A personal blast from my past that doesn’t hold up as well without my rose tinted glasses. The things it does right in terms of overall presentation and providing an illusion of depth in the systems quickly gets overturned by some unfortunately inconsistent pacing for the story and a combat system that really doesn’t feel like it’s to be mastered, in favor of simply being brute forced. The character interactions, music and visuals all have a lot of quality and charm to them, but there’s distinct elements that take me out of the experience. Spells casted by party members completely break the flow of combat by forcing the player to watch the whole spell cast, interrupting whatever momentum or groove they could have been getting into. The skill system is half cooked, with a lot of solid consideration but also skills that are such no brainers (like Perserverence) that they should just be removed entirely because every player with a brain is gonna go for them. As well as skills like Flip actively ruining the combat (fortunately it can be manually disabled, but it’s just lame to have something so useless and situational). Finally the story ramps up in the transition from the first to second disc, and provides a lot of really interesting story a la Star Ocean 1, but unlike 1, The Second Story ends with a pretty straightforward, un-twisty conclusion that is literally described to the player by an NPC earlier with not divergence from the plan. Plus, while the 4 locations you visit to get the stones necessary to invade Fienal are super unique and pretty, it is ultimately a macguffin hunt with little actual story beats occuring, and the final attack on Fienal feels like it was in dire need of some form of story shakeup mid way to keep it engaging, instead of just being a final zone to slay some bosses and grind for levels in between. That all being said, it’s an absolute vibe of a game, and has a lot of odd quality of life features that seem well ahead of their time. It’s trope-y, it’s repetitive and a little frustrating to play but it’s ultimately worth a go-through as it’s still a nifty package with a lot of heart. But I ultimately expect to be returning to Backloggd in a week or so to completely decry this version of the game in favor of the remake.