Aidyn Chronicles is a game I struggled to love for a long time, and a game that's story is more interesting on paper than in practice. H2O, the game's devs previous game was Tetrisphere, a game that I enjoyed but admittedly ran very poorly. Their next title was one of the last games released for the N64. It's not only one of four dedicated RPGs released in the west, it veers closer to a CRPG than Quest 64, Paper Mario or Ogre Battle. The only console comparison I could make would be the Lunatic Dawn ports to the PlayStation, or other PlayStation/Saturn ports of pre-existing CRPGs.
It attempted to shove a full Bioware/Black Isle RPG into a N64 cart, with character stats/classes, party building and a wide cast of NPCs. In terms of combat, these aren't elements that are executed poorly. Different classes and builds have a very real impact on how well fights play out. The gear that you pick up doesn't just translate into pure stat advantages, it changes the way that your characters play. The world feels "big" in the sense that there's a lot of ground to cover, and there's a decently staffed roster of NPCs. It's an experience that's unlike most console RPGs released up until that point, and one that's so poorly executed that it manages to cancel out any goodwill it might have earned swinging for the bleachers.
The game isn't incomplete in the same way that Quest 64 is incomplete, but the game is a buggy and optimized slog. Clipping through floors/staircases is a common occurrence. The nonlinear or more open ended elements of the game might encourage sequence breaking. These usually lead to save-ending bugs or, if you're lucky, just a crash. Multiple spells either flat out don't work, or have the opposite intended effect (like the stamina "buff" reducing your overall stamina).
In terms of performance, the game runs worse than Tetrisphere's laggiest points, with regular frame dips when the game has to render more than five feet in front of the main character. I'm not sure why the game runs this poorly either, this is one of the ugliest games on the Nintendo 64. The art direction isn't doing any favors, but the game's blurry, compressed look stood out at the time of its release, and only got worse with age. I was thinking how to describe the music as well, and I couldn't come up with anything other than "it fucking blows." It's not bad in a bland way, it's bad in a very lazy but distinct way, jarring to the point where I had to mute the game most of the time.
The combat itself, even when it does work, is crippled by the speed of fights. The pace is glacial and even minor encounters can take a full five minutes. Normal spell animations feel more egregious than anything Square was doing at the time. Earlier, I praised the game in the sense that there are meaningful abilities and differences between classes. Most of those meaningful abilities are either crowd control or defensive buffs. The game is balanced around these in such a way that trying to ignore them will make the early game onward much harder. It's focus on them only drags out combat even longer in a game that already had a terminal speed issue.
All of this could have been, if not acceptable, an evil I'd be willing to put up with if the story was interesting. Aidyn Chronicles's biggest flaw is that the story is bland and boring at best, and incomprehensible at worst. Characters aren't developed well, when they do bother to develop them. The worldbuilding "feels" like standard high fantasy from around the time, but it's hard to tell because the prose of this game feels machine translated. Motivations and characterization feels just as smothered in Vaseline as the graphics. Trying to comprehend what a conversation's impact on the overall story is requires constant effort. It even sets up sequels that never happened (and upon retrospect probably were never going to happen given the context in which this game released), so even if the Bethesda level writing resonated with you somehow, you're going to be left holding the bag in terms of narrative.
The biggest praise I could have given Aidyn Chronicles was its ambition, but I don't think there's anything ambitious in its narrative that warrants sitting through the game itself. There's a modding scene that's fleshed out the gameplay and if that interested you, you should track down those romhacks. For everyone else, this is an easy skip. It's the worst RPG on the N64, only saved by it's relative novelty.
It attempted to shove a full Bioware/Black Isle RPG into a N64 cart, with character stats/classes, party building and a wide cast of NPCs. In terms of combat, these aren't elements that are executed poorly. Different classes and builds have a very real impact on how well fights play out. The gear that you pick up doesn't just translate into pure stat advantages, it changes the way that your characters play. The world feels "big" in the sense that there's a lot of ground to cover, and there's a decently staffed roster of NPCs. It's an experience that's unlike most console RPGs released up until that point, and one that's so poorly executed that it manages to cancel out any goodwill it might have earned swinging for the bleachers.
The game isn't incomplete in the same way that Quest 64 is incomplete, but the game is a buggy and optimized slog. Clipping through floors/staircases is a common occurrence. The nonlinear or more open ended elements of the game might encourage sequence breaking. These usually lead to save-ending bugs or, if you're lucky, just a crash. Multiple spells either flat out don't work, or have the opposite intended effect (like the stamina "buff" reducing your overall stamina).
In terms of performance, the game runs worse than Tetrisphere's laggiest points, with regular frame dips when the game has to render more than five feet in front of the main character. I'm not sure why the game runs this poorly either, this is one of the ugliest games on the Nintendo 64. The art direction isn't doing any favors, but the game's blurry, compressed look stood out at the time of its release, and only got worse with age. I was thinking how to describe the music as well, and I couldn't come up with anything other than "it fucking blows." It's not bad in a bland way, it's bad in a very lazy but distinct way, jarring to the point where I had to mute the game most of the time.
The combat itself, even when it does work, is crippled by the speed of fights. The pace is glacial and even minor encounters can take a full five minutes. Normal spell animations feel more egregious than anything Square was doing at the time. Earlier, I praised the game in the sense that there are meaningful abilities and differences between classes. Most of those meaningful abilities are either crowd control or defensive buffs. The game is balanced around these in such a way that trying to ignore them will make the early game onward much harder. It's focus on them only drags out combat even longer in a game that already had a terminal speed issue.
All of this could have been, if not acceptable, an evil I'd be willing to put up with if the story was interesting. Aidyn Chronicles's biggest flaw is that the story is bland and boring at best, and incomprehensible at worst. Characters aren't developed well, when they do bother to develop them. The worldbuilding "feels" like standard high fantasy from around the time, but it's hard to tell because the prose of this game feels machine translated. Motivations and characterization feels just as smothered in Vaseline as the graphics. Trying to comprehend what a conversation's impact on the overall story is requires constant effort. It even sets up sequels that never happened (and upon retrospect probably were never going to happen given the context in which this game released), so even if the Bethesda level writing resonated with you somehow, you're going to be left holding the bag in terms of narrative.
The biggest praise I could have given Aidyn Chronicles was its ambition, but I don't think there's anything ambitious in its narrative that warrants sitting through the game itself. There's a modding scene that's fleshed out the gameplay and if that interested you, you should track down those romhacks. For everyone else, this is an easy skip. It's the worst RPG on the N64, only saved by it's relative novelty.