My god this was the longest five and half hours of my gaming life. Why does my roommate have nostalgia for such absolute garbage. This is the platonic ideal of a Bad Game, so bad in so many ways that you can near feel the heat from the dumpster fire that must have been its development.

The anime box-art looks nothing like any asset in the game. The opening cutscene looks nothing like any asset in the game. The in-game drawings of ANYTHING look nothing like any 3D model in the game.

There is one good music track. It plays in the tutorial level. It also serves as the theme for the final boss fight.

There are multiple copy-pasted tower levels that have the same 1 minute loop of music on them. That doesn't even loop. They cross fade into themselves not even on a beat.

If you did not choose to have a magic user in your party, you're fucked. I played as a pirate, and without a long-range attack, there were multiple bosses that I could not reach. I have no idea how the game is supposed to be finishable with anyone who isn't a warlock.

My experience with this game was running around trying to whack things with my sword, and I never did learn where the hitbox on my swing was supposed to be. Sometimes things died in front of me, or to the side of me, or sometimes I'd be turned around and facing a direction I never input. But maybe I never killed anything at all, and it was all my roommate's bouncing balls of magic that would routinely clear a room off-screen before I got to wander over.

There's no run button, but walking for a set amount of time will transition you to running, which has no change in animation but does change movement speed. Multiple in-game traps were timed for my roommate's Warlock running speed and nothing else. Or were timed for nothing. So it was impossible to purposefully avoid them. Except that sometimes their damage hitboxes didn't work. Until you got used to it, in which case you'd get stun-locked from the same floor trap you'd walked over five times already looking for the one switch you missed in a room full of bullshit.

Speaking of, enemies come out of generators so fast that lizardmen would literally appear to die faster than my sword swing animation. It was literally impossible for me to kill things faster than they appeared. Until my roommate used some phoenix fire warlock blast and killed everything. I'm pretty sure my pirate's Final Smash equivalent did not have a hitbox.

No one was paying attention to this. There was no game design, no balancing. Assets were programmed and jumbled together onto a disc.

Multiple times we had to restart levels because I accidentally hit a switch to open a door - but the game only wanted Player 1 to hit switches to open doors. So the door wouldn't open.

Routinely got stuck on level geometry. Or nothing. Destroying enemy generators left debris that had hit detection boxes, which, with no jump button, turned every cleared room into aa maze should you need to back-track. Which you needed to do a lot.

I do not have enough gaming history knowledge to know what the "good" game of this genre is that so many people tried to make one like it. The Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance games my roommate has made me play felt better than this one, but were still fundamentally terrible experiences. No impact for weapons interacting with enemies. No sound effects for feedback that anything is happening. Little alignment between hitboxes and animations. Just purely unpleasant lack of cohesion.

Whoever was translating this did not bother making sure what the narrator said matched what was on screen at all. Or maybe they did the "full" translation first, and then ran into character limits for the in-game text. The number of times I was asked to "go thru the teleport" on my way to hell was enough to stop being funny.

Ending each level gets the same "grandiose" music playing over a still generic fantasy image with a couple lines of text babbling on about nonsense that fails to stay consistent from one level to the next. Some white mages are mentioned that are never shown. The main villain is either a monster, or a dragon, or a dark mage, or a space flea, or something else - you kill him like five times. Each time with dialog like "Your mission: kill him forever" to be followed with "you slew the bad buy, but then he fled. He is weakened, but is growing stronger than ever!" I felt like I was being punked by a 5-year-old's level of storytelling.

Incidentally, this was the first game I ever played on the original Xbox, and boy howdy is that controller awful. What were they thinking with all those far and out of the way buttons? Everything is so mushy and the A / B button placement still feels like a sin.

I am so done. Why can treasure chests have rotten meat inside. Or half the gold of the cost of the key to open it. What is the point of the lives system. Why are they called credits. Was this a port of a Chinese arcade game??

F rank, no stars. My roommate was howling with laughter at my suffering for this god-awful experience. I am making him drive the van when I move.