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chuckroA secretive bloodline of time-travelers. A wicked man in black who controls monsters. Gods who are mysteriously absent. And as formulaic a game as one could find.
This is another standard KEMCO shovelware jrpg. This one stood out to me because it involves time travel, and I love a good time travel story (even though, as I suspected, this one wasn’t so great).
There’s a brief prologue with your time traveler Rean; followed by jumping to Lake, your real main character, a slacker who lives with him family in a small podunk village and has no real ambitions. Then a mysterious man in black marches an army of monsters in, kills everybody, and burns the town. Lake vows revenge, of course, and that vow makes up the majority of his character. At this point, you travel through a succession of mostly-linear dungeons in a sequence of fetch quests, always running just behind the man in black, collecting party members and killing roadblock bosses. Eventually, you discover the identity of the man in black* and kill a god.
The interface is a little rougher and a little clunkier than Eclipse of Illusion, though it still has a decently smooth battle system and nice mini-map.
This was clearly translated into English (presumably from Japanese) and the translation isn’t the greatest. There are place names that are stupidly literal (“The box of light and sun” is an area where you randomly rest after a battle), many literal item names (“Potion of total magical healing”), and some clunky descriptions and dialogue (“Lake became POISON”). This smacks of a game that was rushed out but could have been far better.
Special skills are done in a materia-style manner, granted by “bits” that attach to slots in your weapons. Any character can use any weapon, but each has a preference for a certain type, and enemies are weak or strong against each weapon type, so you sometimes want to have characters using non-preferred weapons so as to hit weak points. (There don’t seem to be any elemental attacks or weaknesses, though.)
Unfortunately, the innovations end there. Each “dungeon” area features two new monsters in half a dozen different formations, followed by an out-of-nowhere boss. (There’s only one major antagonist, and you spend 90% of the game just hearing about the destruction he’s causing in the background.) For that matter, bosses get hit-all attacks long before you get hit-all healing, and every one of them is just a boatload of HP and an endurance match.
The time-travel aspect is also underused, but I expected that. It reminds me of Final Fantasy Legend 3, in that you can pass back and forth and there are a few minor plot points involving things taking “the slow path,” but in general you just go to each era and do your thing there, without much need to return to earlier ones. (The fact that the eras are millennia apart, so the world has changed significantly and the only recurring characters are other time-travelers, impacts this as well.) There are basically no sidequests, the character customization is limited because bit slots max out at 9-12 (depending on the weapon) and many bits use 2-3 slots, and the battles get tedious.
* It’s Lake from an alternate timeline. The god of time pulled him out of time before he met the rest of the party and learned the power of friendship, and that version of him was consumed with anger and thirst for vengeance. Lake defeats himself in a pocket of space-time—offstage!—and reunites the party to defeat the god of time. I actually liked this twist because it did figure into the setup of the game and was foreshadowed in a bunch of places, so kudos to that.
Overall: Meh. It had a few interesting ideas and, at 9 hours of gameplay, didn’t really wear out its welcome; but the battles got boring and the plot was very one-note. It was mediocre; not good, but not terrible, either.
This is another standard KEMCO shovelware jrpg. This one stood out to me because it involves time travel, and I love a good time travel story (even though, as I suspected, this one wasn’t so great).
There’s a brief prologue with your time traveler Rean; followed by jumping to Lake, your real main character, a slacker who lives with him family in a small podunk village and has no real ambitions. Then a mysterious man in black marches an army of monsters in, kills everybody, and burns the town. Lake vows revenge, of course, and that vow makes up the majority of his character. At this point, you travel through a succession of mostly-linear dungeons in a sequence of fetch quests, always running just behind the man in black, collecting party members and killing roadblock bosses. Eventually, you discover the identity of the man in black* and kill a god.
The interface is a little rougher and a little clunkier than Eclipse of Illusion, though it still has a decently smooth battle system and nice mini-map.
This was clearly translated into English (presumably from Japanese) and the translation isn’t the greatest. There are place names that are stupidly literal (“The box of light and sun” is an area where you randomly rest after a battle), many literal item names (“Potion of total magical healing”), and some clunky descriptions and dialogue (“Lake became POISON”). This smacks of a game that was rushed out but could have been far better.
Special skills are done in a materia-style manner, granted by “bits” that attach to slots in your weapons. Any character can use any weapon, but each has a preference for a certain type, and enemies are weak or strong against each weapon type, so you sometimes want to have characters using non-preferred weapons so as to hit weak points. (There don’t seem to be any elemental attacks or weaknesses, though.)
Unfortunately, the innovations end there. Each “dungeon” area features two new monsters in half a dozen different formations, followed by an out-of-nowhere boss. (There’s only one major antagonist, and you spend 90% of the game just hearing about the destruction he’s causing in the background.) For that matter, bosses get hit-all attacks long before you get hit-all healing, and every one of them is just a boatload of HP and an endurance match.
The time-travel aspect is also underused, but I expected that. It reminds me of Final Fantasy Legend 3, in that you can pass back and forth and there are a few minor plot points involving things taking “the slow path,” but in general you just go to each era and do your thing there, without much need to return to earlier ones. (The fact that the eras are millennia apart, so the world has changed significantly and the only recurring characters are other time-travelers, impacts this as well.) There are basically no sidequests, the character customization is limited because bit slots max out at 9-12 (depending on the weapon) and many bits use 2-3 slots, and the battles get tedious.
* It’s Lake from an alternate timeline. The god of time pulled him out of time before he met the rest of the party and learned the power of friendship, and that version of him was consumed with anger and thirst for vengeance. Lake defeats himself in a pocket of space-time—offstage!—and reunites the party to defeat the god of time. I actually liked this twist because it did figure into the setup of the game and was foreshadowed in a bunch of places, so kudos to that.
Overall: Meh. It had a few interesting ideas and, at 9 hours of gameplay, didn’t really wear out its welcome; but the battles got boring and the plot was very one-note. It was mediocre; not good, but not terrible, either.
