I'd say this is one of the more fair adventure games of it's era, given that you actually bother exploring and picking up items to increase your health instead of beelining to the end of the level, it also showers you with healing items save for the last few levels, the 2 before the final one were fine but the last one was ass due to how vague it was with where you needed to go. And don't think I didn't notice that Rondo of Blood rip-off final boss you cheeky wanker devs. Other than that the game has a lot of charm thanks in part to it's fantastic sound which helps give the game that much more personality, your character emotes a lot through voice which I found amusing, and the OST itself is a good listen. Visuals are great too, good old SNES pixel art. Fun, whimsical experience all around.

Anyone who thinks this is any bit better than the remake hasn’t played it since 1999 and is huffing unhealthy amounts of nostalgium. This piece of shit takes the exact same game-design from 1/2 (fixed camera, tank controls) but abandons everything that made those games work in the first place, long gone are ammo management and snappy decision-making in favor of churning out an action game that simply does not work, juking is barely viable due how many enemies they put next to one another, and the fixed camera is poorly implemented because it hardly ever shows you what you need to see, one screen it’s empty, the next screen you find out you ran into 3 zombies. The fact they put a dodge system in a fixed camera game is ridiculous in and of itself, but they went ahead and made it so it requires frame perfect precision and is mandatory for getting through the game, not only that but it doesn’t account for the camera angle changing mid-fight AND enemy behaviors happen to be erratic and unpredictable.

It’s quite charming and jam packed with content for a mere GB JRPG. Love the trainer designs and how varied they all are, trainers in general help make the battles less random and meaningless which makes me surprised that other JRPG’s don’t bother including something like them to make battles more natural, I believe it’s a fine bridge between strictly no random encounters and only random encounters. Not that i mind random encounters. Ultimately a chill, fun adventure. Nothing more I can say really.

A complete joke of an “RPG” that encapsulates every bad design decision to come regarding the RPG genre. Awful and useless skills, nonexistent variety for builds, you’re locked into 3 classes with yet another set of useless and boring skills that don’t enhance the role playing in any meaningful manner. The over-world’s level design is needlessly convoluted, mountains blocking your way and leading you down a contrived linear path, making an already snoozefest game even more of a chore to go through, with laughably slow “running” and no mounts, you spend the vast majority of your time running from quest marker to quest marker, with those quests themselves requiring you to just meet someone, who then tells you to go to a place. And to make matters worse it has ridiculous side quest bloat, every 20 steps you take in the overworld you’ll be greeted by a side quest that has no connection (thematic or otherwise) or bearing on the main story, all of them revolve around someone being lost/dead and their friend/lover/compatriot asking you to find them/take revenge/secure their remains, every single one.

A Tragedy In Balancing:
Going Commando may have fun, exhilarating combat, fluid movement and a wide array of weapons, but what good is any of that in a game that insists upon locking itself into a vicious, self absorbing form of vertical progression? the more you progress, the more useless your weapons become. In the original and most adventure games, only a few hits will deal with all the small fry, but in Going Commando, the regular enemies become more and more powerful until they take about half of your (even upgraded) pistol ammo away, this continues until midgame where the only viable options of playing the game are The Bouncer (exploding ball weapon) The Hoverbomb Gun (exploding ball weapon) and Synthenoids (flying sentry allies), completely obliterating the variety and slickness of the game, what in the beginning was a fun, fluid shooter becomes a dreadful loop of getting more bolts to get more overpriced armor and to actually get weapons that do meaningful damage. And that’s another aspect I’m gonna touch upon, unless you follow online guides on bolt farms, you’re gonna be completely left in the dust, i did all the gladiator challenges and dogfight challenges (which net you bolts) and i still found myself severely lacking bolts, the armor for example is necessary otherwise you get 3-shotted, and it’s price rises with further versions, going from 50K to 100K to 200K and etc, the weapons that actually matter for midgame are all overpriced too. It ultimately has good parts but it’s brought down by nonexistent gameplay flow.

The emptiest game I've ever played, I don't mean this figuratively but literally. The majority of this game consists of walking from one empty hallway to another in order to simply go somewhere or solve insultingly simple puzzles, there is nothing to explore, nothing to fight, and the few times it bothers to shove enemies in its empty halls are nothing to speak of either because they're either the exact same goddamn dog enemies or the even rarer ghost enemies. I have never played a game this hopelessly pointless and boring. To call something like it creative is an insult to creativity itself because this is nothing more than an undercooked Silent Hill title.

I wish I could earnestly say I liked going through this but the gameplay is just far too clunky and underdeveloped, you want me to deal with the cryptic progression? Wonderful. I have no problem with this. I appreciate the challenge and find it quite unique. But dealing with that AND having to go through sections where I don’t have combat options and depend entirely on the lackluster stealth or sections where I do have the option of fighting back but still lack the option to explore because every enemy is like the ghosts from SH4 and never die, all of this coupled in with the looming threat of dying = all I just did being reset only makes for a very frustrating experience. I want to like this, I really do. And maybe even somehow someday I will. But today is not that day.