Walking around in an amiga demo or one of those bizarre bowling animations, like a ghost in the machine. Surreal, isolating, and so ethereal. The bulk of what I love about this game lies in its limitations: the grain on the screen as quicktime desperately tries to load another MOV file; the distortion at the tail of every sound file on the one lone audio channel; the excessive fogging in the pre-rendered scenes which no doubt made the developers macintosh computers explode: no other game really feels like this.

[This is an old review. Decided to delete the original log because it stuck out like a sore thumb on my profile due to it being the only log with a date on it lol]

God, if there was ever a game I desperately wanted to finish, it was this one. To make it short (doubt): I LOVE the idea of the junctioning system, I really do... but I think I might be a brainlet. I thought I was playing the game right: getting the GF abilities to turn my items into spells and stocking up on curagas to make my characters into walking tanks. Draw attack spells and refine them into stronger spells, and do this until every enemy shits and cries the moment you appear on the battle screen. Really, everything was mostly fine for the first ten hours - the story was grabbing my attention, and the characters were decent enough to keep me playing. I was hooked!

Then disc 2 happened.

This is where the junctioning system went from a bizarre albeit pretty fun exploitable game mechanic into inventory management hell. Assigning GFs to my party went from ''ooh this would be a cool combo!'' into ''wait who the hell has Cerberus? Oh, I guess I have to exchange their spells then, UGH''. God forbid the game decides to split your party. I also realized that I had totally missed out on the card game so I never really got to use card mod which apparently breaks the game even further, so RIP, shame I didn't know that beforehand. This game has a thing for missable stuff for some reason, like some of the GFs are drawn from certain boss fights so make sure not to miss those. May continue this one day when I'm in the mood but god, what a rough game. Still, very commendable with how it tries to differ from its vastly more popular predecessor. This has now been my ''I suck at this game and will now complain about it'' review.

This game is the best. Thief Gold is also the best but dammit picking a favorite is hard. I love the paranormal pagan vibes of the first game but this one goes full art deco metropolis mode and it's a wonder to behold. Gold heavily relied on the paranormal missions to help with the pacing whereas Metal Age just mixes up the objectives more. It even ditches the loot quota for most of the missions which is greatly appreciated. You get a hell of a lot more verbs to work with in this game and it never gets dull. Anyways I'm gonna go and snort my Thief Gold case now byebyE