A small amount of good artwork by Mutsumi Inomata and a battle system that's interesting on the surface is mangled by trying to fit a 1995 standard game into a 16 megabit cartridge. Battles should be interesting with two pure melee characters supporting a sole mage with up to 36 different spells but in practice it suffers from the worst of ATB's pacing problems where you fumble with an absolutely terrible interface as the game marches on or end up just waiting for fights to conclude far too slowly. It's hard to overstate how sloppy the interface is; everything in both menus and battle with almost no exceptions is cycling through a single visible option on a system with bizarre menu ordering. Even selecting the right spell is infuriating as even once you've worked out what the correct type of spell you want is (1 is an attack, 2 and 4 are buffs, 3's a heal, 5 is 'other' and 6 is counterspell), the numbers are selected backwards!

The memory on the cart is all spent with the pretty title screen and the few full-screen cut-in pictures in the beginning. There's maybe two more of those as you go through the rest of the game and in terms of background you are going from field to town to dungeon to castle over and over. It's short but it felt quite repetitive towards the end as the game ran out of things to show.

As a comparison, '93's Phantasy Star 4 'only' has half as much space again, but it uses that space much more intelligently with less elaborately animated skills in battle and many more but much smaller cut-in pictures. They then used the rest of the memory for an amazing battle system, many more characters, a great soundtrack, multiple planets and an actual plot. I should play through PS4 again.