Maybe the most forgotten bottom of the barrel Xbox original IP you could ever come across in the bargain bin. Because Playstation was dominating the JRPG market and Microsoft was disappointed by the lack of output provided by japanese developers they sought to fix this by checks notes …getting the developers who would later do two of the Western Silent Hill games (?) to make an RPG that would capitalize on Eastern/JRPG trends. The concept alone is an uneasy smorgasbord of dated 90s anime aesthetics, JRPGs but not the obvious one you’d think a westerner would lift from like Final Fantasy but Secret of Mana and Star Ocean, the cultural weirdness of early 2000s, and a distinct British sensibility that the only game I can compare with at the top of my head was Beyond Good and Evil. This also jumped from three different consoles during its earliest development until it found exclusivity at the original Xbox where Microsoft hoped this would fill in the JRPG gap in their library while somehow misnaming the game from “Suteki” as intended by the devs to “Sudeki” until it was too late to change it for marketing. This all painted a certain picture of just how well this did when it came out and how Microsoft treated what was meant to be their big answer to the Playstation 2 having every JRPG that would entice people to buy the console to play them.

Tried giving this my all in beating it only to give up around the last stretch because my engagement was completely fizzled out. The plot is stretched so paper thin and makes the abundance of weird background lore that the opening tries to convey to the player feel woefully underdeveloped and all over the place. The characters are awkwardly conceived with non-existent chemistry while spouting dialogue which ranges to being just okay I guess but the quality of the voice acting is very poor and sounds too compressed for some reason. It was probably good I just stopped where I left because looking up the ending is barely a real ending and just ends without trying to satisfyingly wrap up whatever the plot was at the end. The environments can look pretty nice, some of the music has weird instrumentation to it, but they become too linear and samey as you walk through long chains of hallways with the occasional wide open space where you fight enemies. The combat is real-time to stand out from how JRPGs are turn-based and it's an interesting blend of melee combat and what’s just a basic FPS with magic but it's too clunky and repetitive to feel satisfying. There’s just not enough variety or depth here, as two of the melee characters play almost identical with maybe different special attacks which barely do good damage to enemies, and the ranged magic characters feel too simplistic for a gameplay loop as fixed as this. The leveling system is also really underdeveloped as you never really need to invest a point into a certain stat after a few times and can basically min max the hell out of all four of the party. Apparently the developers weren’t satisfied with how this game turned out from its development because one of them uploaded an unfinished ending which was supposed to be in the final game and there were apparently large chunks of content that got sent to the cutting room floor. It actually explains why the last third of the game was just asset-flipping a location you already explored in the game but with a darker color palette and lighting.

Weirdly speaking I’m actually not opposed to seeing this get a full-blown remake which re-imagines the concept to feel less like someone desperately trying to cater to JRPGs in strange and flaccid ways with better combat. But I’m convinced I’m like one of the few people who actually played this game and acknowledged its weird existence in the Xbox’s original library because I don’t even think Microsoft remembers this game either so this will never happen.