This review contains spoilers
I played a lot of JRPGs in middle school and early high school, and they all kinda meshed together. Franchises like Star Ocean, Suikoden, Wild Arms, etc. haven't been as easily memorable to me as some of the other franchises I got into at that time, like Tales and Shin Megami Tensei. But I think I always felt positively about them regardless, because, growing up in an area where I was pretty much the only super hardcore gaming enthusiast, it felt neat to have these fairly obscure experiences under my belt instead of things like GTA (Which may explain why I also have bad memories of those games). And since I am prying into why I felt certain ways about video games when I was a teenager, I can't help but be curious as to what I saw in this game. I never held it to an extremely high regard, but I always thought of it as a game that was quite fun.
I guess I'll start with the combat. It improves the issue of randomly switching targets mid attack, a flaw that made First Departure completely unplayable for me. This is probably the only reason I felt I wanted to press to the end, as this small adjustment made things allowed for nearly every battle to feel fine, whereas FD had 0 battles that weren't frustrating. It does keep pretty much every other issue, however. Attacks will just randomly miss, you're limited to having to special attacks without menu hopping (It's an action RPG btw, for those unaware), and depth perception is difficult with 2D sprites on a 3D plane. Another issue that arose here (One which I never really saw in FD) was how sluggish encounters become when spells grow more powerful. When many of the spells are used, it completely stops the flow of time to give you a presentation of the spell being used. And around the end-game, spells are being shot off constantly, so battles become way too slow for an action RPG, especially one as mindless as this. Every offensive spell does this, I believe, and most support ones have an animation. It gets old when the cutscenes for the spells are totaling a larger amount of time than the time you spend actually fighting (Source needed. I have no actual evidence, but I honestly can't tell, which is still bad). On top of all of this, it's such an easy game (Until the final boss, but we'll get to that!). I bet it without ever really focusing on the metagame stuff like crafting and specialties and all that jazz. Not only that, but everything was so damn simple. Putting and emerald ring on your melee attackers and just spamming special artes worked on 99% of the encounters. I only died twice before the final boss. Once where my party got insta-killed by being eaten, and once where my party got insta-killed through petrification. All this culminates into a really shallow and tedious battle system. Maybe if I had done more work in the metagame, I would've had more fun with combat, but they didn't do a good job of incentivizing it, so I didn't see the need to bother.
Story was also bad, which is a shame, because it probably should've been great. The lore behind everything is cool, and some of the twists are fun, but the pacing is terrible. We spend about 85% of the game in fantasy land (Not gonna rant about how dumb the idea of a sci-fi RPG that doesn't incorporate sci-fi into a majority of the plot is again) as the plot doesn't really move. You're just kinda questing to decipher some texts or something. I don't really recall much of it since it drags it's feet for so long. Then the main plot just kicks in out of nowhere, and suddenly there are ten villains and the world you've lived in is a projection or some shit and there's some sort of new world that is the actual world and it is going to be destroyed if out don't stop the ten dudes from making it phase into oblivion? Like, I got most of that wrong, I'm sure. It dumps almost the entirety of the lore and plot on the player in one cutscene. The final bits of the game are just massive info dumps of story, and I eventually stopped caring because how in the hell do I follow it? Best part of the story, however, is when Rena asks Gabriel why he wants to destroy the world, and Gabriel just says, "You wouldn't understand."
and dies. A+. As far as characters go, Rena and Claude are really the only ones notable enough to warrant much of an opinion. Claude kinda sucks. Rena is alright.
Final boss was the worst part of the game, however. It's pretty easy to start off with, but in phase 2, he gets the ability to launch spells off at an alarming rate, and this usually ends in your party getting wiped with no chance to heal. Now, I'm not against bosses having one-shot capabilities.
Happens in Souls games all the time. But the thing is, a one-shot attack should be preventable or dodgable in some way. Gabriel has no significant windup for these spells, he can't be stunned while casting, and they can only be dodged through luck. So how did I beat him? Literally luck.
He didn't use his spells as quickly or in as high of a volume as other battles, and when he finally unleashed a swarm of spells on my party, Dias managed to dodge the one that would've given me a game over. I barely managed to heal everyone back up and won. It wasn't satisfying. It wasn't rewarding. It was what it was: A lucky break. In the process of being mutilated by this seemingly unfair battle, I checked online to see if I was missing something. But I wasn't. Guides literally say luck is the only way to win (I guess I could've grinded for a few hours as well, but that wasn't happening). I can't imagine how anyone thinks this is a good idea for a video game, especially one that has never challenged the player beforehand. It is indefensibly bad. 2/6
I guess I'll start with the combat. It improves the issue of randomly switching targets mid attack, a flaw that made First Departure completely unplayable for me. This is probably the only reason I felt I wanted to press to the end, as this small adjustment made things allowed for nearly every battle to feel fine, whereas FD had 0 battles that weren't frustrating. It does keep pretty much every other issue, however. Attacks will just randomly miss, you're limited to having to special attacks without menu hopping (It's an action RPG btw, for those unaware), and depth perception is difficult with 2D sprites on a 3D plane. Another issue that arose here (One which I never really saw in FD) was how sluggish encounters become when spells grow more powerful. When many of the spells are used, it completely stops the flow of time to give you a presentation of the spell being used. And around the end-game, spells are being shot off constantly, so battles become way too slow for an action RPG, especially one as mindless as this. Every offensive spell does this, I believe, and most support ones have an animation. It gets old when the cutscenes for the spells are totaling a larger amount of time than the time you spend actually fighting (Source needed. I have no actual evidence, but I honestly can't tell, which is still bad). On top of all of this, it's such an easy game (Until the final boss, but we'll get to that!). I bet it without ever really focusing on the metagame stuff like crafting and specialties and all that jazz. Not only that, but everything was so damn simple. Putting and emerald ring on your melee attackers and just spamming special artes worked on 99% of the encounters. I only died twice before the final boss. Once where my party got insta-killed by being eaten, and once where my party got insta-killed through petrification. All this culminates into a really shallow and tedious battle system. Maybe if I had done more work in the metagame, I would've had more fun with combat, but they didn't do a good job of incentivizing it, so I didn't see the need to bother.
Story was also bad, which is a shame, because it probably should've been great. The lore behind everything is cool, and some of the twists are fun, but the pacing is terrible. We spend about 85% of the game in fantasy land (Not gonna rant about how dumb the idea of a sci-fi RPG that doesn't incorporate sci-fi into a majority of the plot is again) as the plot doesn't really move. You're just kinda questing to decipher some texts or something. I don't really recall much of it since it drags it's feet for so long. Then the main plot just kicks in out of nowhere, and suddenly there are ten villains and the world you've lived in is a projection or some shit and there's some sort of new world that is the actual world and it is going to be destroyed if out don't stop the ten dudes from making it phase into oblivion? Like, I got most of that wrong, I'm sure. It dumps almost the entirety of the lore and plot on the player in one cutscene. The final bits of the game are just massive info dumps of story, and I eventually stopped caring because how in the hell do I follow it? Best part of the story, however, is when Rena asks Gabriel why he wants to destroy the world, and Gabriel just says, "You wouldn't understand."
and dies. A+. As far as characters go, Rena and Claude are really the only ones notable enough to warrant much of an opinion. Claude kinda sucks. Rena is alright.
Final boss was the worst part of the game, however. It's pretty easy to start off with, but in phase 2, he gets the ability to launch spells off at an alarming rate, and this usually ends in your party getting wiped with no chance to heal. Now, I'm not against bosses having one-shot capabilities.
Happens in Souls games all the time. But the thing is, a one-shot attack should be preventable or dodgable in some way. Gabriel has no significant windup for these spells, he can't be stunned while casting, and they can only be dodged through luck. So how did I beat him? Literally luck.
He didn't use his spells as quickly or in as high of a volume as other battles, and when he finally unleashed a swarm of spells on my party, Dias managed to dodge the one that would've given me a game over. I barely managed to heal everyone back up and won. It wasn't satisfying. It wasn't rewarding. It was what it was: A lucky break. In the process of being mutilated by this seemingly unfair battle, I checked online to see if I was missing something. But I wasn't. Guides literally say luck is the only way to win (I guess I could've grinded for a few hours as well, but that wasn't happening). I can't imagine how anyone thinks this is a good idea for a video game, especially one that has never challenged the player beforehand. It is indefensibly bad. 2/6
chandler
2 years ago