This game is pretty, great art, sprite, and character design. Which is what drew me in when I first saw the gameplay in a magazine years ago. But I never got to finish the game back then, now I know why.
It’s slow.
The combat, while having the standard turn-based game, is extremely slow even compared to some of the games in that era. Normal enemy is a damage sponge and animation takes an unnecessarily long time to finish. Making a lot of encounters last for more than a minute. By the end, I actively tried to avoid any encounter that I could.
There’s also the MP issue in the early game, where you will be starved for MP because you need to use skill to end battle fast, but the good skill costs an ungodly amount of MP. This is kinda fixed mid to late game because of how much money you have to buy tents (to heal your party to full).
Speaking of skill, there’s a skill tree, and their decision with the skill tree baffles me. So you gain SP to unlock stuff in the skill tree, however, you can’t see ahead of the skill tree because everything is covered until you spend SP to KNOW what the covered skill is. You will still need to spend SP to unlock the skill itself. This makes skill tree planning almost impossible (thank you, internet).
However, there are only a handful of useful skills for each character, so once you unlock that you don’t even need to try anything else.
The story… I don’t know. It’s the typical church bad, someone is trying to awaken a sealed evil being, and you have to collect a bunch of McGuffin to prevent said evil from awakening. Not to mention the ending is so abrupt, the credit rolls start before I even realize I just finished the game.
They also did the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen in a JRPG, they took away half of your party members for the final battle, meaning, if you only train the one that’s taken away… good luck finishing the game.
But, the characters are the selling point of this game. Especially the original 3, Killian, Spinel, and Henson. They are fun and their interactions are fun to watch. There are more characters later and they are also pretty interesting, but not as good as the first 3.
Overall, it could've been a good game, but it has some baffling decision and the slowness of the combat isn’t helping it.
It’s slow.
The combat, while having the standard turn-based game, is extremely slow even compared to some of the games in that era. Normal enemy is a damage sponge and animation takes an unnecessarily long time to finish. Making a lot of encounters last for more than a minute. By the end, I actively tried to avoid any encounter that I could.
There’s also the MP issue in the early game, where you will be starved for MP because you need to use skill to end battle fast, but the good skill costs an ungodly amount of MP. This is kinda fixed mid to late game because of how much money you have to buy tents (to heal your party to full).
Speaking of skill, there’s a skill tree, and their decision with the skill tree baffles me. So you gain SP to unlock stuff in the skill tree, however, you can’t see ahead of the skill tree because everything is covered until you spend SP to KNOW what the covered skill is. You will still need to spend SP to unlock the skill itself. This makes skill tree planning almost impossible (thank you, internet).
However, there are only a handful of useful skills for each character, so once you unlock that you don’t even need to try anything else.
The story… I don’t know. It’s the typical church bad, someone is trying to awaken a sealed evil being, and you have to collect a bunch of McGuffin to prevent said evil from awakening. Not to mention the ending is so abrupt, the credit rolls start before I even realize I just finished the game.
They also did the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen in a JRPG, they took away half of your party members for the final battle, meaning, if you only train the one that’s taken away… good luck finishing the game.
But, the characters are the selling point of this game. Especially the original 3, Killian, Spinel, and Henson. They are fun and their interactions are fun to watch. There are more characters later and they are also pretty interesting, but not as good as the first 3.
Overall, it could've been a good game, but it has some baffling decision and the slowness of the combat isn’t helping it.