If you are around gaming communities long enough, you’ll inevitably hear about some game that becomes extremely popular and seemingly everyone raves about how amazing and perfect it is. In my experience, it’s a good idea not to get swept up into the hype; after all, I’ve gotten the impression that Earthbound, Mother 3, and Portal are supposed to be in that category, yet the Mother trilogy has some pretty big problems across all three games, and Portal is just straight up boring. However, the game I beat today, while not perfect. might actually come close to meeting its reputation, as it at least holds up as an enjoyable game.

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  12 hours playtime

  no achievements

This is a turn-based RPG, though it has a few notable changes to the usual formula. Assuming you are still capable of starting a blind play-through by now, the first thing you’ll notice is that enemy attacks take the form of Shmup-esque bullet patters, and you have to avoid them manually by moving around the screen. For the most part, you can move up, left, down, and right, but there are a few battles that change the mechanics of your movement. For example, one of the battles turns the mechanics into a platformer, which I highlight because it decided to make up the jump button, which is rather clunky (especially on controller), and with as popular as this game is, I’m surprised this hasn’t been changed (surely someone would have brought it up before now, right?). Luckily, it’s only for one battle (two if you count post-game content).

The next difference you’ll notice is that the game prioritizes sparing monsters over fighting them. You can still fight them if you want (and the game even has a “hit the button at the right time” mechanic so fighting requires a bit more interactivity than just selecting a menu option), but for each battle, there’s an “ACT” category that gives you the option to “check” an enemy to get more info about them. This category also provides a bunch of other options that are different for each fight, and you have to select the right options in order to dissuade your opponents from fighting, at which point you’ll be able to spare them and move on with the game. You might think that this turns battles into little puzzles since you have to figure out how to get them to stop fighting, but for the most part, the game practically tells you how to do this if you “check” the monster. Of course, not killing anything means you don’t get exp, but the game is balanced around not leveling up, with enemy attacks never taking more than a few points of health per hit.

The last difference I’ll point out is a bit more subtle. If you read my very first post (the one about Baten Kaitos), you might remember that I said “I’m all for adding more gameplay to the non-battle parts of RPGs” when I brought up the game’s block puzzles. This is because plenty of RPGs don’t have much game-play for the non-battle parts; it’s mostly just town exploration and walking from point A to point B, and if you can’t reach point B, the game lets you know you have to go get item C from point D or hit switch E to remove barrier F. Don’t get me wrong; this game has its fair share of long, empty halls and switch hunts, but it also has its fair share of parts where you actually have to do more than just walk and hit the confirm button, like avoid lasers or solve block puzzles.

Like I mentioned in the opening, this game is rather well made. The mechanics are solid, the challenges are varied but never too drastically different, and there’s even a bit of a consistent difficulty curve, with enemy attack patterns getting more complex throughout the game. Honestly, most of my complaints are really minor, like the lack of a run button and the fact that 3rd-person-plural pronouns are used to refer to an individual character when the game wants to be gender-neutral (it gets especially bad at doing this in the post-game ending), but I do have one issue that I feel is rather major. You see, while most of the monsters have obvious ways to spare them, the game makes some of them unintuitive at best and misleading at worst. For example, one of the first NPCs you meet lets you know that if you “ACT” a certain way or fight until the monster is low on health, it won’t want to fight you and you can spare it. Well, not much longer after that, another NPC tells you to prove your strength to it if you want to progress, then it sends you into battle. The first thing I tried to do was use my “ACT” options, but the only one available besides “check” flat out told me that it didn’t work whenever I picked it, so naturally, based on what both NPCs said, I thought that this was a battle where I had to fight until the enemy was low on health because that’s how hints work. Well, it turns out that, for this battle, the game decided to break the rule it had established mere minutes before, as well as break a consistency that most RPGs have, and made it so that after a few attacks, the damage you deal to the enemy increases significantly, and in this case, it went from taking only a small fraction of health to an instant kill, with the next NPC commenting on the monster’s death. Normally, I’d progress through the game without thinking too much about this moment, but I knew that the game has multiple endings, so I looked up a walk-through, and it turns out that if you want to access the post-game content, you have to get past pretty much every monster without killing them, including this one. Sure, you can still make it to the end of the game just fine after this, and I did read that the game gives you hints on what to do differently to access the post-game after you beat the game for the first time, but this doesn’t change the fact that the game leads the player into doing something that locks out the post-game content. This means that if you killed a monster and want to try again to unlock the post-game content, you have to start the entire 8-9 hour campaign over again, and although the game is good, I don’t think it’s that good. Sure, there are some different lines of dialogue you can get if you start over, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re walking through the same settings, fighting the same enemies, etc., and personally, I don’t think that much repetition is worth a couple extra bosses and some new story bits.

As for what the post-game has to offer, it’s an extra dungeon, a few new bosses (although you pacify one the exact same way as a previous boss), a different form for the final boss (though it sometimes re-uses attacks from previous bosses, and not in a new way, either; it literally just reuses their individual, easier-to-dodge attacks), some additional world-building, and of course, a new ending.

EDIT: Speaking of the final boss, I should probably also mention some of my issues with it, even if it’s a bit of a spoiler. For the normal ending, there’s two phases for the final boss. The first phase has some pretty complex attack patterns, some of which may or may not be impossible to dodge, so I recommend bringing a few healing items with you into this fight. The first phase also makes you think that the game is gonna have a final boss with an actual personality and motivations, but then it pulls the rug out from under you for the second phase and has a final boss that wants to destroy the world for seemingly no reason and is defeated with the power of friendship. This part is also rather sinister since not only does it have a couple attacks that I’m convinced can’t be avoided, but it decided to get around this by having moments where healing items move across the screen, as well as having the boss’s attacks deal less damage to you the less health you have. Plus, if you still manage to die, you’ll find out that the game saves your progress at around six different points in the fight (usually right after when the healing items show up), so it’s more about spectacle than being an actual final challenge. The post-game’s final boss changes things up a bit: now, it wants to destroy the world because it lost someone it cared about and is defeated with the power of friendship. It’s clear why this game’s story is so highly regarded. Also, instead of being a disappointing climax because dying doesn’t set you back very far, it’s a disappointing climax because dying doesn’t set you back at all. The game does hint that if you die enough, it actually will set you back for real, but that never happened to me, and I don’t think it happened to any other player; again, it’s all just spectacle, but even more than last time since you can’t die. To be fair, the post-game’s final boss has attack patterns that are hard to dodge without being seemingly impossible (when it isn’t reusing other bosses attacks that are even easier to dodge), so it could at least be reworked into a genuine climax.

Overall, this is a pretty good game, and I would recommend it, but if you have any interest in the post-game content, I recommend keeping a walk-through handy, even if it’s your first play-through. The game is well made for the most part, and the only unintuitive parts are regarding what you have to do to access the post-game and various Easter eggs rather than basic progression, but when the game decides to be unintuitive, it goes all in.

(mood music)

THE NEXT STORY!

YOU HAVE YOUR CONTRACT; DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO ACCOMPLISH THE OBJECTIVE!

COMING NEXT SCENE:

“ONE-MAN BRIGADE”