Yeah, it's fine.

Better than other slotbuilders in that it has some very firm archetypes in mind and then actually provides direction in scenarios that let you properly experiment with those archetypes.

Major issues are that the numbers ramp up into meaninglessness and the writing is just a bunch of extremely hit and miss jokes. But if you enjoyed Luck be a Landlord you'll probably enjoy this.

I'm an absolute sicko for games with large numbers of recruitable characters. I wanted to try and press on so I could keep adding Guys to my party. But I can't keep doing this.

The thing is that there's nothing specifically terrible about Eiyuden in isolation. There's going to be a 12-year-old for whom this will be their first JRPG, it will be the start of a life-long love affair with the genre for them and I wish them nothing but the best.

But for me? Everything dragged. the random battles were boring and interchangable. The main characters were vapid. The story was mildly diverting at best. The spritework was nice, but the backgrounds were nothing. For me "there is basebuilding now!" is about the worst feature you could introduce partway.

I didn't expect the majority of characters you can add to your party to be particularly well developed. They do have fun visual designs and nice hooks. But I did expect party building and strategising to be a major component of gameplay, and it simply isn't.

So yeah, if you've never played a JRPG before and you're curious about this, I'd recommend trying it out before you try another, more interesting one. Because you can never go back.

Finally got around to playing this piece of gaming history and it's easy, at least in the early-to-mid game, to see how it spellbound a lot of people back in the day.

My big takeaway here is that the simple graphics, lighting and sound design actually serve the stealth genre better than the AAA efforts we have now. When your world is as visually and audibly complex as what games are capable of nowadays you enter this sort of uncanny valley where you try approaching the situation as if it were real instead of a system and end up frustrated when that expectation isn't met. While Thief's mechanics aren't perfect it's much easier to look at a situation and go "the enemy won't be able to see/hear me if I go there", which dramatically improves your capacity to plan your approach.

It's a real shame that, stealth games being something of a novelty in the late 90s, Looking Glass clearly didn't have enough faith in the concept seeing the whole thing through. Thief completely shits itself in the last act of the game, the missions going from semi-open ended heists and tomb robberies to a miserable action-filled slog through mutant-filled warrens. The climax clawed things back a bit, but really just wanted it to be over by then.