The first thing that jumped out at me when I first played this was its extremely distinctive setting, with its aesthetics and architecture clearly inspired by the Old West. The next thing that jumped out at me was how fantastic the music was. It nailed both the sweeping epic orchestral tracks as well the nostalgic introspective moments excellently. With such a cool setting I was all ready to love the game, but none of its other aspects engaged me very much.
The story had its moments, but was let down by a very weak script and inconsistent translation. Some of the dialogue was actually snappy and very competently translated, and some was barely coherent, and unfortunately most of the latter was reserved for the major storyline moments. It was hard for me to get into the game when many of the big events and twists were inadequately explained, or when the characters barely reacted to them.
A weak script can still be saved with good engaging gameplay, but it wasn't very satisfying here. The exploration felt rather hollow; due to the very zoomed-in camera, exploring towns were more of a chore than they had to be, and much of the treasure hunting in towns amounted to little more than "here's 100 identical barrels, 5 of them have treasures, go nuts". The dungeons didn't fare that well either, with many of them being monotonous and linear (and one in particular being obnoxiously mazelike). It's a shame because this could have been one of it's really strong suits had it more fully explored some of the mechanics it introduced at the beginning of the game: namely, character switching and tools. Each character has their own strengths and weaknesses, and the tools could have added a Lufia 2-like puzzle element to the dungeons. One segment near the end, where your characters are split up and need to navigate a dungeon separately and clear obstacles for each other, was really great, but on the whole these mechanics felt underexplored.
Finally, combat was generally too easy, with almost every enemy and even most bosses easily dispatched by regular attacks and healing. There was one brutal boss fight about halfway through the game where you fought two hard-hitting opponents at once and didn't have access to party healing; I thought it would be a wake-up call boss, but immediately after that the difficulty level went back down again, which is probably more a symptom of poor balancing rather than an intentional difficulty spike.
I need to reiterate that this was a game that I really wanted to like given its unique setting and fantastic music, and if any of the above things were tweaked just a little bit it would probably have improved my experience immensely. There was enough promise in this game that I am looking forward to playing its sequels at some point!
The story had its moments, but was let down by a very weak script and inconsistent translation. Some of the dialogue was actually snappy and very competently translated, and some was barely coherent, and unfortunately most of the latter was reserved for the major storyline moments. It was hard for me to get into the game when many of the big events and twists were inadequately explained, or when the characters barely reacted to them.
A weak script can still be saved with good engaging gameplay, but it wasn't very satisfying here. The exploration felt rather hollow; due to the very zoomed-in camera, exploring towns were more of a chore than they had to be, and much of the treasure hunting in towns amounted to little more than "here's 100 identical barrels, 5 of them have treasures, go nuts". The dungeons didn't fare that well either, with many of them being monotonous and linear (and one in particular being obnoxiously mazelike). It's a shame because this could have been one of it's really strong suits had it more fully explored some of the mechanics it introduced at the beginning of the game: namely, character switching and tools. Each character has their own strengths and weaknesses, and the tools could have added a Lufia 2-like puzzle element to the dungeons. One segment near the end, where your characters are split up and need to navigate a dungeon separately and clear obstacles for each other, was really great, but on the whole these mechanics felt underexplored.
Finally, combat was generally too easy, with almost every enemy and even most bosses easily dispatched by regular attacks and healing. There was one brutal boss fight about halfway through the game where you fought two hard-hitting opponents at once and didn't have access to party healing; I thought it would be a wake-up call boss, but immediately after that the difficulty level went back down again, which is probably more a symptom of poor balancing rather than an intentional difficulty spike.
I need to reiterate that this was a game that I really wanted to like given its unique setting and fantastic music, and if any of the above things were tweaked just a little bit it would probably have improved my experience immensely. There was enough promise in this game that I am looking forward to playing its sequels at some point!
newtontlod
1 month ago