Legend of Mana Review

           Today’s game is Legend of Mana. There’s some days when you just have to wonder who decides to bring the first game in a series stateside. I mean, sure you’ve got some games that simply wouldn’t do well in the US that do great in Japan, but it’s tough to bring an innovator in the series to a new audience. Maybe change is supposed to be good, I don’t know. Anyway, Legend of Mana  is an interesting choice of first game, so let’s take a look.

The game starts off with a story telling how the world of Fa’Diel was destroyed through a war to control magic power. Pretty standard stuff, but where things take a turn is when you learn that you, the chosen hero, must recreate the various places in the world from the artifacts they have been stored in. And that’s just about it for metaplot for the whole game. You place artifacts, visit lands, and participate in various quests. There are about three main storylines, but they’re entirely separate. There are also a great number of minor events that help flesh out the world. The events that you participate in frequently involve either running around town talking to people, exploring dungeons, or visiting specific places in a variety of lands. The dungeons are probably the easiest to navigate, though they frequently have screens that look almost identical, leading to getting lost occasionally. When you’re in for a town adventure, watch out! You’ll need to talk to everyone, usually several times. Occasionally you’ll even need to talk to them from a specific direction or on a specific day of the week. Without a walkthrough or serious use of hints, a lot of these will take a long time to figure out. While tedious, few town adventures require much legwork. Not so with exploration missions, which will have you trekking all over Fa’Diel searching for something, anything, that will trigger a scene in your latest quest. The events that you run into run the gamut of content, and so it’s hard not to enjoy at least a few of them. However, the story is so non-linear that it’s frequently difficult to figure out anything at all to do, which detracts from the enjoyment of the scenes when you eventually find them. All in all, not the worst stories out there, but Seiken Densetsu 3 (the next most recent incarnation of the series) has all of them beat. Not to mention that the stories are not worth the aggravation of going through talk quests (been there, done that.)

If Legend of Mana has a strength, it’s in the characters. Where the story is not so great, the characters are truly interesting. With so many side events, almost all the characters in the world are unique, and are developed in at least one event. Plus, reading up in the in-game encyclopedia on the people and monsters that you meet really gives the world of Fa’Diel the feeling of depth. The characters involved in the major storylines are ven more intriguing. The character of Larc, a dragonman bound to serve an evil emperor working from the pit of the netherworld, is wonderfully dark. Pearl is a princess (with a secret) who’s protected by the knight Elazul, both of whom are on the run from a mysterious enemy. And of course Niccolo, the rabbitman who will do anything for a profit, up to and including faking amnesia. Some of these characters sound familiar, but there’s a certain amount of nuance to them, mostly from their participation in the varied and expansive world the exist in.

The battle system? Do we have to? All right. The battle system is real-time. You hit the monsters, and when you hit the monsters enough, you can use a special move. That’s really all there is to it. There’s a lot of weapon types to choose from, but they function essentially the same on the battlefield. Each weapon type has its own set of special moves, which are learned at unspecified points while using the weapon. Special moves are pretty bad, because while they leave you invincible during the charge up, they hit so infrequently that it’s hardly worth the bother. This goes for boss enemies too, so even bosses in this game aren’t too hard. In fact, on the default difficulty that you get on the first play-through (see replay value below), the whole game is almost painfully easy on the combat end of things. Once in a while you might have trouble with a boss, but normal enemies are never anything more than a waste of time.

Of possibly more interest are the systems for farming, raising pets, creating golems, and creating weapons. While going into each of these in too much detail would be as tedious as it would be repetitive, the basic premise for all of them is very similar. While you explore dungeons, you may run into a monster egg/elemental spirit. By doing some annoying cat and mouse antics, you can catch said thingy and get a monster/elemental coin. At home, you can harvest fruits to feed your pets hatched from eggs, customizing their stat growth, and you can make weapons/armor by taking materials and tempering them with elemental coins. Golems are just random pieces of equipment strung together with some kind of AI instructions. Sound complicated? It is. In fact, it’s really too bad that none of  it’s even remotely necessary, because of the game’s ridiculously easy difficulty level. Even so, it’s very difficult to get anything useful out of these places, because very specific ingredients and items are needed to make something that’s better in any way than what you just find lying around.

Replay value is where this game is supposed to shine, I guess, and to its credit, there’s a lot of things that you can do differently. Different part of the map, different order of events, different weapons use, you name it. There’s even an adjustable difficulty the second time around, which is handy, since it makes for some challenge in an otherwise pretty easy game. Even so, the battle system’s not great to begin with, the item creation system less so, and the different weapons aren’t really all that different. The only remaining pleasure might be had from finding events that you missed on the first play-through, but if you follow a walkthrough, it’s possible to get every event the first time. So, that makes this game’s rating a dubious “at least once with a walkthrough, and who know how many without.” While you might manage to accidentally find more events yourself simply by trial and error, there’s a fair number that are very difficult to find without a clear idea of what you’re shooting for.

So, that was Legend of Mana. Really, not a terrible game, just not as great a game as could be expected. You’d think that the previous game in the series would have been a better choice to bring to the US, but I guess that wasn’t in the cards. The only thing I should mention before I get to the ultimate rating is that this game is pretty. The art is colorful, vibrant, and gives the game its own unique style. While the art doesn’t exactly make up for the problems with the game, and indeed occasionally exacerbates them, it’s still so good that I feel it deserves some mention. With that aside, this game gets a 7.0 out of 10. It’s underwhelming, but there’s little that’s jarringly wrong with it. The battle system’s extreme simplicity is the game’s biggest downfall, though the annoying town quests contribute too. It’s fun enough to at least play once if you follow a walkthrough.

Quick Tip: When selecting a location on the map to start your game, be sure to choose one that has very little water. You need a little water for those lands that require it, but otherwise, you’re better off on land.

How I Broke Game: If you press the attack button quickly, you go into a combo, with ghost outlines of yourself showing up. However, at the end of the combo, you can’t attack for a while. A friend and I figured out that if you wait just a little after the first hit, you can attack again without being in a combo. This means that you can be constantly attacking.

If you liked this game, then you should definitely try out some of these games. Dark Cloud and Dark Cloud 2 are action RPGs with weapon modification systems and town building aspects that are remarkably similar to those in Legend of Mana. Dragon Warrior VII and to a smaller degree Dragon Quest VIII share a certain amount of the episodic nature found in events. Odin Sphere has some similarly deep stories for its protagonists, and is also an action RPG. It’s quite a bit harder though, so be warned.

Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love Review

Every console deserves one final, great send-off game right? Sure, sometimes there are games that come out for the console afterwards, but the send-off game is the last one that’s any good. The game doesn’t have to be the best game for the console. It just has to be a game that is better than anything else that’s come out in the past couple of months. Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love, is that game for the Playstation 2. Just from reading the premise on the back of the box, you can tell that this game is going to interesting. Interesting doesn’t necessarily mean good, however, and the first Sakura Wars to hit the United States has some significant problems. Whether its high points can overcome these problems is what we intend to discuss right now.

Sakura Wars really has two battle systems, because it is both a dating sim and a strategy game. We’ll start off by looking at the dating sim aspect of the game. You take the role of Shinjiro Taiga, a young ensign from Japan. Arriving in New York, you find that the unit receiving you is less than pleased with you. Apparently, they were expecting your much more famous uncle, who is the star of previous games in the series. All of the female party members pretty much start off hating your guts, and it’s your job to show them that you’re up to snuff. Whenever you get time off, you can wander around to various locations in New York City, where you might encounter one of your teammates. If you do, you’ll frequently be treated to one of this game’s mediocre minigames, or better yet, get some dialogue options. Do well enough, or answer right, and the girl in question will start to like you more. The dialogue is frequently hilarious, whether you choose the best option or not. It’s probably the best dating sim to hit the mainstream American market, not that that’s saying much.

The other battle system, the strategy part, isn’t so hot. When you get into a battle at the end of every chapter, your characters get into their steam-powered mecha and fight crime. In this mode, you have a certain number of energy bars, which are expended while you move, attack, guard, and charge your sp for special attacks. So long as you don’t do anything else, you can move around with no penalty, simply regaining the expended bars when you get closer to your starting point. You can normal attack up to five times as part of a combo, and if you want to start again (assuming you have enough energy) you’ll start a new combo. Special attacks are powerful, but mostly consume your sp, and you can only use them once per battle. Joint attacks attack each enemy in a straight line between you and your partner, dealing damage based on how close the two of you are. See, that random dating was worth something. As the leader, Shinjiro can declare three styles: all-out attack, balanced, and total defense. There are times when you’ll want to use the other two, but mostly the default of balanced is best.

The missions frequently take the form of “destroy x and y so that you can attack the main form before it retreats. Mince, slaughter, repeat.” While there’s a little variety, like a mission where you have to save statues or defend your base of operations from suicide bombers, the battles are frequently pretty dull, and no amount of enlivened voice acting is going to stop you from fervently wishing that the boss would just die so that you can get on with the story.

Speaking of the voice acting, there’s a fun little thing about the Playstation 2 version of this game. You can play with the original Japanese voice cast or the English dub. The Japanese cast is pretty good, but the American cast does a decent job, and gets various characters’ accents across better. This reviewer was particularly fond of Diana’s English voice, because it perfectly fit her role as the party healer. On the other hand, Mexican loli Rosita is absolutely awful, sounding nearly as Russian as Mexican. The music is good, with several pleasant, jazzy tracks, and some excellent, energizing battle themes. There are even some decent somber pieces, which help set the mood when the story takes a turn for the darker.

This game is not hard. At all. If you do even decently at the dating sim part, the battles should pose little difficulty. Occasionally you’ll run up against a tactical snag or make a bad decision, but it’s quite unlikely that you’ll want to start a battle over again more than once or twice throughout the entire game. If you don’t mind losing points with a character when you let them die, it’s even easier. The completion time for this game is barely over 20 hours, which is short, but not too short. Fortunately, there’s ample reason to replay the game, as beating it not only unlocks a dialogue skip feature, but there are at least five character paths to explore, and innumerable dialogue options. So, that’s a solid “one for the money, two for the show, three to go steady, and six for the lols.” You might end up sandbagging a bit through the battle sequences, but the dating sim might actually be enough to keep you going that long.

Well, there you have it. I loved the Playstation 2 as much as the next guy, and I feel this is a good game to think of as the last. It wasn’t the most original thing out there, and it certainly wasn’t challenging, but it had lots of heart. The sense of humor evident in its production helps to overcome a lot of the trite material, as it’s always amusing to see a game go totally over the top.My overall rating for this game is 8.5 out of 10. It’s hilarious, fun, and pretty well localized. The voice acting is solid, with the exception of one character. The gameplay isn’t the best around, especially for the mecha battles, but it does pretty much everything else quite well. With this game, I feel I can truly say “So Long, My Love,” to a great old console.

How I Broke Game: Well, once I figured out that you could move as much as you wanted before you attacked, I used Subaru’s first turn to rescue two of the three statues you need to during her chapter’s first mission.

Quick Tips: Some times the best option is to say nothing! When you don’t like any of the choices, or you’ve tried them before and they didn’t work, try letting time run out. It occasionally is the optimal choice.

If you liked this game, you might want to check out one of these games. Persona 3 and Persona 4 almost have as much dating sim in them as this game does, and the RPG parts a much better. The humorous approach are remarkably similar to those found in Disgaea: Hour of Darkness and Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories. I guess Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria has a somewhat similar battle system, though it’s much more difficult.

The Legend of Dragoon Review

              HARPOON! Ahem. Excuse me as I get a few things off my chest. Cool Boogie! Flurry of Styx! Pursuit! Okay, I think I’m good now. So, yeah, The Legend of Dragoon. That game that was supposed to be a Final Fantasy VIII killer. It’s been a long time since I’ve reviewed a Playstation game, and this one’s going to be interesting. A long awaited game comes out and… nothing. Not awful, not raves, nothing. Apparently this one sold well enough that it merited greatest hits, but… no one seems to give this game much notice. Or at least, that seems to be the case for me. So, let me remember this game for you.

It starts out with a promising cg scene showing a village being burned and an army unit running through. They find a girl, test her with a glowy stone, and take her into custody. With voice acting. Hah! Take that Final Fantasy! We have voice acting in our game. Neener neener. When cut to our protagonist, Dart, as he returns to town, he is saved from a dragon by a mysterious stranger, named Rose. He makes it back to his village to find that it’s been burned down and his childhood friend Shana has been kidnapped. So, he sets out on an epic quest to save Shana, save the world, save Shana, learn the secret histories, save Shana, and right wrongs. Oh, and save Shana. It’s not a great story, but it might have been alright. There are some interesting myths associated with this world, and a number of the locations you visit look like they could be interesting. It’s really hard to tell, because a horribly mangled translation mars the whole project, and makes it so the story does not flow. The dialogue is stilted, and, when not outright grammatically incorrect, sounds awkward. It ruins the mood when the characters talk with a strange mix of over-formality and poorly-used informal speech.

The characters suffer from the same transration plobrems, which damage characters to one degree or another. The main character is pretty okay, if bland. He is completely oblivious to the fact that Shana has the hots for him since forever, and apart from that, he’s full of hot-blooded determination. Shana is the worst. Literally her only purpose in the story is to be kidnapped and serve as a thing for you to rescue. She’s not even an interesting character. Prince Albert has some interesting conversations acting as the well-educated ruler of a country, assuming you can understand through his awful translation. Meru is actually pretty good, because her perkiness makes it such that weird translations fit her character. Rose is good at being dark, brooding, and somewhat mysterious, and even seems to have suffered less bad translation issues.

It’s a good thing the battle system of this game is good, or it would have been a total bust. Each character has a number of “additions” that you can equip before battle. These additions are basically the normal attack of this game. Whenever you attack, you have to press a button (usually the X button, but occasionally the O) at the correct time. If you hit all of the timings correctly, the attack does significantly more damage, nets you more sp, and ends with the character announcing the name of the addition. In case you were wondering, that's what was with the beginning of the review. The voice acting on the attack names is definitely "so bad it's good." Anyhow, sp powers your other major battle ability, the titular Dragoon Spirits. Once a character has a Dragoon Spirit, they can transform into a Dragoon. Each turn in Dragoon form costs 100 sp, so mastering additions is very important. Dragoons can attack or use magic, and their defense power is doubled while in Dragoon form, as well as boosting all other abilities. This is the only use of magic in the game. Otherwise, players use attack and healing items. In this game, defending not only reduces damage, it heals 10% of a character’s hit points. It’s a good mechanic, as it gives you a reason to use the guard command, which is pretty much neglected in many RPGs. The various additions are really great, because each one deals a certain amount of damage, hits a certain number of times, and grants you a certain amount of sp per hit. They’re set up so that none are strictly better than any others, since even ones that do more damage and more sp gain frequently have more hits, so more opportunities to mess it up. Though there are some that you’ll find you want to use more frequently, it’s nice that you have to weigh the pros and cons. Similar balancing occurs in the equipment sector, where many weapons and armor have special abilities that make up for slightly lower power levels. It’s obvious that a lot of thought went into the equipment in this game, and the uniqueness of the items is another high point. Dragoon form is somewhat underwhelming, as it removes your ability to heal with items or guarding, and forces you to attack in some way each turn, even if the enemy has a counter attack. There’s a number of battles that you are heavily discouraged from using Dragoons in, making Dragoon form less a super form and more of a gimmick.

This game is very long. Four discs of long. Each disc will take at least 15 hours to complete, and probably several more. Part of this stems from the “random” battles, which are encountered after a set distance traveled. Most areas are set up that simply walking through the area will trigger at least one battle. Battles are fun, but they can get tedious if you’re just trying to get from point A to B. That, and the complete lack of any significant customization for characters, or a new game plus feature, or even many sidequests doesn’t help this game in giving players cause to replay it. Thus, this game is pretty much “nah, no thanks. Once was enough,” on replay value.

Well, it’s hard to tell by looking at all the things wrong with this game, but it is not exactly a terrible game. The game systems are balanced, so that there’s a decent amount of strategizing available to you. While the game is pretty easy on the whole, there are some boss fights that are remarkably challenging. If there had been a good translation of the mediocre story, it would have made for a pretty good game, where the battle system carried some of the weight of the story. However, with the translation as bad as it is, the story and characters are pretty much dead weight, and so the battle system is the only thing you look forward to. I frequently found myself becoming impatient during story sequences, because I wanted to get back to the battles. So, as it stands, the game gets a 7.2 out of 10. It’s still not a terrible game, but there are enough problems that I can’t even give it an average rating. It’s severely underwhelming for all the hype it’s given on the back of the case.

Quick Tip: On the ghost ship, make sure you play the treasure chest combination segment until you get an Ultimate Wargod. It’s a very useful accessory for when you just can’t quite seem to get a certain addition to work out.

How I Broke Game: So, I figured out that an enemy called OOPARTS frequently appears on the map stretch between the prison  and halfway to the commercial city. It’s fast, and frequently instakills your party members and runs away. If you defeat them though, you get a spirit potion and 600 gold, which is very handy for buying some snazzy equipment.

If you liked this game, then you might get a kick out of one of these games. The Shadow Hearts series (Shadow Hearts, Shadow Hearts: Covenant, and Shadow Hearts: From the New World) has a similar timing based battle system. Final Fantasy IX has a somewhat comparable high fantasy genre, with a world that is equally populated with interesting locales. Final Fantasy VI has a good amount of unique items, and lots of good ways to deck out characters with equipment.

Shadow Hearts Review

       It feels like I’m forgetting something. The month of pre-Final Fantasy X on the Playstation 2 has come and gone, but some of you might notice the absence of one game. That game is Shadow Hearts. It came out just a little more than a week before Final Fantasy X. Talk about cutting things close to the highly publicized debut of an incredibly popular series competing in the same genre. It’s a little bit too bad, because of all the games that came out on the system before the big FF, Shadow Hearts felt the most complete. Dark Cloud  is the only game that came close to feeling this complete, with the gameplay being really well balanced, but the story kinda got shoved in at the end. I guess I’m getting ahead of myself. On to the review of Shadow Hearts.

Things start off with a newspaper article about a man getting brutally murdered. You then cut to a girl riding on a train in Manchuria. Okay…. When this well-dressed gentleman walks down the aisles, killing all of the soldiers he meets, with pretty good amounts of blood, you definitely get the feeling that this story is going to be a little darker than your standard RPG fair. And, all in all, you’d be right. Shadow Hearts is rated “M” for a reason, and it’s not the sexy pantyshots. The game sets out to be a horror RPG, and it really does nearly as good a job as you can do with that concept. It gets legitimately creepy at times, and the story doesn’t shy away from grisly scenes. Otherwise, there’s not too much that’s terribly exciting about this plot, except possibly that there are two endings. There’s the bad ending, which is the default (and canonical ending). There’s also the good ending, where you have to defeat a couple optional bosses. For the most part, you travel around the snazzy alternate history Europe and Asia busting ghosts and destroying demons, trying to figure out what the people chasing Alice really want. Most segments play out like a particular ghost story, and that’s not so bad. You’ve got locales like a ghost village in China, a haunted bathroom, and an insane asylum. Yeah, you heard me, haunted bathroom. The game definitely has its own, ah, interesting sense of humor. Gives it a little bit more personality, so it’s not a bad thing.

The characters are pretty good. Yuri’s an amusing anti-hero, who manages to be tormented and sardonic without either element undermining the other. Alice manages to avoid being just another dumb healer chick, narrowly, by actually doing useful stuff and being overall pretty practical. I mean, she doesn’t just mope when around when she hits a bump around halfway through the adventure, she actually goes out and exorcises ghosts. The others are okay, with Zhuzhen (this game’s crazy old person) and Margarete Zelle (actual historical figure) keeping up the humorous banter quotient and Keith having a surprisingly blasé approach to life. The game’s antagonist does a good job of making himself despicable, enhanced by his maintaining the appearance of civility throughout.

The combat in Shadow Hearts is obviously meant to be pretty original, and to some degree it succeeds at this goal. Every action you take requires you to use the “Judgement Ring.” Basically, a cursors sweeps once around a circle with various zones marked off on it. You have to press the X button when the cursor is in one of the marked zones, called hit areas to execute the action. This system allows there to be two types of status effects in the game. Character status effects, which are similar to those in most RPGs, and ring status effects, which affect the way the ring works. For example, some effects increase the speed at which the cursor rotates, or make the ring smaller and harder to see. The other mechanic in the battle system is the Sanity Points system. Every character starts each battle with maximum SP, and loses one each turn. When the run out, they go berserk, attacking the enemies and allies randomly until the battle’s over. While this might not sound altogether bad, they also don’t receive experience from the battle if they end it while berserk. It doesn’t come up too much in random encounters, but SP can make boss battles rather difficult. In the end, it’s a nicely blended action and turn-based battle system. You get all the time in the world to choose your attacks, but you still have to pay attention when you get around to executing your actions.

Well, there’s an interesting dilemma to replayability. You have two different endings, and a new game + sort of feature. On the other hand, there’s not much that you can do differently for a lot of the game. You only barely have enough party members to choose a party in the first half of the game, and it’s not like you can customize character development too much. You can play around with accessories to some degree, but that’s only an option a bit later in the game. I guess this game’s replay value is something on the order of “at least 1.5 times to make sure you get both endings, probably two times just to make sure you get everything.” Believe me, you are going to miss things your first time through the game unless you are consulting a walkthrough pretty seriously.

I said this game feels the most complete of those that came before the FF. I guess that means that the story for this game was exactly what it was meant to be, the battle system was appropriately balanced and fleshed out, there were sufficient sidequests, and the capabilities of the Playstation 2 were adequately probed. Shadow Hearts did not, in other words, feel like a game that was rushed through certain stages of development before the creators were entirely satisfied with the results. So, that doesn’t mean that it’s a great game. Don’t get me wrong, Shadow Hearts is a very good game. It gets about 8.3. Not quite excellent, but very close. You might notice I rate it more highly than all the other early PS2 RPGs last month. It simply is a well-written, properly tested, and overall swell game. Even though the game came out just before FFX, it didn’t feel like it was being shot out to capture the market before the bomb hit. It seemed more like that’s when it happened to be finished. In a lot of ways, it’s similar to how Wild Arms was to FFVII.

Quick Tip: When you start getting lottery tickets, talk to everyone and try to find all 15 lottery members. There are six in Asia, and ten in Europe. Not only can you get some awesome items, but if you miss even one you miss out on an excellent item.

Fun Fact: Margarete is based loosely on the real historical Margarete Gertrude Zelle, who was accused and executed in France for being a German spy during World War I.

If you enjoyed this game, you might be interested in one of these other games. Shadow Hearts: Covenant is a direct sequel to Shadow Hearts. While it’s a little less on the horror end of things, it has a much better design for character customization and the combat system in general is more sophisticated. Not to mention that you get a special benefit if you have a completed Shadow Hearts save file. The Legend of Dragoon has a similar timing element to its battles, and a bit of similar playing around with accessories that you can do. Parasite Eve and Parasite Eve II  are also horror-based RPG that aren’t too bad, though they’re both moderately short games.

Final Fantasy X Review

Happy new year! What, you didn’t think I was going to build up the pre-Final Fantasy X Playstation 2 without getting to the main event itself did you? You may have guessed, but I’m not exactly a final fanboy. I like some games in the series, and like other less. Where does X rank in? Well, I’m not going to tell you. Yet. That’ll be another article. For now, let’s just look at the iconic series’ first entry onto the PS2.

Final Fantasy X starts out with a flashback, where the main character asks you to listen to his story, while the camera pans across the party camping out in the ruins of a city. Then you cut to the main character, default name Tidus, playing the silliest sport since Quidditch. This turns out to be a flashback in your flashback so you can flashback while you flashback. Confused? So is Tidus, when he comes to in some ruins and gets rescued by scuba divers. Eventually, he ends up washed ashore on the island of Besaid, where he meets most of the party, including his love interest, and sets out on a quest to save the world from the terrible monster that destroyed his home hundreds of years ago. For all that it’s a cookie-cutter plot, there is some decent political intrigue going through this game, and mildly interesting twists which, of course, I’m not going to get into.

The characters are mostly meh, with Tidus being pretty annoying and bratty for a main character. Wakka’s got his Hawaiian accent, Kimahri’s all stoic, and Rikku’s almost painfully chipper. The real up note is Auron. Everyone says it, but I’ll repeat; Auron is a badass. He always wears those shades, carries that booze for all he’s worth, and is the only one who consistently calls all the other characters on their idiocy. There’s a lot of that going around in this game. The villains are pretty bland. Really, they just want to destroy/rule the world. Nothing much to see here, move along.

The gameplay is pretty solid. Battles are turn-based for the first time in a while for the Final Fantasy series, but the pace doesn’t slow down much because of the way all the enemies and characters are animated. They never stop moving, and do a lot more than just bob up and down. Anyhow, characters’ abilities are an interesting mix of class and customizable. When a character gains a sphere level, they can move one space on the sphere grid, a massive board-game-like map of abilities and attribute bonuses. They all share the same map, but locks at various points make it so characters are stuck in a particular role until the locks can be removed. So at the beginning of the game, there are distinct character roles, while by the end of the game you can mould your characters however you wish. It satisfies both types of players, and that’s a pretty hard thing to do.

The replay value of this game is pretty limited. Sure, you can understand what the Al-Bhed are saying if you collect the primers on your first playthrough, but that’s not much. The character customization system means that you’re going to be stuck with characters who look pretty much the same at the beginning of the game, so there’s not much you can do to change things up until late in the game. I’d say this game is a “once through, twice only for the most devoted of completion whores.” It’s a fun game and all, but let’s not kid ourselves, there’s no particular reason to play the game again except for nostalgia, which you either have or you don’t.

Final rating? Well, I’ll try to be fair. I don’t want to get hate mail over this, because I know some people really like this game, but I also don’t want to underrate this game. It’s well-made, represents the first RPG on the system that made extensive use of voice actors (Shadow Hearts had some, but only occasionally), and set the standard for the system in terms of RPGs. Well, enough talk, this game gets a 8.2 out of 10. It’s better than your average game, and certainly better than most if not all of the other RPGs that preceded it on the system, but in the grand scheme of things, unremarkable. Unremarkably good, but unremarkable nonetheless.

Quick Tip: You might be tempted go straight through someone’s sphere grid. You might want to wait around at some lock spheres until you get key spheres to open them, since you can get to some potent abilities or combinations of abilities by doing this.

Fun Fact: Wakka and Kimahri have the same voice actor; John DiMaggio. He also voices Bender from Futurama.

If you liked this game, you should take a look at one or more of these games. Final Fantasy XII has good visuals and voice acting, a system of leveling up that is somewhat similar, and a plot chock full of excellent politics. The whole Xenosaga series (Episode I Der Wille zur Macht, Episode II Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Episode III Also Sprach Zarathustra) gets you into the story really well with gratuitous cutscenes, and there is some degree of customization of characters in it as well. Tales of Symphonia has a similar initial premise for the story, and has a similarly staggering array of sidequests.