The game is fine, but a excessively long and slow. That's about the theme of this review.
Basic gameplay is mostly classic jrpg: explore dungeons, fight monsters and bosses, save the world from ancient evil. There are a few twists that change it up though: in dungeons, monsters appear as you walk around and fights only happen when you walk into them.
Fights are standard turn based jrpg with some scope for getting more turns if you're faster. There is a job system for customising your characters and a pokemon - lite monster capturing system. The problem with these is that neither is really fleshed out enough to be really interesting. The job system is a bit shallow, just switch jobs to change your stats and learn new abilities that can then be used any time. The different job's abilities are not well balanced either. I mostly ignored the monster capturing and did fine. The monster designs are not inspired enough to really make it appealing. These two systems are also totally orthogonal. Allowing the two to mix somehow (teach your monsters jobs? Learn abilities from captured monsters?) might have added some much needed originality.
The interface is clunky and takes some getting used to. It ignores some conventions, for example select opens the menu and start just brings up the option to quick save. You need to press select to bring up item/skill descriptions rather than having them open all the time. Some of the item descriptions are laughably terse and unhelpful too. "Charred Newt - A grilled newt."
The game seems to use a steep levelling curve so that you level up quickly for a short period when entering a new area and then get stuck for a long time. This makes grinding for exp relatively ineffective and ensures you're mostly at the expected level for any area/boss fight. However, it robs a lot of sense of progression. This also applies (I think*) to the job system which has some odd effects. You can stick with one job for the whole first half of the game and not master it, but if you change jobs later in the game you will almost instantly get the first few levels/abilities and master it relatively quickly.
A ton of stuff in this game is just a little bit janky and annoying. There are too many too list, but here's one example: when a monster learns more skills than it can know, you get prompted after *every fight* to swap it out. There are just so many little annoyances that add up over the game.
The biggest criticism I have is that the dungeons are too long. Each ends up feeling like a slog before it's over and they are labyrinthine and lack any landmarks which makes navigation tricky. Each one seems to have some kind of unique element, although some of these are not great (invisible paths through corn you just have to trial and error through anyone?). The game forces you to renavigate some of these multiple times which really feels like unnecessary padding.
The game as a whole is slow paced, in dungeon design, combat speed, and in the pacing of the story particularly near the start. All this serves to pad the game length without adding actual enjoyment. Not cripplingly bad but still annoying. Very few parts of the game are really hard, not many bosses are really hard to beat in a stand up fight, but the game relies on the attrition of long dungeons and sudden death attacks to create artificial difficulty. The end of the game is massive slog consisting of repeating dungeons from earlier, including one which repeats 3 times(!).
None of this made me hate the game, but I also didn't really have a great time at any point of the game.
No credits shot, as the game didn't seem to have a credit roll at the end. It just ended with a "Fin", which I didn't capture as I was waiting for the credits.
Final Rating: 3/5
Next up is Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004.
* The job system is very opaque and gives you very little information about how you're progressing.
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