Second RPGotQQ played for 2022. This one pretty easily makes its way into my top RPGs of all time. For spending roughly 50 hours on it, the pacing in this game is excellent. You really get the feeling of a "zero to hero" adventurer story. The characters are generally pretty well written and the battle system is just superb. I only have two issues with the game, and they're relatively small. The English voice acting can be pretty flat and uninspiring, and the lack of maps combined with environments that look pretty similar can lead to feeling lost or turned around more than you'd probably want.

It's been a while since I played a game for this long, and I absolutely loved this one.

this might be the perfect introduction to kawazu and his wild approach to the often more simplified rpg style of other jrpgs we all know. beside the romancing saga and saga frontier series it's more easily and immediately grasped, almost bite-sized. choose a starting character, and then enlist 3 more: human, esper, or monster. humans need to chug potions purchased from merchants to increase stats; espers have stat growth something like that of final fantasy 2 and randomly learn, replace, and relearn spells as they battle; monsters eat the flesh of other monsters to evolve and change form. weapons (swords, axes, etc) for the humans and espers have 'charges' like in a vancian magic system, which is a bit odd, but it works. your first quest soon becomes clear: collect 3 items needed from different castles to proceed. this is quickly achieved, a gateway into other worlds is opened, and thus your legend unfolds before you.

i won't spoil the rest. final fantasy may be known for its adventurous nature, but this trend started with ff2 and then kawazu began work on a long series of games one might describe as final fantasy's weirder sister series. many of the saga games feel a bit soberer than this one—saga 1 is a wild journey and it is all kinds of fun. that this began life on the game boy in 1989... it's almost like a poem, simple and elegant, offering a little dream-window into a surprisingly expansive world of weird and wonderful things. and far more so than something like the first dragon quest, another game i feel achieves much through charming minimalism: this game literally goes places.

ascend the tower!