There’s something to be said for the way you can clear this in 30 minutes- things like the touch-of-death quality that combat has, where one or two mistakes can see your entire health bar depleted in an instant, or the fact that your AI companion undermines so much of the balance- it all actually ends up being pretty easy to forgive when restarting is such a non-commitment. (Also helped by the stupid number of different routes, so each playthrough can be radically different)
Think the brevity also lends the game a more playful attitude; there’s a leveling system, where in a full-length game you’d feel obliged to ration out points and make a well-rounded character, but here, the prospect of making some weird, experimental build is a lot more inviting. It’s fun just to see what happens when you put everything in magic or luck- you’ll lose, what, half-an-hour?
I will say, it’s one of the worst first impressions I’ve had in recent memory: play as frontman Han and you’ll wade through an aggressively mediocre beat ‘em up where you have fairly limited options to deal with enemies, spamming the same few moves over and over. But finish the game once, and you unlock Serena, a knight whose kit feels the best-suited to managing all the chaos onscreen, balancing magic and physical damage, strength and speed- she’s even the most important character in the story! Most of my problems with the game have cooled as I’ve put more time into it, but I think it’s a misstep that the most balanced character is initially locked behind a more lopsided playthrough.
Get past that though, and you’re treated to a game that offers a surprising degree of flexibility to carve out your own playstyle, set in a world that’s filled to the brim with the best kind of melodrama and passion.
(Also, if you do play it, you might want to play the 360 version specifically, apparently the Saturn original suffers from long load times and unskippable cutscenes.)
Think the brevity also lends the game a more playful attitude; there’s a leveling system, where in a full-length game you’d feel obliged to ration out points and make a well-rounded character, but here, the prospect of making some weird, experimental build is a lot more inviting. It’s fun just to see what happens when you put everything in magic or luck- you’ll lose, what, half-an-hour?
I will say, it’s one of the worst first impressions I’ve had in recent memory: play as frontman Han and you’ll wade through an aggressively mediocre beat ‘em up where you have fairly limited options to deal with enemies, spamming the same few moves over and over. But finish the game once, and you unlock Serena, a knight whose kit feels the best-suited to managing all the chaos onscreen, balancing magic and physical damage, strength and speed- she’s even the most important character in the story! Most of my problems with the game have cooled as I’ve put more time into it, but I think it’s a misstep that the most balanced character is initially locked behind a more lopsided playthrough.
Get past that though, and you’re treated to a game that offers a surprising degree of flexibility to carve out your own playstyle, set in a world that’s filled to the brim with the best kind of melodrama and passion.
(Also, if you do play it, you might want to play the 360 version specifically, apparently the Saturn original suffers from long load times and unskippable cutscenes.)