This game has had so much potential. The combat rules. It's so unique, it looks great, it feels great, it just rules. They thank the Street Fighter 3 artists and animators in the credits and you can see and feel the influence. They did a good job of making any team composition viable—maybe too good of a job? Should I be bummed they're isn't a definitive best comp (unless you're speedrunning)? You have a LOT of options for combat and everyone levels up at roughly the same pace, which makes leveling up pointless but opens you up to experiment the whole time if you want.

The characters really carry the whole experience. Though some of them are more endearing or interesting than others, all of them look cool and have beautifully animated movesets full of clever details and personality. The characterization and VO is really top-notch, with a bunch of unknown-to-me actors in the lead roles, and Star Trek: The Next Generation's own Lieutenant Worf, Michael Dorn, as Ravannavar, the boss of the first 1/3 or so of the game.

The platforming aspires to Metroidvania but we don't quite make it there. The movement never really feels fluid and the maps are difficult to navigate. Everything looks the same, getting from one end of a map to the other takes forever and the minimap is not helpful. They tried to do linear paths through big sandboxes but they should have picked one or the other. The settings are cool and exciting but moving through them was my least favorite part of the game.

One of the things that makes this game so compelling is that you can see the ambition, you can see the lack of resources, you can see that they had a vision and some of it really works! And some of it doesn't. Like why go to the trouble of making an innovative, gorgeously animated combat system and then make combat so infrequent after the first half of the game? Why have exp at all if it doesn't really do anything? They tried to cram so much stuff in and while i love that ambition—doubly so because some of it is realized—it just needed more time in the oven. It's a shame what happened with the studio because a sequel could have been something very special.

This was my second playthrough and I finally put down Qadira and Tungar to try Nuna and Ginseng & Honey. I'm not sure you really need a healer or support characters at all to be successful in this game but they're just adorable so we keep them around. I also enjoyed playing with Thorani a bit, she has fun mechanics. Maybe next time I'll finally figure out Zebei, Baozhai or Kushi. Razmi still rules.

bounced right off the original back in 02 but this was a pretty fun time. i played this with a walkthrough as i wanted to experience the vibe without having to worry about keeping track of routing and completion. maybe that makes me soft but i think it helped this games strengths shine through. they really nailed the whole isolated, space anthropologist-with-an-arm-cannon feel of metroid, and the unforgiving and sometimes janky difficulty was just present enough to be nostalgic instead of frustrating.