That's right! I played a full 5 hours of this game in one day! What can I say? When I go into a game I go all in.
What I am about to describe to you here is something that I think potential players need to be made aware of as it is going to scare off (rightfully slow) a bunch of potential players but that is ok, because you would just be mad at yourself for not seeing this beforehand otherwise.
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The story seems to be a 30-50 hour story and that is fine. To me that is actually the perfect length for an RPG. There are almost zero incentives to revisit old areas although at times you are forced to do so and this becomes really annoying really fast.
I say this because the encounters with enemies are completely randomized and you can't see them coming they are just THERE all of a sudden. This is something that was just normal back in the day and how frequently you encountered something seems to be completely randomized by some sort of RNG. This is all fine and dandy when each encounter is a challenge of some sort, but there are portions of the game where you are required to backtrack to an area that you were in, sometimes long before now, in order to visit some castle somewhere.
Despite the fact that you are far too powerful for the enemies to so much as put a scratch on you, this encounter still happens, over and over again.
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Before the battle begins you are given the option of "allow to flee" and then it takes you out of the battle before any shots are fired but it is still kind of frustrating because why make the battles happen at all? You could say it is for XP grinding but here is the thing, get don't really get any because the xp is scaled depending on your current level. The only time where this fight would be even remotely worthwhile is if you were taking on a new character with a group of experienced ones and then they would get a nice XP boost from these enemies. Other than that, there is literally no purpose to these battles and there should be a way to bypass them entirely without wasting your time.
Which brings me to another rather annoying aspect of the game. Most of the maps are filled with absolutely nothing and there is no reason for there to be these big open spaces because you can't chance encounter any sort of item or ore or something like that. It is just a wide open space with no reason for being there at all.
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Take the map of the very first area for example: Those rocks that are sticking out in the south would be a wonderful place to have some loot or resources stashed but there never is. There is nothing there but you wasting your time and eventually ending up in a randomly encountered batch of unseen enemies that once you are a few levels up, is going to be a breeze of a battle that requires zero strategy on your part.
If you haven't set your battle strategy up to avoid this, your troops are still going to waste MP on something that doesn't in any way require them to do so.
Which brings me to my next and largest beef with this game. Where the hell are the MP refill items?
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All of the stores have a ton of items for sale but none of them have MP recovery items. Let's say you have a caster in your group, which I do enjoy having and especially like having a dedicated healer who only attacks during those wonderful rounds where you have managed to avoid all damage: Well, having those people in your group are going to become dead weight after around 3-4 battles because they are going to have used up all of their MP. Any spell that is worth using is going to use about 1/5 of the overall MP that any caster has and once that is gone, there isn't any way to get it back organically.
Sure a few magic pots will drop in battle here and there but not nearly enough to even bother having casters in your group at all. This is a major part of the game that I find extra annoying because 1/4 of the crew that you encounter are magic-users that I never use because they can't handle anything longer than a trip down to the corner store.
I like this game for a lot of reasons and mainly it is because it reminds me of how gaming was when I was young. However, I think that I am going to have to relegate this one to the background for when I get frustrated at other, better-made, games. There isn't really much strategy here and most of the time I find myself simply putting my strategy on auto and making sure that I bring about 3x as many healing and revive potions with me than I think I will need. I leave all casters at home and that is a damn shave because some of the best animations happen during the spells. Too bad you only get to see them 2-3 times before the MP is all spent!
I've been told that you get access to MP items later in the game but why make us wait? I have also already gotten the teleportation ability but that didn't happen for me until about 12 hours of gameplay. Up to that point I was walking and walking and walking and walking.
I'm not totally done with this game, but after 5 hours in a row yesterday and having very little about the game actually change, I need a bit more variety in my life than just doing the same thing over and over again.
Potential buyers be warned! This is a good backup game for ultra-casual gameplay. It offers almost zero challenge and a lot of it doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense!