Tim Lenz

This is a "3 out of 5 stars" kind of thumbs up. I've put over 70 hours into this game and generally enjoyed it, but it's a far cry from the classics it pays homage to. Unlike those games that shaped my video game playing childhood into adulthood, this game will likely be mostly forgotten within 6 months. The art style is a beautiful mixture of nostalgic 8- or 16-bit sprites and more modern backgrounds and visualization, and some of the music is entirely beautiful. The gameplay mechanics are generally true to the 90s-era predecessors with some interesting twists that add some strategy (like the break system, and visualizing future turns, a la Final Fantasy X). However, the skill and itemization aspects are severely lacking. There are 8 characters who each have a skill library of, hold your laughter, 7 skills for a 70 hour game. You max out a character's skill tree somewhere in the Level 20-25 area. After that, the only sense of progression you get is by seeing damage or character stat numbers inch slightly higher with each level. There's no sense of real growing power bumping from, say, Fire 1 to Fire 2 to Fire 3, or gaining Meteo or Flare. It just... stops. The same fire spell I had at Level 1, I was casting at Level 66, just with higher damage numbers. (Disclaimer: There is some end-game content I have not finished yet which may change this... but going 40 levels with barely a sniff of getting better really takes the oomph out of leveling and grinding.) And I rarely upgraded items b/c I rarely found any items that improved my stats. And when I did, they were always universally usable (aside from a character's skill and job dictating what class of weapons they could use). I could put my Warrior class in a magical Princess Dress if I wanted to. Hey, it's 2019, so you do you, Warrior guy, but at the very least, the best class/job-specific items should have some sort of class/job-specific requirements. Finally, the most important part of the classic RPGs, the part that made every one of those games memorable for decades and ingrained them in my memories forever, is virtually absent from this throwback: the story. The "8 Characters, 8 Stories" idea is a simple gimmick that doesn't work. The result is 8 completely isolated mini-RPGs with stories as compelling and engaging as Saturday Morning Cartoons, interwoven haphazardly by chance and nothing. These characters bind together for absolutely no reason at all. "Hi, I'm a hunter apprentice trying to find my Master. I must find him at all costs! Wait, this thief I bumped into on the street wants to rob a mansion? I better go help him do that instead!" There's no cohesion, no reason for these characters to get together. May as well have just pulled names out of a hat every morning to decide whose errand that none of the others care about we're going to go on today. Overall, this game is somewhat of a nostalgia piece, mimicking all of the easily-replicable parts of the classics and mailing in the deep, complex, meaty parts. Again, I still enjoyed it enough to put 70 hours into it... but barely.