An RPG about the benefits of reading books. (Oh and I guess you build some robots too.)
The insanely convoluted story that gleefully mashes up genres and tones is a wild ride. You start out the son of a humble small town inventor, rescuing some kids who got stuck in a cave (after the petulant Elon Musk-esque scientist fails to do it), and before you know it there's hacker gangs and a crab-man and a doppelganger mayor having an affair with his secretary and a haunted mansion and a vengeful volcano god (who's not really a vengeful volcano god) and a pumpkin-head-man and brainwashing and aliens and more aliens and time travel and space travel and now you have doppelgangers and the whole time you're being trailed by a small-time reporter named Mint who's always trying to "get the scoop." It absolutely does not make anything clearer that the translation is garbage. But it's kind of all part of the charm.
I will say I don't know how anyone could have ever completed this back in the day without a guide. The item crafting system is way ahead of its time (ditto the battle system, which predates Pokémon by a few years), but it's also pretty damn complicated, with a lot of tedious trial and error if you don't know in advance what you're doing.
The insanely convoluted story that gleefully mashes up genres and tones is a wild ride. You start out the son of a humble small town inventor, rescuing some kids who got stuck in a cave (after the petulant Elon Musk-esque scientist fails to do it), and before you know it there's hacker gangs and a crab-man and a doppelganger mayor having an affair with his secretary and a haunted mansion and a vengeful volcano god (who's not really a vengeful volcano god) and a pumpkin-head-man and brainwashing and aliens and more aliens and time travel and space travel and now you have doppelgangers and the whole time you're being trailed by a small-time reporter named Mint who's always trying to "get the scoop." It absolutely does not make anything clearer that the translation is garbage. But it's kind of all part of the charm.
I will say I don't know how anyone could have ever completed this back in the day without a guide. The item crafting system is way ahead of its time (ditto the battle system, which predates Pokémon by a few years), but it's also pretty damn complicated, with a lot of tedious trial and error if you don't know in advance what you're doing.