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chuckroFor centuries, humanity had the Seru to act as tools and companions. But ten years ago, the Mist covered the land and turned the Seru feral, and humans bonded with Seru into mindless zombies. Three youths hiding in humanity’s remaining enclaves are pulled into a plan to free the world from the Mist, just as the villains behind it accelerate to their final stage of conquest.
I last played this game to completion in college; it’s been twenty years and it’s interesting what parts of it hold up and which don’t. The mechanics are clever and the initial draw of the game: Instead of just choosing “Attack”, you input a combination of attacks for each character (left and right arms, high and low kicks) which can also combine into “Arts”, special attack moves that use up your AP gauge but deal more damage. The battles are very long, as is common for the era, though even more so because each character’s attack is multiple blows and combos; and every single spell is a summon. The XP curve is really weird, as enemies gradually ramp from ~100 XP per battle to ~1800 XP per battle over the course of the entire game, but the level curve pretty much guarantees you’ll need to grind to get past bosses. Then suddenly battles in the final dungeon give ~4000 XP, I suppose to let you catch up to a higher level if you need to. I opted to skip that aspect of the game; I cheated up infinite stat-raising items; that made battles go much faster since most ended in a single round and I never stopped to grind. I suspect that’s why I finished in 20 hours instead of 40.
Again like many games of the era, the battle sprites and the man sprites are in completely different art styles—the former are vaguely realistic proportions (which carry over to the handful of times a human appears in a pre-rendered cutscene), the latter are chibi-style and (because they’re made of polygons) tend toward being spiky. The artist (at least for the battle sprites) didn’t seem to get the memo that Noa was supposed to be 11 and Vahn is 14; they’re proportioned like adults. The dialogue writers can’t decide if Noa is a sheltered six-year-old or an autistic teenager, so they mix it up between those. She was raised by a Seru-enhanced wolf in a cave since infancy; so both her emotional maturity and her ability to interact with others is questionable.
That said, though, the plot is clever and creative, and is willing to take dark turns and not end perfectly happily. There’s a deep well of mythology and a bunch of twists and turns and you try to figure out which parts were lies or misconceptions. A few parts of the mythos don’t get explained particularly well: Is Tieg a precursor species, an interdimensional being, a god of time, secretly Rem the god of dreams, or somehow all of these things? Were Seru given to humans intentionally, or was that Rogue’s fault and Tieg just ran with it? What happened to the ten Ra-Seru in the ten Genesis trees? (Meta, Terra, Ozma and Jedo are in the first four trees and taken by the protagonists and Songi. Then there’s Jeremi, Mt. Letona, Sol, and three trees in Buma. The Buma trees had Horn (the light egg) and two that were used in Mist Generators. In theory one more was used in a Mist Generator; and Palma and Mule (earth and water eggs) can be acquired through minigames. In theory that’s all of them?)
Overall: This was a clever and somewhat experimental game, unique for its time. It only holds up middlingly well, but Albatoss did a fantastic LP of the game for Talking Time if you want to experience it.
I last played this game to completion in college; it’s been twenty years and it’s interesting what parts of it hold up and which don’t. The mechanics are clever and the initial draw of the game: Instead of just choosing “Attack”, you input a combination of attacks for each character (left and right arms, high and low kicks) which can also combine into “Arts”, special attack moves that use up your AP gauge but deal more damage. The battles are very long, as is common for the era, though even more so because each character’s attack is multiple blows and combos; and every single spell is a summon. The XP curve is really weird, as enemies gradually ramp from ~100 XP per battle to ~1800 XP per battle over the course of the entire game, but the level curve pretty much guarantees you’ll need to grind to get past bosses. Then suddenly battles in the final dungeon give ~4000 XP, I suppose to let you catch up to a higher level if you need to. I opted to skip that aspect of the game; I cheated up infinite stat-raising items; that made battles go much faster since most ended in a single round and I never stopped to grind. I suspect that’s why I finished in 20 hours instead of 40.
Again like many games of the era, the battle sprites and the man sprites are in completely different art styles—the former are vaguely realistic proportions (which carry over to the handful of times a human appears in a pre-rendered cutscene), the latter are chibi-style and (because they’re made of polygons) tend toward being spiky. The artist (at least for the battle sprites) didn’t seem to get the memo that Noa was supposed to be 11 and Vahn is 14; they’re proportioned like adults. The dialogue writers can’t decide if Noa is a sheltered six-year-old or an autistic teenager, so they mix it up between those. She was raised by a Seru-enhanced wolf in a cave since infancy; so both her emotional maturity and her ability to interact with others is questionable.
That said, though, the plot is clever and creative, and is willing to take dark turns and not end perfectly happily. There’s a deep well of mythology and a bunch of twists and turns and you try to figure out which parts were lies or misconceptions. A few parts of the mythos don’t get explained particularly well: Is Tieg a precursor species, an interdimensional being, a god of time, secretly Rem the god of dreams, or somehow all of these things? Were Seru given to humans intentionally, or was that Rogue’s fault and Tieg just ran with it? What happened to the ten Ra-Seru in the ten Genesis trees? (Meta, Terra, Ozma and Jedo are in the first four trees and taken by the protagonists and Songi. Then there’s Jeremi, Mt. Letona, Sol, and three trees in Buma. The Buma trees had Horn (the light egg) and two that were used in Mist Generators. In theory one more was used in a Mist Generator; and Palma and Mule (earth and water eggs) can be acquired through minigames. In theory that’s all of them?)
Overall: This was a clever and somewhat experimental game, unique for its time. It only holds up middlingly well, but Albatoss did a fantastic LP of the game for Talking Time if you want to experience it.
