If you do enough research, you'll actually find no shortage of praise for this game from various corners of the internet. A lot of this praise seems to be directed at its hardcore nature and inclusion of atypical mechanics for its era. Even Hideki Kamiya cited Super Hydlide as an inspiration during the production of Scalebound. Yeah, Scalebound. Makes you wonder, huh...

Look, credit where credit is due. The game was for sure ahead of its time with its gameplay. A 24-hour day/night cycle, a weight system that accounts for everything you carry (including money), and the survival-lite mechanics in the form of having to eat and rest after a certain amount of time has passed. On paper, these sound like cool ideas, and they would certainly come to be used more effectively in future RPGs, but they only serve as a major nuisance here. They contribute to this game being jank incarnate, and between your character not even having a fluid walking cycle, and the main environment fluctuating between a vomit green and piss yellow color scheme, it's not a very pleasant game to even look at, much less actually play.

But to explain more in-depth what makes this game suck, I'll cover those so-called "far-thinking" mechanics a bit more in-depth.

24-Hour Day/Night Cycle - What could possibly be wrong with this? Well, apart from dawn turning the environment into the aforementioned piss yellow gradient, staying up for too late will eventually exhaust your character, which makes you weak to the point of not even being able to kill the easiest of enemies, so you're forced to sleep at an inn. Make sure you don't head towards a dungeon before catching some much-needed ZZZ's.

Weight - As I said before, everything you hold in this game holds weight. Realism my ass. How does a dagger weigh twice as much as a club??? Leveling up allows you to carry more weight, but the early game is especially brutal as a result. Holding too much weight slows you down significantly, and increasing the speed isn't really an option because it also makes the in-game time speed up, which means you'll probably need to head back to an inn before you even get a chance to kill a handful of monsters. But hey! There's a bank where you can deposit all that heavy money in! That's cool, I guess...

Hunger - This is probably the dumbest mechanic, and this is totally bias, because I'd often forget to buy food rations and it screwed me over quite a handful of times. I'll be in the middle of a dungeon when I suddenly notice my health draining. Well, shit. Gotta backtrack to a town with an inn. Except I made sure to learn the "move" spell early on which lets you teleport to an inn. But even this wasn't an option a couple of times, because I'd either run out of herbs to refill my magic or I'd get magic sealed... by an enemy? The game doesn't even tell you this, but that's what I imagine happened to me a couple of times that I couldn't use magic for seemingly no reason. If so... seriously? No status effect message or indicator for that?

I got a little sidetracked there, but there really are a lot of issues I have with this game, many of which lead to other problems. So many in fact, that I don't even feel like bringing anymore up. This may seem like a half-assed review, but that's okay. Half-assed games deserve half-assed reviews. Well, it's more of a mini rant than anything.

Despite all that, I still think it's worth a playthrough out of curiosity alone. I would have never gotten through it without a guide and without putting on albums in the background while I grinded and suffered through its horrendous dungeons and cryptic progression. But at that point, it really did become a sort of cathartic journey. It's an awful game, but an interesting experience, nonetheless.

Reviewed on Dec 18, 2022


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