Fascinating little piece of history. You can see a path here from Star Wars to Mass Effect in terms of rpg design. I fond the combat extremely bad and there's plenty of pacing issues. The lore gets dumped on you in such chunks, its hard to find the emotional resonance its looking for in those heightened moments.

The Good/Bad choices seen in KOTOR or Mass Effects really suffer here. Open Palm vs. Closed Fist starts with some interesting nuance. Open Palm believes in helping others no matter what. Closed Fist believes in self-strength and tough love. Closed Fist ideology might ignore someone in danger if they felt the victim merely needs to get stronger. But if they felt the odds were clearly unfair, with the oppressed having no path forward on their own, then they might feel obligated to help. Its an interesting distinction, but ultimately the choices fall back into that Good Bad binary.

But the ambition here carries this a long way. Numerous people worked on this with a different idea of what kind of story they were telling and you can feel how those concepts meshed or clashed with each other. There character writing needs some polish and there's definitely a feeling of 00s yikes about a few asian character designs. But the overall vibes are nicely tuned, its easy to forgive the clunk.

I might get immersive sim pilled from this.