a very charming example of an rpg that is primarily about resource management across a long journey or dungeon crawl. i really enjoyed the first third of this game, up through the marsh cave, because i had to balance my resources carefully, making decisions such as "is this battle worth fighting?" "should i use this item now?" "should i use this spell now?" "how far can i get before i need to go back to town?"

however, the default level curve on this version shot me way too high after that, and even after turning it down to 0.5x EXP i didn't settle back into "interesting gameplay" until facing tiamat. but that did leave me at the perfect level for the final dungeon and boss to be genuinely challenging. if i played this again i would definitely leave 0.5x EXP on the whole time.

i wish there was more overworld traversal and less dungeon, because i really liked the rhythm of making camp during an overland journey, but found the dungeon layouts lackluster. it's clear that the intended design is to wander a lot and hit a lot of dead ends but eventually stumble into very valuable treasure chests, but in this version there is a map so you never get lost, and there's even a checklist for chests so you never miss one. this mildly satisfies a completionist impulse, and certainly makes it easier to be a completionist, but at the cost of making so much of the dungeon redundant, filled with easy-to-find chests that gave me more valuable items than i knew what to do with.

great graphics and sound, cool setting made of so many disparate genres, and vancian magic that makes spells feel valuable. i love that npc dialogue is very to the point, which makes it easy to remember their directions and hints for sidequests. makes me interested in playing the nes version for a less breezy experience