The gameplay is pretty well designed, responsive, and satisfying. Though personally I find the game to get pretty hard after a few hours even when I’m using all the moves and tools at my disposal.

Presentation-wise I love the when I have to hold the DS on its side, which especially for swipe/stylus-focused games like this also allows for some more wrist flick real estate. The story is told through a manga format and looks lovely. Levels have pre-rendered backgrounds of high quality, but the game switches to full 3D arenas during the great boss fights with big monsters and dragons.

It’s a great game that takes the format of the DS seriously and pulls it off well, I don’t know if I’ll ever fully beat it personally because I lack the skills for these particular bills.

The gameplay is presented like a scaled-down chess game but with different mechanics. Your pieces and the enemy pieces, which are fun cartoony things like karate dudes and pig goblins rather than knights and bishops, engage in a stat-based card draw battle when they meet on the board, and upgrade to evolved versions if they get on the enemy side of the board. The pieces can have different abilities, such as some mage-like pieces which can cast spells of different effects.

Beyond being just good simple fun with a good amount of strategy, it's also funny and I love the character designs and short quips they have in battle. There's also an amount of variety between stages, making sure you're never totally comfortable and keeping you on your toes. Quickly has become among my favorite games for the Game Boy. Translations for the Famicom version can be found allegedly, and that version is a bit prettier and has more features.

This is a game which contains so much vision and a sense of sophistication that it is felt even through the more sloppy aspects, to the point where they largely read as the product of perhaps limited time or resources rather than poor taste. To see a Playstation game which does all of its dialogue through motion-captured scenes which play out as if on a stage, and with high fidelity voice acting is something I didn't even know had been done on the console I grew up on.

The combat sytem isn't very challenging by design, and the puzzle solving is not particularly well-planned out all the time, but the strength of the performances and the unique setting, charracters, and story make it a game that sticks with you.

I stumbled backwards blind into this game after stumbling backwards blind into Shadowhearts Covenant and thinking I was probably missing some context for that game.