This review contains spoilers
There are enough moments that remind me of previous Quintet games that I'm glad to have finally gotten around to this. That said, this is the first time I finished playing one of their games feeling pretty annoyed? "Annoyed" doesn't really go far enough for ActRaiser 2, since that was straight up heartbreaking, but there's too much to love here that it makes this more disappointing.
I honestly don't even know what happened with the translation. I would say there was an awkwardness to the translations on ActRaiser and Soul Blazer, maybe a flatness to them, but in the case of those games it served the narrative and tone really well, and enhanced emotional impact in some unexpected ways. Maybe it's having a party of more human characters and scripting them to have human drama, but here a lot of it is just stilted and abrupt; one "sacrifice" moment in particular that was definitely meant to land emotionally was instead kind of funny? Don't know how I feel about that.
Also some of the maps and enemies are just tedious to get through. The key standouts: the Mountain Temple and its endless identical looking vines; the obnoxious bush placement in the Angkor Wat garden; the invisible enemies in the Pyramid that may not alert you to their presence which then results in backtracking because you want to clear all the enemies out for the upgrades but also don't want to bring up the map over and over.....
And the central mechanic of swapping between forms as you traverse the dungeons is really cool, at least until you realize that the dungeons are, for the most part, designed to be played in a very specific way, and you're not really going to get the freedom to play as one form over another. If you find a door to swap, odds are the game is going to make you use a form you weren't using already.
It's very rough around the edges, and ambitious in ways that aren't necessarily positive. But when I went through the underground angel village, or talked to an NPC that casually let me know one of my friends was dealing with his parents fighting all the time, I was brought back to the time I first played ActRaiser and just felt the sort of mundane sadness that games of this console generation weren't bothering with. So it's still special, just less special than I'd like, I guess.
I honestly don't even know what happened with the translation. I would say there was an awkwardness to the translations on ActRaiser and Soul Blazer, maybe a flatness to them, but in the case of those games it served the narrative and tone really well, and enhanced emotional impact in some unexpected ways. Maybe it's having a party of more human characters and scripting them to have human drama, but here a lot of it is just stilted and abrupt; one "sacrifice" moment in particular that was definitely meant to land emotionally was instead kind of funny? Don't know how I feel about that.
Also some of the maps and enemies are just tedious to get through. The key standouts: the Mountain Temple and its endless identical looking vines; the obnoxious bush placement in the Angkor Wat garden; the invisible enemies in the Pyramid that may not alert you to their presence which then results in backtracking because you want to clear all the enemies out for the upgrades but also don't want to bring up the map over and over.....
And the central mechanic of swapping between forms as you traverse the dungeons is really cool, at least until you realize that the dungeons are, for the most part, designed to be played in a very specific way, and you're not really going to get the freedom to play as one form over another. If you find a door to swap, odds are the game is going to make you use a form you weren't using already.
It's very rough around the edges, and ambitious in ways that aren't necessarily positive. But when I went through the underground angel village, or talked to an NPC that casually let me know one of my friends was dealing with his parents fighting all the time, I was brought back to the time I first played ActRaiser and just felt the sort of mundane sadness that games of this console generation weren't bothering with. So it's still special, just less special than I'd like, I guess.