A pretty good RPG at the core, suffering from a bland story and a severe lack of polish. As an oldhead LoL player who quit LoL itself years ago due to toxicity and multiplayer burnout I was excited for a single-player story-driven experience in this universe, but I ended up leaving the game unsatisfied.

Let's start with some positives. The visuals are generally quite good, with really nice looking in-game models and animations. The models do a great job of capturing something similar to LoL's aesthetic while adapting it slightly to fit into a more focused game with a different camera angle. The opening cutscene depicting the corruption of the Blessed Isles is gorgeous - on par with Arcane. The actual story cutscenes in the campaign unfortunately look terrible in comparison, but let's not get too hung up on that here. The music is great, with a very clear distinction between Bilgewater's music vs. the Shadow Isles'. The character portraits are all of extremely high quality, although I do kind of wish that there were a few variants for different facial expressions and such.

The core combat system is something that I immediately took to as a big fan of FFX. It uses a similar system of "turn-based" combat where the order of turns is fluid and mutable, but takes this concept to a much further extreme. You can change the cast time and cooldown of abilities in exchange for different damage values, you can delay enemy turns and advance ally turns, there's haste and slow effects, there's Doom counters, there's specific effects that trigger only if a character falls into a specific space on the turn order, the works. It's an extremely developed system and one that continued to keep my attention throughout the game's runtime, especially once I turned the difficulty up to Veteran and was suddenly at risk of my DPS characters getting 2-shot by most enemies if I wasn't paying attention. If the combat was worse, I probably would have dropped this game pretty early on.

The biggest issues by far all stem from a crippling lack of polish, in every sense of the word. This feels like a beta version of a game that needed another 6 months or more in the oven to iron out its myriad technical issues and other problems. Let's run through a non-exhaustive list of these issues. If you don't care about the details, feel free to skip this section while noting how large it is.

MECHANICAL BUGS. One of the final bosses turned off all of my characters' runes (passive abilities, essentially), making the fight much harder, but when I died and retried, all runes worked again. Puzzle mechanisms occasionally became frozen and un-interactable for upwards of 30 seconds, forcing me to wait until the game allowed me to progress again. Some (extremely slow) elevators would re-activate before I could get off, forcing me to make the whole trip again. Enemies would become grouped together in multi-wave battles even when they were way farther away than the visual "chain" indicator. Enemies can attack you while you're in a dialogue box or cutscene, and this can cause the whole game to freeze after combat.

VISUAL BUGS. Ahri's orb gets stuck easily and ends up lazily floating around after every battle you initiate with it. Quest markers sometimes show in the wrong spot or don't show up at all. Some chests and lore pickups don't appear on the map, or don't get checked off as "acquired" after picking them up. Miss Fortune's Level 3 Ultimate ability seems to involve her summoning a ship which fires upon enemies, but the ship is invisible making it look awkward and unfinished; the follow-up shot damage also often shows as "[AMOUNT]" instead of a proper damage number. Idle NPC dialogue occasionally gets stuck in a loop on your screen until you're sufficiently out of range. Buff/debuff icons from the previous battle are still active for the first few seconds of the next battle. Hazard and Boon icons sometimes stick around on the turn tracker even when they are not active.

INCONSISTENT ABILITY TEXT. Different abilities word similar effects in different ways, for example one will say "boosts crit chance" while another will say "increases [name of champion]'s crit chance". Some abilities that last a set number of turns don't mention this in the description, and some abilities that stack a buff and then do something at max stacks don't mention the max number of stacks. Some effects say "do X each turn" where "each turn" means your turn, other times it means ANY turn. Attack Power is alternately called Attack, Atk Pwr, and AP. Some abilities will modify values in the description when you upgrade them (e.g. "100 damage" -> "130 damage") while others will just tack on sentences (e.g. "100 damage" -> "100 damage. Deals 30 extra damage.") The description for Ahri's passive is repeated in the description of another unrelated ability of hers.

POOR QUALITY OF LIFE. Maps are extremely large and fast travel points are scarce, despite a lot of mandatory backtracking both in the main quest and especially in side quests. Potions with the same name but different rarity don't stack, even when the effect is identical, and they aren't sorted in any logical way in your bag, so it's a chore to find a particular kind of potion or tell how many you have. The long intro logo animations when booting up the game are unskippable, and the intro cutscene has to be skipped by holding a button for 3 seconds every single time. Weak enemies are hard to avoid when backtracking even though they give virtually no experience, and even "scared" enemies who try to run from you often get in the way or run directly into you, triggering combat. Non-linear stats make stat increases hard to understand, particularly in the Enchanting menu where you aren't given a preview of the actual difference in effect.

GENERAL LACK OF POLISH. Some quest NPCs abruptly appear or disappear at the beginning and end of cutscenes. Ahri's Level 2 Ultimate ability has a shot where it cuts to all of your enemies standing stock-still off-center from the camera, which looks really bad. A handful of dialogue options have icons next to them which are never explained or used anywhere else. The lore rewards spoil every character who will eventually join your party from the first minute of the game. Braum's mustache is black even though it's brown in LoL and other Runeterra media.

Any of these problems, or even a few of them, would be easy to overlook. But there are simply SO MANY bugs and other problems that it seriously affects my enjoyment of the game. If this game was polished I could easily see myself giving it an entire extra star in this review.

With all that out of the way, how is the actual game despite the bugs? While it's not bad per se, it's unfortunately not much to write home about. While the core gameplay concepts are good and highly engaging, the game is not super well balanced. Miss Fortune in particular is so strong that I could never find a reason to take her out of my party, and Illaoi is so much better than Braum - being a tank that can also heal and revive instead of a tank that has clunky CC which bosses are immune to - that I never used him once I had 4 total party members. And while I like the Enchanting system in theory, the game throws new gear at you quickly enough to make it feel pointless. Spending rare resources on giving a powerful enchantment to a piece of gear only for it to be summarily outclassed by something you pick up 10 minutes later feels really bad.

Not every game needs to be a mechanical masterpiece though, right? What about the story? Well, beyond the initial "wow" factor of seeing characters and places I love from a new angle, it didn't do much of anything to interest me.

Minor spoilers follow.

A large part of the story's intrigue, the mysteries and reveals that power the first 50-70% of the runtime, hinge on dangling questions that I already knew the answer to as a LoL fan. I'm not questioning if Gangplank is dead, because I know he survived. I'm not wondering about who the Ruined King is, because I've seen his story already. I'm not intrigued by the vague hints Yasuo and Ahri give about their pasts and their true nature, because I'm already intimately familiar with both of them. I realize that these things might go over better with someone who isn't already a fan, but not having that perspective really makes it clear how much of the story is simply dangling the prospect of answering various questions in front of you. The actual STORY of what is happening for most of the game is that you need to go through a dungeon to find a macguffin, which then unlocks another dungeon where you can get another macguffin. The story feels like it could've started and ended within 5 hours if there wasn't an endless stream of magical barriers that can only be nullified by spirit stones buried in lost tombs. The latter half of the game is especially egregious with this - just when you think you've reached the climax you're instead thrown into multiple barely-relevant dungeons just so you can power up the most important and magical macguffin of them all.

On the note of plot points that barely feel relevant: everything concerning Ahri and Yasuo comes across as tacked on. These are two characters from a faraway continent who have nothing to do with either of the regions at stake in this story. The story bends over backwards to invent new lore about Ahri's tribe and awkwardly try to connect them to the Shadow Isles, but as someone who knows a lot about both the Isles and Ionia from other media this was hard to swallow. Yasuo and Ahri were included because they're popular characters, not because there was an important story to tell about Yasuo's past and Ahri's tribe that related to Bilgewater and the Ruination. Braum is in a similar outsider position, but the story is by contrast very happy to just let him hang out in the background and be Braum. No one tries to convince me that there's a secret lost civilization of Iceborn in Bilgewater or that the Watchers actually originated in the Shadow Isles. Braum is just here to be fun, and he is.

As far as the actual character writing, it's about what I would expect from something set in this universe. For as much as I love these characters they are LoL characters at the end of the day, and LoL characters tend to be pretty one-note in their source material. Expanding on that to the point that any of these people have a halfway-believable personality is commendable, and for the most part I think Airship Syndicate succeeded at this. Braum is still mostly a wholesome comic relief, but that's a good role for him, and he can be more serious on occasion. Pyke rarely has much to say that doesn't concern dragging captains to the depths of the sea, but considering he's a cursed revenant who barely does or thinks about anything else this simplicity works out and is even fun to watch interact with the more complex characters. The one stickler in my opinion is Illaoi. Illaoi can barely get through a single sentence of dialogue without mentioning Nagakabouros or her faith. Every other word is about motion, Mother Serpent, faith, worthiness, visions, guidance, etc. I understand that's the core of her character, and that her arc in this game is supposed to be about stepping outside of her all-consuming religious fervor, but it's just exhausting to deal with especially when she gets more screen time than most of the rest of the cast. Characters like MF and Yasuo have similarly simple goals or ideals at the core of their character, but they are still given room to talk about other things.

And through all the dungeons and Ionian distractions, what is the story at the core of it? A bog-standard tale of the good guys beating the bad guys with almost no additional complications. Your plans always work and you defeat each villain the first time you encounter them. Everything is played so incredibly straight that it's difficult to ever feel like there's any tension or stakes to what's happening, even when the world is on the verge of ruin.

At the end of the day this is a mechanically-sound RPG soured by a boring story and heaps of technical issues. Despite playing through the whole thing I would find it hard to recommend to almost anyone - fans will be bored by the reveals of information they already know, while newcomers will likely be uninterested in what seems like an extremely generic fantasy tale. I really wanted this game to be great, but it couldn't live up to those expectations.

After the first 15 hours of this game I was really ready for it to take a decisive spot as one of my favorites, but the whole late-game sequence kinda dragged and I felt like I needed to drag myself through the final dungeon to finally finish. I devoured the first three-quarters of the game in like a week or two, and then let it sit around unfinished for over a month because I lost excitement.

The main party is extremely strong, with Freya, Eiko, and Vivi being particular stand-outs. Nearly every character has a clear identity and their own story/motivation/character arc, although some get way more focus than others. This is obviously a major strength of the game and something that instantly puts it in a high tier among RPGs IMO, but it also becomes somewhat of a weakness as the game progresses. By the time you get to the "end game" - i.e. the second half of Disc 3 and on - most of the party has either finished their arc (e.g. Vivi and Steiner) or fades into the background as the main plot takes over all the screen time (e.g. Freya and Amarant). The last 8 hours or so of the game becomes The Zidane Show almost exclusively, so if he's not your favorite character in the party you might start to lose interest... or at least I did.

Speaking of the late game, I started to feel increasingly pigeonholed into continuing to use the same party of 4 as I progressed. XP and AP are not given to party members on the bench, even when the story prevents you from using them, and there is no easy way to switch party members for basically the entire game. By the time I was in the final dungeon a few of my neglected party members were 20-30 levels behind my main group, and similarly far behind in terms of learning abilities. Even if I brought them along to difficult fights to quickly get XP they would still end up way behind in AP without some serious grinding, which I was not willing to do. This isn't a huge deal in terms of beating the game since practically any configuration of 4 will do fine if they're appropriately leveled, but it was disappointing and felt somewhat incongruous with the story to leave half of the party in the dust like that. Compare to FFX which heavily encourages using every party member equally and allows switching freely even mid-battle, FFVI which forces you to use more than one full party at several points and gives free levels to characters that get locked out of your party for story reasons, and FFXIII which simply gives equal XP to benched characters.

I avoided doing most of the optional content in the game, largely because when I looked up what there was to do it all seemed extremely tedious. Much of the best gear is locked behind various chocobo treasure hunt minigames which were barely acknowledged or explained in-game, and which I was way behind on by the time I looked into sidequests on Disc 4. Beyond that there's a few quests with missable steps, a few quests based on getting specific random encounters, Blue Magic collection which is even more of a pain in this game than it usually is, a bunch of synthesis gear that requires specific drops and an insane amount of gil, and a superboss that expects you to be Level 99 with all abilities unlocked and best-in-slot gear. I know this kind of content exists to appeal to people who want to play the game for as long as possible, but a lot of it just sounded particularly time-wasting and not fun, especially with how slow the combat moves.

Despite all of my issues with the endgame though, my first ~30 hours were thoroughly enjoyable and worth playing through. I fell in love with many of the characters and loved seeing all their interactions. I loved how the party would split up in each town and have their own little adventures on the side. I loved the whole Black Mage plot thread. I loved the more cartoonish artstyle and light-hearted tone. And the combat was very enjoyable too despite how much it got slowed down by animations - it was fairly easy and easily broken but that seems to be the norm for FF games. Overall this was an incredibly solid game, and one I would recommend to any fan of the series.

This is a review of the PS1 version.

Short version: The game starts out pretty fun, but becomes a slog in the late game. Spells rarely feel worth it to cast making martial characters way stronger than casters, and the insane number of random encounters gets pretty monotonous when they stop being any kind of threat.

Long Version:
The early game was pretty enjoyable. I picked Warrior/Monk/White Mage/Black Mage to have a nice spread, and while the Warrior very clearly outclassed the others at the start I could feel the Monk slowly getting more and more powerful, and the White Mage was valuable just for some extra healing. Black Mage seemed super weak, but I expected them to catch up and overtake the "martials" in the late-game, similar to how D&D class progression works.

The early dungeons were actually really threatening, and with the extremely limited availability of spell-based healing and AoE damage (due to the Spell Slot system) I was forced to think a lot about resource management in order to save enough juice for the bosses. There are a lot of random encounters in these dungeons (and the overworld), and a lot of the random enemies can be pretty threatening, but it was just the right level of difficulty that it was fun to manage my resources and pull through by the skin of my teeth. By the mid-game I felt like I was getting into a nice groove. The Mages started getting enough slots to be a little more consistent, and the higher-level damage spells start to actually be worth using more often... at least, sometimes.

One big problem with magic in this game is that the damage is insanely inconsistent, with higher-level spells having huge ranges of possible damage like 50-200 or 60-240. When most enemies have 200-300 health and the martials are easily dealing 200-300 damage per attack, that's the difference between good damage and a completely wasted turn + spell slot. This is made even worse in the late game when every enemy seems to start resisting magic, meaning even a 6th or 7th level spell often does only 40-ish damage to each enemy.

As I got further into the game, magic just felt more and more worthless. On top of the damage issues above, most spells also just got completely overshadowed by the introduction of a suite of items that can be used to cast a given spell for free, infinitely. Why would I ever bother using one of my 3 high-level spell slots on a big AoE spell that deals ~50 damage to all enemies, when I can infinitely use the Gauntlet/Mage Staff/Black Robe to deal ~40 damage instead? Why would I ever bother to cast healing spells when I can spam Healing Staff/Healing Helm every turn to keep my whole party at full health forever? Why do I have spells like Invis2 if I can just use them for free through items? Considering any class can use these items, it really started to feel like there was no point in having dedicated magic-using classes at all.

The only way that the Mages actually pulled their weight was through the handful of support spells that can't be replicated through items, and by the White Mage being able to clutch heal or revive during boss fights. While it's better than nothing, it's really sad in my opinion to have your Black Mage - usually depicted as an unstoppable force of raw magical power - reduced to nothing more than spamming low-level buff spells like Haste and Temper on your martial characters. I feel like I really understand why people say the optimal party composition is 3 Warriors/Monks and a single Red Mage - low-level buff spells and the occasional heal is all I really needed dedicated casters for in the end.

If the spell items were more limited, or spell slots were more abundant, or spells simply did more damage/healing per cast, then this wouldn't be nearly as pronounced. But with everything the way it is, having a dedicated White/Black Mage in the party feels like nerfing yourself for most of the game.

Beyond the issues with spellcasters, the game is decent but unremarkable by modern standards. The overabundance of random encounters gets really grating in the late game especially since they cease to pose any sort of challenge once you get the infinite-healing items and high-level gear. Battle animations take so long that even a trivial random encounter in the late game can take a minute or more, and you get dozens of them per-floor in all of the huge late-game dungeons. I started turning up the emulation speed by the final dungeon.

After all of those trivial encounters, the final boss was a huge shift in difficulty. He has a number of moves that did tons of damage to the whole party (some of which didn't even seem to be included in the Fire/Ice/Lightning element wheel that I have Null spells to counteract), can Haste himself but can't be Slowed to counteract it, and can fully heal himself whenever he wants. It feels like a battle against RNG more than anything else - if he doesn't Haste early and doesn't Curaja before you can kill him, GG; if he Hastes early and spams Curaja then you're completely fucked. Until I looked online and realized that buff spells stack (allowing the cheesy strategy of stacking Attack-up spells on your Warrior and dealing silly amounts of damage) I didn't think I would be able to beat him despite finding everything before him so easy it was boring.

And as far as story goes... practically all of the story content is just in the scrolling text after beating the final boss, and it gets extremely convoluted extremely quickly. Partially as a consequence of introducing complicated elements last-minute and partially because barely any time or word-count is put into explaining what the hell happened. It's a little more ambitious than I was actually expecting, but it wasn't great.

Anyway, to sum up: The game was pretty fun early on but became a slog in the late-game, and the class balance is so fucked up it's ridiculous. I'm glad I got through it because it's interesting in a historical context, but as an actual game it's not very enjoyable. 4/10, would not recommend unless you're specifically interested in Final Fantasy or old RPGs in general.

Probably the worst tie-in anime fighter I've ever played. The combat is jank, the health bars are way too long, and it looks like total ass, which is all par for the course. What really sucks is that it doesn't seem capture anything about the characters that would make them fun in a fighter.

I only played exactly one match of Rukia vs. Ulquiorra but each character seemed to have practically no moves, and the ones they did have were underwhelming and somewhat random. Rukia doesn't even get to be a Shinigami at all until she uses her super, and Ulquiorra's moveset had nothing to do with his canonical abilites. He doesn't use a sword, he doesn't fire Ceros, he doesn't use Resurreccion, he doesn't even seem particularly fast. Instead he teleports and creates black holes, something he never does in canon.

I looked through a move list of all the characters and while it seems like Ulquiorra got a worse deal than most others (probably due to his abilities not being shown much before the game came out), it's still absolutely tragic that the characters have such a limited move pool and so much of it is eaten up by generic melee attacks. And while Ulquiorra might be one of the worst characters compared to his representation in the manga/anime, he's far from the only character in this game that had shown barely any of their actual abilities by the time this game was made. Rather than trying to include a bunch of characters from an at-the-time brand-new arc, they really should have waited until they had any idea what these new characters actually did.

Compared to the contemporary Naruto, One Piece, and DBZ fighting games this is a real disappointment and I can see why this series of games never continued.

Neat little short game. As Temmie herself says in the bonus room all you really do is walk around talking to people and looking at pictures, but hey, sometimes that's all you need. Temmie's art and character designs are killer as always and it's hard to complain about a soundtrack by Camellia and Toby Fox.

As another reviewer mentioned I did have to rely pretty heavily on the hint bird to figure out what the heck I needed to do after doing an initial pass around the game world, but once I realized that you can fast travel directly between the three main areas (Home, Village, Castle Town) it became pretty quick and easy to go back and forth checking things off. There are a few things that maybe didn't need to be included as "important" objectives that the bird mentions though, like looking at the view off the mountain.

Overall it's nothing incredible but it's a pretty good way to kill a couple of hours.

A funny idea that wayyy overstays its welcome.

I went into this fully expecting it to be a 30-minute game consisting of running around recruiting everyone, and then a single fight with the Dark Lord. I was very wrong. This is a full-blown RPG with dozens of fights and an extremely over-complicated combat system. This game has dozens of elemental types, dozens of status effects, and unique combo moves between dozens of pairs of characters. A lot of effort is made to make different fights unique with restricting your party size, or giving debuffs to certain characters, etc., but overall the combat just feels so bloated and it quickly becomes a slog to get through. Scrolling through literally 99 characters to find the one guy who can grant Manasteal gets old really fast.

Beyond that, for a "comedy RPG" it's not very funny at all. Most of the dialogue is entirely serious, and when they do start cracking jokes they just aren't very funny. The main gimmick is funny in concept but that's pretty much the extent of the comedy. And while some of the characters look pretty decent, it seems very apparent that most of them were created randomly through something akin to Picrew.

I got to encounter 40 or so before giving up. I have no idea how close I was to the end. There's an option to skip battles but it felt pointless to just skip through the whole game without playing any of it. I wouldn't recommend playing this. The music is pretty decent though.

An extremely unpolished title with some cool ideas.

The most common complaints about FFXIII that I've seen are that it's too linear and the combat sucks ("auto battle bad"). I didn't think either of these problems were all that bad. The game is extremely linear except for a brief moment in the middle, but this isn't inherently an issue. FFX is also extremely linear and it's fine. If it weren't for the issues I'll get to later then I don't think most people would've minded as much.

The combat is pretty good too, once you actually unlock all of its functionality (which takes way longer than necessary). It's essentially an ATB system like the older games, but the ATB bar fills SO fast that it's impractical to manually choose specific inputs all the time. Instead of choosing inputs your focus is on choosing paradigms, and in harder fights you will likely need to paradigm shift constantly to fight at peak efficiency. Instead of telling someone to cast Cure, you switch to a paradigm that has a Medic. The result is similar but it allows for more fast-paced battles.

My main issues are with the writing. At the start of the game Snow and Sazh are pretty boring characters, and Hope and Vanille are downright obnoxious. The worst two get a little better as the story goes, but overall I didn't feel like any of the characters really developed all that much. Their relationships with each other are also pretty static - there's some pairings with relationships that are established early, but they don't really develop past this and as a result they never really start feeling like a proper "squad" of people who all have each other's backs. Sazh is the worst offender of this, having virtually no connection to anyone else except for Vanille (and even that gets mostly dropped in the late game), but there are a few other pairings that have barely any direct interactions with each other.

Besides the character writing, the plot was also extremely messy and confusingly told. After the first act of constantly running away, the plot starts to seriously meander, and there were several moments where I felt unclear what exactly the party's short-term objectives were or why we were doing what we were doing. Meanwhile the main villain seems to always say that whatever the party happens to be doing at the moment is exactly what he planned for them to do which starts to feel pretty silly, and in the final moments of the game the day is saved by a completely unexplained deus ex machina.

Much of the plot hinges on saving the floating city of Cocoon, and much of the characters' motivations are wrapped up in their emotional connection to this goal. The problem with this is that I don't feel like I as a player was given much reason to give a shit about Cocoon. You're barely given any screen time with the main characters' loved ones, and you never have any interactions with the general populace outside of them running terrified or trying to kill you. Because of the in-media-res start of the story you never get much of a chance to experience what "normal" life in Cocoon is like, so you can't really miss it.

Despite my earlier saying that the linearity is not inherently an issue, it's true that the game is essentially a series of monster-filled hallways. There is a "stealth" system that allows you to avoid or ambush enemies in theory, but in practice something like 80-90% of the enemies in required areas are directly in the middle of the path and stare straight at you as you approach. There's also no way to run from battles. This means that no matter what you are going to fight a LOT of battles, and for the number of them they individually tend to take a long time especially in the late game. Fighting random encounters all the time in a game like FFX is fine because most of them can be resolved in seconds, and the ones that can't can be fled from. In FFXIII plenty of trash mob encounters take several minutes to complete with no option of running or avoiding them. The length of battles combined with the complete lack of proper "towns" or any similar resting spot makes the whole game kind of blur together into an indistinguishable mess of monster-filled hallways.

There is a single brief moment in the mid-game where it opens up dramatically, with side-quests and fast travel unlocks and everything. This would be a welcome change in theory, but in practice the open map and its many respawning enemies is an absolute chore to traverse, not helped by the paltry number of fast travel points, the clunkiness of using them, and the frankly nauseating camera which is often difficult to corral.

Anyway, it's overall pretty mediocre as far as JRPGs go. Decent combat mechanics are tainted somewhat by an over-abundance of overly-tanky trash mobs, and a cool world is somewhat wasted on a trite and hard-to-follow story.