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chuckroI think it's a very good sign when I start playing a game, am pleasantly surprised by how easy and intuitive it is, and squee in a fanboyish way as the Indiana Jones-expy rescues a mysterious young woman from an evil cult and leads her to his airship, but is knocked into the bay when the cultists catch up with them. It’s a strong opening.
Nostalgia is everything it claims to be. Plays like a DS remake of a SNES-era rpg (the graphics engine is very clearly a clone of the FF3/FF4 DS remakes), along with the appropriate difficulty curve and preponderance of sidequests. Strategy actually matters to some degree in battles, because elemental weaknesses make a big difference and you're given the upcoming battle order (and a couple of abilities that can affect it). You only have one party, essentially Paladin, Thief, Black Mage, White Mage; but you have some control over which skills you learn at which points and can focus on building up the ones you use. Revisiting dungeons gets slightly tedious, but that's mostly for sidequests and the pace is been pretty good.
The plot is entirely predictable but amusing nonetheless. It carefully hits every trope it can—mysterious girl with amnesia, orphan with a “plot trinket”, missing family members, a seven-piece macguffin, sudden but inevitable betrayals, and boss fights against God. But it does do its best to be both a little different (the story is set in a steampunk-fantasy alt-Earth instead of a high fantasy world) and to keep the action as awesome as possible. You fight an evil cult intent on destroying the world, including infiltrating and destroying their secret bases. You fly your airship to Mt. Ararat to find the Lost Ark. You find El Dorado, unlock the secret of Easter Island, hunt down the lost treasure of Atlantis, and accidentally releasing a goddess of death from the Acropolis. And at the end, there’s a post-game section with two bonus dungeons and a number of bonus bosses, including one that took me three times longer to kill than both forms of the final boss combined.
Bottom line, if you liked SNES-era rpgs, and you like the remakes where they add bonus content and iron the kinks out, then this game is for you. It manages to be awesome despite not actually having been a game from your youth, so it can honestly be fun without relying on, well, nostalgia.
Nostalgia is everything it claims to be. Plays like a DS remake of a SNES-era rpg (the graphics engine is very clearly a clone of the FF3/FF4 DS remakes), along with the appropriate difficulty curve and preponderance of sidequests. Strategy actually matters to some degree in battles, because elemental weaknesses make a big difference and you're given the upcoming battle order (and a couple of abilities that can affect it). You only have one party, essentially Paladin, Thief, Black Mage, White Mage; but you have some control over which skills you learn at which points and can focus on building up the ones you use. Revisiting dungeons gets slightly tedious, but that's mostly for sidequests and the pace is been pretty good.
The plot is entirely predictable but amusing nonetheless. It carefully hits every trope it can—mysterious girl with amnesia, orphan with a “plot trinket”, missing family members, a seven-piece macguffin, sudden but inevitable betrayals, and boss fights against God. But it does do its best to be both a little different (the story is set in a steampunk-fantasy alt-Earth instead of a high fantasy world) and to keep the action as awesome as possible. You fight an evil cult intent on destroying the world, including infiltrating and destroying their secret bases. You fly your airship to Mt. Ararat to find the Lost Ark. You find El Dorado, unlock the secret of Easter Island, hunt down the lost treasure of Atlantis, and accidentally releasing a goddess of death from the Acropolis. And at the end, there’s a post-game section with two bonus dungeons and a number of bonus bosses, including one that took me three times longer to kill than both forms of the final boss combined.
Bottom line, if you liked SNES-era rpgs, and you like the remakes where they add bonus content and iron the kinks out, then this game is for you. It manages to be awesome despite not actually having been a game from your youth, so it can honestly be fun without relying on, well, nostalgia.
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Date: 2010-02-22 06:23 pm (UTC)I'm curious about an upcoming game you might enjoy: Infinite Space. It looks fairly complex, but in this case that allows for a heck of a lot of customization and gameplay.