Beat. Upon starting the game I thought I was choosing between 2 different characters; a hot girl and a not so hot girl. So I chose the hot valkyrie looking girl and considered the spear the best weapon for her aesthetic. It was not until much later that I realized the beginning was just a gender choice, after I seen how almost every human looking guy looked very feminine. There were a few humorous lines referring to the girl character, like one making fun of her hair pipes. Next I was faced with putting locations on the map, and there was an overwhelming amount of info on the map about each element. I wondered if I had to place stuff with feng shui to get bonuses or synergies, but the game never taught me about it so I ignored it. I later read that a few side quests could only be done with certain placements and that there was an optimal way to place stuff. I just put stuff wherever since I had no idea what kind of biome it would be, and then made up stories about why the land was set up and settled that way. It was kind of dumb how many of my cities were very close and the biomes did not match up well. I did mildly like this placement aspect as it reminded me of civilization, but as the game went on I realized that only a small portion of the world map was used. This in turn led to probably the worst aspect of the game; the confusing backtracking to previous areas. I expected each placed location to be a 1 and done mini adventure with the entire world eventually being filled in. I had fun early on while the game was like that. I recruited the 2 kids, upgraded my spear twice at new shops, then swapped to a dagger that dropped from a blade enemy in a spooky tower dungeon. Soon after this I ran out of new locations and did not know what to do. There were 2 or 3 quests that I could not figure out, including a ghost mystery at the port town. Had to resort to a walkthrough, and it turned out I was missing a dialogue trigger. I had similar problems at points throughout the game, with characters not being where the walkthrough said, and otherwise fumbling around trying to figure out what trigger progressed the quest. Another big problem was the map layout of some areas and complete lack of in game map. The jungle was bad and the 1st time I used online maps. This place and others had interconnected screens that looped around and had samey looking layouts. Seriously, way too many reused assets for a ps1 game. Most of the wilderness areas were frustrating and tedious like this. I followed the walkthrough until the end, upgrading to a 2h axe earthsplitter dropper from an enemy, then finally the spear star gazer dropped from an enemy. Items only had names without any kind of type icon so I often had to go into the equipment menu too see if I found something cool or just another item. FF1 on NES had equipment icons for Christ sakes, and this was the ps1.

There was also blacksmithing, beast capturing/raising, golem crafting, farming, and magic from musical instruments. I made a few instruments to try out the magic but it seemed to be only nukes, no healing or buffs. Lame. Music could be used to tame elemental spirits to get elemental items, kind of like a more convoluted and time consuming version of FF8's draw. I did this a few times but never bother with golems or smithing. This kind of stuff makes me not want to play without a step by step guide to optimize it with minimal investment. But the game was easy enough to get by without engaging with all these systems. Even though I did die a few times, the game was more than easy enough to get by with simple found and bought gear. Why even put all these mechanics in the game if you don't need to use them to win? The only 1 I needed was a pet to add a 3rd party member for a switch in 1 dungeon. It made me go back home and look at the 3 eggs I had captured. I had retarded no limb pikachu, some dumpy tadpole thing, and bad ass garuda the giant bird. Guess which one I used. The bird of course. It began far under leveled at level 1 but did half decent in battle. It even managed to level up a bit by picking up some xp gems before me. Stupid having to manually pick up xp and loot from enemies during combat before it vanished. The bird had some cool moves; wind area hit wing flap, ranged shot, and picking up an enemy to drop from higher up. Though I did find it a bit more difficult to chain stun enemies with the extra team member attacking. The game had light attacks to X and power attack to square. Light did a combo of different moves, which for the spear went long range stab to close range swirl, to long range sweep with a cooldown afterwards that disabled attacking. The other melee weapons I tried were similar. The best tactic was to delay slightly after pressing X to ignore the combo and just do the 1st fast long range hit over and over without any kind of cooldown. Many bosses never even got an attack off. The power attack had a cooldown too and was mostly useless. Sometimes I used it as the finishing blow, and with the right distance against certain enemies it could do a moderate power aerial hit with no cooldown. The other 2 face buttons could be mapped to a variety of simple moves. I chose defend and counterattack, which later upgraded to counterstrike. Counter was awesome, doing massive damage if I timed it correctly. With only 2 slots though I saw no point in trying out the other moves. Then the 4 L and R buttons could be assigned to weapon techs or magic. I only ever had the 2 basic spear techs, while 2h axe and dagger I only had 1 tech each. They were decent for avoiding big attacks and did pretty good damage. Apparently I needed to experiment with the other moves to unlock better techs. But I breezed past the final boss. After that I used a better walkthrough to finish as many side quests as I could. Looks like I failed the treasure map quest and could not progress that series. I also missed a quest regarding the playboy bard before he turned to stone, and a few relating to world placement.

Final stats (noting that which stats raised depended on weapon type equipped)

Lvl 64, 845 hp, 54 str, 81 tech, 62 defense, 52 magic, 36 hp (should be called con or vit), 58 spirit, 66 charm, 5 luck, almost 19k money.

Star gazer 42 attack, lorant breastplate, lorant boots, bloody mask.

Seems both spear and dagger focused on tech. My physical protection was great but magic defense was not so good. The bird was lvl 11 and my instruments were loral harp, holly flute, and gator drum. Just from making whatever from the stuff I was given from the magic tutorial quest.

I did not like this game and have no interest in new game plus or playing again. On the good side some of the characters and subplots were good, and a lot of the music was great. But the overall design of the game was deeply flawed and it really seemed like it was made by Square's B or C team, nevermind all the reused assets and missing quality of life features. Obtuse non linear plot progression, mostly self contained mini stories rather than an over arching narrative, way way too easy, superfluous mechanics that were like they only asked if they could not if they should, confusing navigation, being able to move around and attack during others's special moves but not doing any damage, weird perspective backgrounds that often made me get stuck on NPCs or the environment, lack of clear indication where screen exits were, ridiculous looking animal people, and more. It was definitely experimental but maybe not worth experiencing.

6.2/10