100 steps forward and about 90 backwards in pretty much every area outside of raw combat. terrible level curves, even worse dungeons than the first and the realisation that none of the side content (bar the first few hours of dondoko island) is interesting really makes it a slog to get through those last few chapters. story is mostly great, bar one character constantly doing shady shit for no reason just to create false conflict (even in the finale. why.)

sad that we probably won't see a return to hawaii, i see it like ijincho in lad8: huge potential, well-designed, explorable, but in the end there's just nothing in it. all it needs is a tune-up like ijincho got in lost judgment...

through its many, many pain points and rough edges, it still ends up telling a great narrative with some really compelling characters. really fun environment too. when you finish the missions up in north algonquin they start introducing a deluge of faceless mafia or government goons to give you missions for the rest of the game and that's honestly my only real "issue" with the game as it were... why should i care about this revolving door of characters who will probably die at the end of their mission line to set up the next one anyway? then the game ends completely unceremoniously. you're winner.

i felt like i hated this game a lot of the time i was playing it but there was just something always bringing me back to get some more mission progress and just explore such a beautiful city (when they have the colour grading turned down) every day for the ~2 weeks it took me to beat it. i'm absolutely sure my feelings would sour towards it if i played it again but the first part of this game, sans the introductory few missions, is just the pure perfection of open-world gaming, especially when you're settling into the mechanics. maybe that's just because they don't make you do any close quarters non-cover combat until algonquin?

The driving is not hard and anyone who complained about it should be banned from reviewing games forever.

hilariously stupid mystery dungeon clone with a cool (on the surface, before you realise how dumb it is) gimmick of reversing status conditions to gain buffs. 5(?) enemies in the game total plus i think two bosses, one at level 50 and i assume the other is at 100.

most of the points here come from presentation, even if it's really repetitive the enemy and random dungeon designs all look pretty good (completely unimpressive technically, but whatever) esp for 2002 where the lower tier of developers were still figuring out how to make things not just look like hi-fi ps1 games. trying to see all the floor themes was probably the only reason i stuck around to floor 40 or so before sunk cost fallacy replaced that

Mechanically yeah it sucks you get fucked over with random status effects constantly. It's okay because the game lets you kinda just skip over things like this half the time. Stops you from grinding with weapon durability, but when you get cursed that equipment can't break and getting cursed is common enough that it'll happen to pretty much every weapon you get, save for anything left half-used or prematurely broken by enemies. and then you realise that grinding is useless and you just want to get possessed by spirits for all your level ups anyway. your health regen goes from being full health to full health minus one point. that stops you from using spheres to level up your max hp as efficiently. and it doesn't stack. that's the only debuff curses give you in exchange for a free level. so by the end i farmed like 10 levels in floor 48 and just hit the lv50 boss with a spear until it died. i was poisoned (bugged, you can have reversed poison and then somehow get poisoned on top of it and there's nothing you can do apart from set up all your buffs again. i didnt have the inventory space for debuff items.) and didn't even lose more than a third of my health by the end of the fight. you can save and quit at any point but it seems really janky it rerolls lighting and dungeon layout and enemy layout so i assume it rerolls treasure and thus is very exploitable. find that out for me please.

The first true roguelike i've played since i've been old enough to have a grasp of how video games work so it's getting a high rating just for doing what i assume it's biting off of better games that weren't made over a lunch break. I only assume this ends at level 100 there isn't a full playthrough in english or even japanese anywhere. it's a mystery how this even has a gamefaqs guide. theres some deep rooted desire in me to basically replay the whole game worth of floors just to see the true ending but really i can't torture myself any more than this. 6 hours of gameplay took me 6 days to make myself complete and i'll be catatonic by next month if i do 6 more! :D

i love tamsoft so theyre getting a 4