressionThis is a bare bones, badly written, JRPG with a poor combat system and nothing unique going for it. I've played fan-made RPG maker games that are better.
Unfortunately, people seem to look at classic JRPGs and remember the grindy level up/progression systems first and disregard the often unique, weird, or existential stories. It's obvious that the creators had a grindy progression system foremost in their minds.
The story mechanic of towns and people disappearing while you go about restoring them is very similar to Soul Blazer (SNES) and is no where near as good. In that game, the mechanic is vague and mystical, while in this game, it's fully-explained early on and ends up being silly and shallow. In Soul Blazer, the mechanic is fun and is primarily how you progress through the game, while in this game, it's just your standard means of going to a new area
The dialogue is long-winded and not intelligent. Dialogue is about 4 times longer than it needs to be, with your characters frequently stating the obvious and making up far-fetched reasons for how to progress (which always turn out to be correct, despite almost no research being done). For example, in one section, you need to sneak into an area. And what do your characters determine should be done to do this? Make the sun set, which hasn't happened in the lifetime of the main character (yeah really, that's their first idea). So you create day/night cycles to the world by restoring a tower. This seemingly world-shattering event is then ignored by everyone else in the world - No one mentions it after sneaking into the area. The game is full of instances like this.
Characters have nearly no background, and don't seem like real people. For no compelling reason, you go off on a quest to save the world and take a very heroic and stoic approach to this, and you remain that way for nearly the whole game, except for a few forced moments where your main character becomes slightly depressed, which are fixed by long-winded and unnecessary dialogue sections. In fact, all of your characters seem the same. Cover up their names, and I bet you couldn't tell who said what. There's very little personality to them and it seems as though the main writer just used the same template to each, even down to their speech patterns (which may be the fault of the localization).
The world isn't very believable. You're dealing with a particular empire throughout the game that seems to be doing the opposite of what their king wants. The game deals with this by having the king disappear voluntarily for most of the game, which is just sloppy writing. And then you flip-flop allegiance to that empire several times depending on whatever general you're dealing with at the moment. And of course, that empire constantly makes stupid decisions, because of course they do. You're the hero after all.
Early in the game, you're sent on a quest to obtain some supposedly-rare mech suits (that just serve to make combat slightly more annoying). Your three-character party gets them, because they're the chosen ones, of course. What's strange about this is that every other character that joins you just so happens to have their own rare mech suit. So this thing that starts out as special early-game ends up being a silly gimmick and bad writing later on since everyone ends up getting one with no effort.
The combat system is basically pulled from the Hyperdimension Neptunia games, being area-of-effect based, but is poorly done. The biggest annoyance is that you can't accurately control your attack area. The Neptunia games solve this by having set buttons slowly move your attack area around after getting into position. In this game, the L2/R2 buttons are unused. So I ended up constantly dealing with the fiddly analog inputs to reposition my attack area. Also, there's skill cooldowns for some reason. Want to cast that heal spell again? Too bad, you need to wait 2 turns. This goes for attack skills too. So I couldn't use the most effective attack skills and instead simply went down the list of skills in every battle, since they at least do more damage then normal attacks. There's several bosses that, without warning, explode when they're killed, damaging all of your characters in the process. If they don't have 75% health or higher, then it's game over and back to the last save point - that makes no sense story wise, as you have backup characters that can switch in any time, but it's still game over if your main battle party dies.
Your combat power is unfortunately level-based. If you skip battles, you'll end up not being able to progress, because all of your attacks will miss. So when you can't hit a boss, it's necessary to go back into the dungeon and grind a bit. This is not a DQ or FF combat system, where smart play is more important than levels.
So I didn't like this one. At least it was only 20 hours.… Expand
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