A short (15 hours) JRPG with great story hindered by stupidly high encounter rate.
This is a japan only game and I can see why, the story at that time is probably deemed too dark for the American audience, there are plenty of dark theme in this game, like slavery, forced death match, human experiment, death, prostitution, death, and more death.
The story itself seems to be pretty simple at first and then it gets more interesting the more you play, it's about Filena, a girl that is forced to grow as a man so that she can avoid being sold as a slave, but instead she have to fight in a gladiator match to the death until she eventually die there. Except... she escaped, with her wife. Yes, wife, it has lesbian, add that to the list why this is not localized.
The battle is standard turn-based, although a bit more involved because you need to know (GUESS) what enemy is weak to, you can equip 3 weapon at a time and there are 3 or 4 weapon types, good luck guessing which one is the enemy weak to. There is no indication. But then again, the game is really easy, all boss fight ended up with me picking my character strongest attack and spam A, with occasional healing.
The main downside of this game is, as I mentioned... the encounter rate. The dungeon design is pretty simple but you can be stuck there for hours just because of all the fight you get into. Strangely enough, I never use fast forward at all in this game even though the emulator is capable of it.
Another downside is on the latter part of the game, close to the ending, it's padding. Not by difficulty but by backtracking, and with the high encounter rate, it became torture, especially if you don't know where to go. They also pulled an FFIX kind of thing as the final boss which is a bit disappointing, but doesn't really damage the great story that much.
Overall, I really enjoyed this game and the relationship between Filena and her wife is just cute.
This is a japan only game and I can see why, the story at that time is probably deemed too dark for the American audience, there are plenty of dark theme in this game, like slavery, forced death match, human experiment, death, prostitution, death, and more death.
The story itself seems to be pretty simple at first and then it gets more interesting the more you play, it's about Filena, a girl that is forced to grow as a man so that she can avoid being sold as a slave, but instead she have to fight in a gladiator match to the death until she eventually die there. Except... she escaped, with her wife. Yes, wife, it has lesbian, add that to the list why this is not localized.
The battle is standard turn-based, although a bit more involved because you need to know (GUESS) what enemy is weak to, you can equip 3 weapon at a time and there are 3 or 4 weapon types, good luck guessing which one is the enemy weak to. There is no indication. But then again, the game is really easy, all boss fight ended up with me picking my character strongest attack and spam A, with occasional healing.
The main downside of this game is, as I mentioned... the encounter rate. The dungeon design is pretty simple but you can be stuck there for hours just because of all the fight you get into. Strangely enough, I never use fast forward at all in this game even though the emulator is capable of it.
Another downside is on the latter part of the game, close to the ending, it's padding. Not by difficulty but by backtracking, and with the high encounter rate, it became torture, especially if you don't know where to go. They also pulled an FFIX kind of thing as the final boss which is a bit disappointing, but doesn't really damage the great story that much.
Overall, I really enjoyed this game and the relationship between Filena and her wife is just cute.