A game that I have waited decades to play. Did it live up to the hype?

Yes.

This masterpiece of a game, which I only dreamed about playing while looking at the pages of the Strategy Guide I bought years ago, is a beautiful and quirky saga brought to us by Shoji Masuda, the same one who also impacted us with "Tengai Makyō II: Manjimaru", which is another solid jRPG.

Linda Cube goes against most of the odds and conventions of its time and presents a more mature, down-to-earth journey of broken characters, alongside AMAZING art and gaming design, with a focus on surviving the perilous wilderness while completing the given task than anything else.

If you like quirky, charming jRPGs from the 90s, you MUST play this one!

Jesus Humanity.

Perhaps the worst thing about this game is the bizarre Intentionally behind the design. It's not just that there's no block button and that you're invincible whenever you crouch or jump (which also has flight, but no air attacks!), it's that the AI abuses it too. Or that you become unable to attack if your "Power" level, which goes down whenever you get hit and has the time it goes up depend on your actual health, which the AI WILL use to casually infinite you if your HP gets low enough, because you can grab enemies who are proned on the ground to end it early and then just grab them to deplete their power again and infinite them if their regen is not high enough. The game has horrible turning lag, which is only worsened by needing to double tap back to turn around (this is apparently a setting in the configuration that is on by default for...for some reason). The AI is subject to this as well and so will do the same thing the player does: Use their invincible jump to cross up the opponent and try to throw out their fastest attack. This also leads to the ideal way to beat the AI being HILARIOUS! Keep jumping in place while the AI attacks and try to catch them in an attack to throw them, which they will often jump themselves but you then jump back and so you and the AI keep jumping at each other for like a minute before one messes up. Oh, also, A and B are attacks, but the C button ain't jump and is in fact near useless! Wanna know how you jump and fly around? You hold up. It's as painful as your fingers as you're imagining.

Why is the timer so weird? It's like the devs have no concept of time. It begins at like 90 seconds, yet lasts about 10 minutes real time. Just like...w h a t? The super stiff controls make the platforming parts hell, although the idea of combining a platformer and a fighter is at least interesting, especially since your health is shared between platforming stage and boss fight. To be honest in the right game this could be fun, but Heavy Nova ain't it. Did I mention you don't start with all the moves? Yeah, you have to grab "Level Up" containers around the platforming stages in order to get all of them, and while the early ones are smack dab in the middle of the stage the last one is hidden. This also means needing to fight the first boss without any but like 4 moves which is about as fun as it sounds. More hilariously, fighters with attacks missing in the story mode (because the 2nd player AI ALSO doesn't have all their moves) are still missing them in the 2-player mode, so the first boss for example only has four attacks in the vs. mode. It's downright comical. This game has some instances of borderline unavoidable damage, enemies just out of sight to blow you up immediately, some absolutely BAFFLING hitboxes that will largely whiff for no good reason (same for the AI in the boss fights and missing!), and overall is just poorly designed.

The music is decent enough but mostly uninspired, although I did like that they went ham on the final boss theme, and uh. Game's preeeeeeetty ugly man, these are NOT the best lookin' robots you could find, palette swap heavy game, some real jank. Also stages don't have defined edges, so they go infinitely left/right, which led to the funniest part of the entire playthrough as I used the dash attack to escape the AI, the AI used the dash attack to follow and since they can be held infinitely we just zoomed across the entire screen like Sonic Adventure 2 for like a minute. I will also confess I didn't beat this game without a Game Genie code to have infinite Power because the AI can infinite you with two attacks if you don't have it and it just was TOO obnoxious to handle.

It's a failure on every level, but at least streaming it out to friends was a fun time. Thanks to Vee's review of the sequel for bringing this game's existence to my mind and making my friend go "it'd be Funni if you played it this sounds so BAD I'm curious".