It's neat but rough around some edges game-design wise. It's an open exploratory platformer, more similar to a Westone title than the typical Metroidvania type of game you'd expect from that kind of genre. It's basically a much expanded take on the Monster Land series. The basic progression is composed of exploring the world to find various tasks and quests that need to be done, and figuring out where to go and how to do them. The levels have depth in them, allowing you to jump in and out of various layers of the foreground and background to explore, giving it a bit of a 2.5D feel (though it's certainly no klonoa visually). The controls feel really tight, the plot doesn't take itself very seriously, the visuals are that colorful pre-rendered silicon graphics ass vibe that we are sorely missing in this day and age, and the soundtrack is funny with its doofy MIDI samples.
Unfortunately there are some major gripes I did have with this game. The biggest problem of all is that despite the fact that this game goes for an explorative "search all the levels for the objectives and secrets" approach to its game structure, there is still a system of limited lives put into the game. Running out of lives just hucks you back to the title screen where you need to reload your last save like most games, but saving in this game also saves the amount of lives you currently have, so saving with a low life count puts you at significantly higher risk for losing progress if you mess up. Couple that with the fact that some areas in the game have bottomless pits that kill you instantly and a problem kinda arises. The conflict between the game structure that wants you to search every aspect of the map and the life system punishing potential leaps of faith/adventurous ideas makes the game feel at ends with itself. I did eventually find a workaround, as save points are quite frequent and saving/loading doesn't take that long. I basically saved my game at every save point like they are level checkpoints, and if i died, I loaded my save back up before the death jingle could finish playing so I didn't lose anything. An inelegant solution, but it worked. My only other problem would be that sometimes the game doesn't really give you a very solid sense of direction/where to go/what to do, but that's kinda the nature of these sorts of games. The map doesn't really help, and all the game really gives for direction is like one-sentence descriptions for each objective that usually don't say much. If you are a kid with endless free time playing this though, that's no issue, but if you are a busy person like me I'd def rec using a guide.
It's a super interesting game for sure and I understand its cult status among PS1 fans. I'd suggest giving it a shot if you like exploratory action games, but it's not one of my personal favorites.
Unfortunately there are some major gripes I did have with this game. The biggest problem of all is that despite the fact that this game goes for an explorative "search all the levels for the objectives and secrets" approach to its game structure, there is still a system of limited lives put into the game. Running out of lives just hucks you back to the title screen where you need to reload your last save like most games, but saving in this game also saves the amount of lives you currently have, so saving with a low life count puts you at significantly higher risk for losing progress if you mess up. Couple that with the fact that some areas in the game have bottomless pits that kill you instantly and a problem kinda arises. The conflict between the game structure that wants you to search every aspect of the map and the life system punishing potential leaps of faith/adventurous ideas makes the game feel at ends with itself. I did eventually find a workaround, as save points are quite frequent and saving/loading doesn't take that long. I basically saved my game at every save point like they are level checkpoints, and if i died, I loaded my save back up before the death jingle could finish playing so I didn't lose anything. An inelegant solution, but it worked. My only other problem would be that sometimes the game doesn't really give you a very solid sense of direction/where to go/what to do, but that's kinda the nature of these sorts of games. The map doesn't really help, and all the game really gives for direction is like one-sentence descriptions for each objective that usually don't say much. If you are a kid with endless free time playing this though, that's no issue, but if you are a busy person like me I'd def rec using a guide.
It's a super interesting game for sure and I understand its cult status among PS1 fans. I'd suggest giving it a shot if you like exploratory action games, but it's not one of my personal favorites.