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chuckroTwo kingdoms are vying for control of a magical crystal, but it shatters and sunders their world into two halves. The mix-and-matched teams on either side of the rift must unlock the power of the crystal shards and restore their world.
I actually bought this game and played the first two hours of it in 2015, but ended up vaguely disappointed and drifted away. I started it again in earnest this year and made it about halfway through, but the repetitiveness of the chapters and the re-unlocking classes and powers for both teams wore me down.
It's a classic 16-bit Final Fantasy game, which is great, but it's based primarily on FF5, which is my least favorite of the lot. On top of that, it caps the job levels in each chapter so you can't grind your characters into brokenness. And the two teams have very similar job selections until much later in the game, so you basically have to arrange your party configuration and grind every set of job levels twice.
That said, I suspect that the interim years playing a lot of KEMCO games softened me to the grind and some of the repetitive nature of the game. It's definitely got a stronger plot and better translation than most KEMCO games (and without the creepy fetishistic stuff that tends to show up in some of them). The lack of a dungeon minimap and the fact that level-ups don't heal you (and neither do plot events—at one point, you beat a boss and get an airship, but then are pulled into a second boss battle without a chance to heal, despite plenty of things happening in cutscenes between the fights).
A lot of the plot bits in Chapter Two (which is really long—you spend a lot of mini-chapters bouncing between the two parties in the light and dark worlds) are very familiar. You have to beat up Bikke the pirate to get access to his ship. You need to retrieve dragon grass to save the injured flying dragons. You need to free a fairy from a bottle to get someOxyale “bubbly water” so you can explore an underwater temple. That’s fun for a little while, but it gets old when the majority of the game is taken up by this.
Both parties have access to the same seven starter jobs, but then over the course of the story, they each unlock four more advanced jobs, usually by helping out someone who uses that job. Rescue a bard, get access to the bard job, that sort of thing. I think I would have liked it better if both sides had access to completely different job sets, maybe giving the traditional core jobs to the Light party, but then loading the Dark party with things like Viking, Yin/Yang Mage, Alchemist and the like. As it stands, this get particularly repetitive because you’re grinding the same levels and abilities twice.
Overall: I love some Final Fantasy nostalgia, but this was a combination of too much nostalgia (the plot feels like a romhack) and nostalgia for the wrong things (FF5’s job system with the brokenness removed). I enjoyed it for a while, but I have better things to do than force myself to finish it.
I actually bought this game and played the first two hours of it in 2015, but ended up vaguely disappointed and drifted away. I started it again in earnest this year and made it about halfway through, but the repetitiveness of the chapters and the re-unlocking classes and powers for both teams wore me down.
It's a classic 16-bit Final Fantasy game, which is great, but it's based primarily on FF5, which is my least favorite of the lot. On top of that, it caps the job levels in each chapter so you can't grind your characters into brokenness. And the two teams have very similar job selections until much later in the game, so you basically have to arrange your party configuration and grind every set of job levels twice.
That said, I suspect that the interim years playing a lot of KEMCO games softened me to the grind and some of the repetitive nature of the game. It's definitely got a stronger plot and better translation than most KEMCO games (and without the creepy fetishistic stuff that tends to show up in some of them). The lack of a dungeon minimap and the fact that level-ups don't heal you (and neither do plot events—at one point, you beat a boss and get an airship, but then are pulled into a second boss battle without a chance to heal, despite plenty of things happening in cutscenes between the fights).
A lot of the plot bits in Chapter Two (which is really long—you spend a lot of mini-chapters bouncing between the two parties in the light and dark worlds) are very familiar. You have to beat up Bikke the pirate to get access to his ship. You need to retrieve dragon grass to save the injured flying dragons. You need to free a fairy from a bottle to get some
Both parties have access to the same seven starter jobs, but then over the course of the story, they each unlock four more advanced jobs, usually by helping out someone who uses that job. Rescue a bard, get access to the bard job, that sort of thing. I think I would have liked it better if both sides had access to completely different job sets, maybe giving the traditional core jobs to the Light party, but then loading the Dark party with things like Viking, Yin/Yang Mage, Alchemist and the like. As it stands, this get particularly repetitive because you’re grinding the same levels and abilities twice.
Overall: I love some Final Fantasy nostalgia, but this was a combination of too much nostalgia (the plot feels like a romhack) and nostalgia for the wrong things (FF5’s job system with the brokenness removed). I enjoyed it for a while, but I have better things to do than force myself to finish it.
