to me this is the ultimate “hidden gem”; it absolutely floored me when I booted it up. the artwork is shocking: the spritework looks like something from a lauded 2020s indie darling. Each of the party members are lovingly and naturalistically animated; points of pixelated colors bleed across the black-line character outlines. These aren’t the static chibi characters of Pokémon and the hoard of Game Boy RPGs in its wake, all of the art and animation feels high-end and bespoke. The first thing I ever saw of this game was a screenshot of the first boss, which looked like something I never thought you could do on a Game Boy Color.

Beyond the incredible look and feel of the game (also, I’ve never played a Star Ocean game before and I love that this is a gaiden/side story. just a bunch of friends that already know each other getting into a new adventure, no huge intro/setup. the ideal RPG beginning) this game is insanely deep and complex, with layers and layers of systems. each party member has manageable skills, abilities, stats, and equipment, with all characters sharing one xp pool. some characters have environmental-specific abilities that you need to access new areas. some characters have unique upgrade systems that involve complex minigames. some characters are op, some are very strange, all of them have customizable movesets that play out in fluid and fast paced Tales-style fights. I am still just scratching the surface of everything this game has to offer (all the gamefaqs we’re written 2001-2003 before there was an English patch, which is excellent btw) but I am so excited I found it. One of the best Game Boy Color games for sure, and such a feeling of wonder. Can’t recommend it enough.

Will forever be known to me as a game i played ONLY during every single one of my Jewish Studies lectures. Im not even Jewish so i cant begin to tell you how i ended up in that class but this was the only thing i looked forward doing at 10:55 - 11:30am tuesdays and thursdays every week. Today was my last day of class so it was either I beat the game today or i take another class about the Jewish religion. There was no better option.

Fun game though if not a little confusing at times which is why it took me so long to beat it, though the game does have hints which i used religiously because between learning about pangrea or whatever my professor was talking about and me not knowing the geography of Japan i couldnt hope to keep up... Then i would have had to take a second Jewish culture class. The zones are pretty open at times and normally i would find this to be boring but the music was very good so i didnt really care much... either that or i was just so bored that anything was entertaining. The tight corridor areas were extremely fucking annoying due to the god awful camera

This game also does that Final Fantasy V shit with the humor where they do an attempt at comedy and nobody laughs but instead of playing this it just plays a laugh track (<-- thats a laugh track in case any of you didnt know) and unfortunately im a sucker for shitty jokes so this appealed to me. I think beating this game was more of an accomplishment to me than completing the course