I was excited for a card based tower defense roguelike with this aesthetic. Everything points to this being cool, and there's enough personality in the game to avoid total derision. The gameplay is just so undercooked. The initial amount of towers you have is minuscule and the variants aren't plentiful enough and take way too long to unlock. There isn't the ability to manually place the towers, so the most excitement there is between rounds starts and ends with active abilities that, by their design, couldn't make up for the lack of mid-round strategy if they tried, and they really didn't.

My least favorite Treasure game, including all of the licensed ones. I prefer games that either take 300 hours to achieve unsteady competence at, or Wattam. Alien Soldier sits smack in that awful middle point, where you can probably see the ending in about 20 hours of practice, but it's going to be grueling getting to that point. The precision it asks for is way too demanding for how clunky and at times unpolished it comes off as, at least in terms of level design.

I've never met an Alien Soldier fan but you gotta imagine they don't wash their asshole.

Evergrace is everything I want out of the medium of video games.

Is this game "good" in a traditional sense? Obviously not. The game's tumultuous development from PS1 to PS2 resulted in the game's scope being both cut back, while awkwardly lurching onto new hardware. This game feels like a strange in-between of a 5th and 6th generation more than any Dreamcast release. The plot is borderline incomprehensible, with key elements of the plot being inaccessible to western players due to a translation error with the bestiary. There are sections of the game that drag on for entirely way too long. There's an eclectic collection of stats that are incrementally increased through random drops from specific enemies, and even then, you won't notice a ton of difference. Combat is slow and lurching. Instant death from the environment is a constant. This game isn't polished in the least bit.

You'll never play anything like it though. Not even the sequel. I got this game at launch, and it's stuck with me throughout my adolescence as this alien, haunting action RPG.

Noriko Meguro's character designs and art direction are in full display here. I love how each of the game's disparate cast are instantly recognizable, even translated in game as clunky as they were. The world design is phenomenal. The skies have this pale, sick green color to it. The "trees" are bare spikes that have more in common with nuclear waste disposal barriers than foliage. There aren't any stock enemy designs in the game, the closest thing to "recognizable" is a boss halfway through one of the routes that looks like a demon. It feels like all the best parts of Morrowind's art direction, without ever feeling the comfort of a more mundane space. The entire game feels like you're in this hostile, foreign land and any respite you manage to get is something you carved out.

Kota Hoshino's soundtrack supersedes the game's own popularity at this point. The in game tracks differ from the original compositions, but not in a way that detracts from the overall experience (if anything, having a more subdued version of Buying Goods at Palmyra is a good thing). Nothing else, outside of Forever Kingdom, sounds close to this game. The highlight track for me would be Omen, the track that plays during the final cutscene/credits track. There's an assumption that this game has a very amateurish, ill fitting soundtrack (partially due to the fact that, as of the time of creating the OST, Hoshino didn't know how to read sheet music). I think the soundtrack fits the game's atmosphere perfectly, and I have a ton of respect for Hoshino for pulling off what he did.

The voice acting, at least in the english version, is terrible. It's never boring, and it instantly careens into "so bad it's good" territory. Don't play with an undub, it's part of the fun.

The large collection of equipment (that you can and HAVE to visually customize!) is admirable. Some players might have reservations with the fact that none of it is going to look like you're walking around in a traditional western suit of armor, I find that to be a selling point. Each piece of equipment also comes with abilities that have either use in combat, or exploration utility that you can only come across through experimentation. While a lot of my runs do devolve into "hit everything with the piko-piko hammer that's inexplicably the second best weapon in the game" (no prizes for guessing the first, check the dev), you are rewarded for exploiting elemental weaknesses and dressing for success.

The story requires external reading to fully understand, due to the game being the car crash that it is. That being said, fully understanding what this game's story isn't impossible and was rewarding to piece together, and unique enough to where I don't want to talk much more about it here. The main "antagonist" never shows up in the game at all and is mentioned only a few times.

All of this adds up to a game that's resonated with me since I picked up a copy back in 2001. A lot of this review just devolved into me saying "damn this game is weird" twenty different times, but I've played so many games and very few of them have such a distinct personality like Evergrace does. It's a challenging work of art to stumble through, one that requires patience. Having 100 percented the game, despite its glaring issues, it's a challenge that's rewarded me enough to call this a game I would put in my top ten. You want something different? This game will give you something different.

So, respect to Nintendo for trying to mix up the formula from the previous games. I get why this game is as popular and beloved as it is. That being said, I think this game is a chore to sit through and it's success bodes very poorly for the series going forward.

I don't like the open world focus. There's a ton of uninteresting time spent in the game going from one oversized zone to the other, with the assumption that collecting crafting materials and fighting random enemies makes up for the lack of focused environments outside of specific zones.

The crafting system in general is a total dud. It's something the player has to engage in, as the reduced importance on NPCs and focused environments means that you'll have to scrounge for health as you get beat up on having to haul Link's stamina-restricted (another major L) ass 10 miles between each point of interest.

The weapon durability system compounds this, and might be the biggest mark against the game. Like. I get it, BOTW has traded the charm and focus of even B-Tier Zelda games like Phantom Hourglass for resource management. There are meaningful choices that have to be made by the player. I just don't think that exchange is equal in any way, nor do I enjoy having to constantly use mickey mouse twigs to deal with a majority of the encounters.

The pacing is dreadfully slow, thematically the game feels like a dud compared to the previous games, replacing Link's arsenal of hookshots and puzzle solving tools with the rune system takes away the very tactile feeling of solving puzzles in the previous game, the music is a major step back in every regard, the switch version has performance issues and I could go on.

The 2010s were just terrible for gaming, dude.

This romhack has some features and overall region direction that would put it in the upper tier of Pokemon romhacks ever if it wasn't the most reddit fucking thing on the planet. Like, even during early stages of this romhack's development, the humor felt decrepit. It isn't even a thing I can suggest you play through and just ignore the unfunny parts, because so much of this game's design is baked into "isn't rickrolling someone funny?"

People have complained that it's offensive and in bad taste, and they're right to do so. I also like Deadly Premonition 2, and that game makes JK Rowling look like Leslie Feinberg. If it's funny, I'll bite. None of the jokes in this humorous romhack land. There isn't a "Oh, if they just went back to the drawing board, this might not have been a total shitshow", because that would imply a 2016 /vp/ could come up with a better bit than "what if we replaced the gym leader's battle theme with sandstorm". So much collective effort and time went into a project that probably never stood a chance.

For a GBA translation of the series, I thought they didn't do half bad. The individual fights don't last very long and dealing with a wave of moons while you're taking a fat shit chronologically sits well with me. There's a decent sized roster, with different weapons to boot. The music is one of the underrated OSTs of the GBA, the commander battle track being a standout.

It's repetitive and very difficult to go back to considering most phones in our current day can run the PS2 games in the series that were avaliable when this released. I don't know what the context would be where someone would be playing this in a modern setting, but if you ever do, go into it with a bit of patience and you'll probably have a decent time clearing at least one of the game's campaigns.

Unlike other fantastic ports of puzzle games, this is different than the Saturn game in pretty big (and negative) ways. The reduction of the amount of rows you get, in addition to changes to the way pieces are cleared make this feel like an incomplete minigame compared to the original. It also doesn't help they used the same (awful) 3D graphics, but just digitized them with all the love of the Gameboy Mortal Kombat ports. This could have been Baku Baku's premier platform, and instead we lost a treasure of puzzle gaming to the ages.

Or at least, we could have had a decent thing to play on the Game Gear between Collumns