Band together six powerful magicians and search out the fabled Rings of Power to free your world. Interact and trade with inhabitants of thirty cities. Over 100 animated spells to choose from! Rings of Power is quite different from traditional console RPGs gameplay-wise, and is more similar to Western-style games such as Ultima series. You can freely wander through the huge isometric world, and are not obliged to follow any storyline except the main quest for the eleven rings. You can talk to NPCs about many topics, choose whom to fight, bribe people, etc. There is a day/night cycle which affects the behavior of characters. Unlike most RPGs, there are no weapons and armor in this game. The turn-based combat is entirely dependent on magic spells. On your journey you will encounter characters from several guilds, each proficient in his own type of magic, and make them join your party.
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I'm not ashamed to say that I love it anyway. This is a game that is so unique and so "indie" that it defies categorization. It certainly is dressed up as an RPG, but it also has very strong adventure game vibes, where you need to go to the right places, talk to the right people, and use the right items. Aside from a very short prologue set in one city, the entire game is completely open-world, letting you explore in any order you choose. And what a world it is! It really feels lived-in. You can speak to people about multiple topics. Different cities will sell different trade goods and pay a premium on others, depending on what they value. You can actually fight whoever you want, but if you become a murderhobo then the townspeople start to gang up and aggro you unless you bribe the mayor.
It was a flawed game all right, but it dared to be different and is an entirely unique experience that I would heartily recommend to anyone who can get past the graphics.
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Edit: Having replayed this after something like 10 years, my impressions stay the same: extremely unwelcoming and supremely rewarding. But I've also been thinking: why do I give this game a pass for its buggy-as-hell battle system and give games like FF9 a hard time for its suboptimal-but-perfectly-functional ATB mechanics? Is it simply nostalgia?
The best answer I can come up with is that the buggy combat and terrible balance is irrelevant because battles are really an afterthought in this game - it's reflected both in how rare mandatory battles actually are, and in the fact that fighting is actually a horribly inefficient way to gain experience or money (completing quests and trading goods are more effective for those respective purposes).
The real soul of the game lies in slowly discovering the world, speaking to its inhabitants about the cities, the latest gossip, the local legends, unfurling the tapestry of lore that would make most RPGs from the next generation blush (and which they somehow crammed into a single Genesis cart). It lies in the dopamine rush you get when you get a new lead in your quest in the form of a torn treasure map. It lies in the shitty-in-any-other-game design decision of having an NPC direct you back to a town you just visited 5 minutes ago to fulfil a mundane fetch quest but you don't even mind because the world feels like it's living and breathing. It lies in the stonehenge-like structures and occasional hidden temples you run into that have absolutely no bearings on your quest but exist in the world because why not? And it lies in the superbly-witty dialogue that makes interacting with NPCs much more of a joy than in most any other RPG I've played. Some highlights:
- "I'm a loony, and so am I."
- "We suspect the necromancers of some nasty undertakings."
- "If you say money can't buy happiness you don't know where to shop."
TL;DR - nostalgia I guess. But despite how garish the graphics are, how unpolished the sound is, and how limited memory leads to quirks like the greatest knight in the world saying "Oh I'm only good enough to split firewood and hold a sword" when you ask him about his job, I will always have time to slip into the world of Ushka Bau. Give it a try and you may find some magic here as well.