Even the enhancements made by the pixel remaster couldn’t save this game from being incredibly boring to sit through. I appreciate the attempt at telling a deeper story than its predecessor but even that aged horribly due to all of its limitations and still pretty basic storytelling. The general structure is also pretty annoying since it devolves into “go there, do this, return here” over and over again, making me realise once again how timeless the mostly intuitive progression of its predecessor is.

Pretty decent rpg for its time and circumstances. The overworld exploration ended up being more fun than expected and the additions of the pixel remaster helped out with the parts of the game that aged less gracefully, like the ridiculously high enemy encounter rate. Also maybe it’s the fault of this version, but the game felt pretty easy throughout up until the final boss, which was a sudden huge spike in difficulty. Overall I had more fun than expected with it but at the end of the day it’s an old ass rpg