Battle Chasers is a game I would probably like at a different point in time. It has a lot of systems that reward exploring every place, fighting a lot of enemies and even replaying dungeons, but the problem is being willing to spend the time.

One of the systems I love is the bestiary, aside from recording the monsters you defeat, it grants bonuses for defeating many of them. The systems I don't like generally revolve around items, it tries to be Diablo without going all the way and ends up being unrewarding and sometimes even pointless.

The art is beautiful, the character designs are cool, and the world map in particular is quite nice to look at and navigate, if anything the art makes me want to play the game more than the actual gameplay.

I wish the game moved more quickly, benched party members don't get XP, item progression feels bad, and after playing for 18 hours I feel like I got what I came for, I don't need to see the finish line.

Looks phenomenal, first of all. Big, colorful, very well-animated sprites for the (seven!) playable characters and many of the enemies and bosses. Lots of personality in both them and the highly detailed backgrounds. Thankfully the game doesn't suffer too too much for the big, good graphics like many other platformers that have them do. Controlling each X-Man (and they do each play quite differently, which is cool) takes a bit of getting used to because of some slightly unusual physics, a touch of occasional jank, etc., but it's fine with some practice, and the levels are designed smartly enough to not let the fidelity cause real issues.

Levels are pretty varied and kind of have a "right" way to play them which boils down to which character to use. This is cool in theory because it makes you learn each character's moveset and quirks and makes them all feel special and truly like their comic counterparts, but can lead to some frustration while you burn lives experimenting with who's going to work best, and of course, it means that you can't just play as your favorite character for the whole game. Well, you COULD, but some levels would be really hard, so.

The weak points are the somewhat unexciting story/villains and some pretty bad-Genesis-y sound and music, which is always a disappointment. But quite good, overall. Maybe the best X-Men game up through, I don't know, X-MEN LEGENDS? I'm probably forgetting some.

(Also, has there ever been another game that has a legit pre-credits sequence? Seriously, you press the power button and you're instantly just standing there in level 1 as a random character with zero fanfare. And then when you beat it, you finally see the SEGA logo and things start proper. That's frickin cool!)