Pier Solar and the Great Architects (2014)

I'm so pissed at this game I could cry. I was about to go to the last dungeon, so I was doing some wrap up beforehand. Right near the end, they give you a fast travel device. By this point, they've locked us out of about half the locations in the game for some reason. So the fast travel thing goes to about five spots.

Anyways, I'm basically all set, double checking I didn't leave any loose ends. I use the fast travel vehicle thing to go to one of the locations. I noticed they removed a platform letting me get back through this area, so instead of backtracking (more on this later), I hit the warp back buttons to get back where I arrived. But I did not. I arrived in an area I was in maybe an hour ago. Um, what? Okay, so I re-load the game. And I'm still back there. I'm panicking. I walk another hour and a half-ish to places where the teleporter thing should be. And it's not there. After retracing my steps and seeing how far I can go in either direction, I realize I'm fucked. My fast travel vehicle is stuck on an island I'm not at, and I have no way of getting there. Or proceeding with the game.

So basically, the game autosaved when I walked from one screen to another in this previous dungeon. If I was walking through this dungeon and hit the warp button (which fyi is a controller shortcut they added into this version), this is where I'd wind up. Somehow, walking through the entire rest of this dungeon, back to the town and building with the transporter, and transporting to the next point, and hitting warp, took me back to that autosave point. Which had for real saved. So I'm fucked. I hadn't thought any of the previous auto saves wrote over my file, or why it hadn't saved again in the last place I was at, but alas. "Why don't you have multiple saves going like all other JRPGs?!?" you may be asking. Good question! Because each save gets one file, and you can only save to that one as you go. There's no option of what "slot" you want to save in. If I had thought to copy my save at some point, I could have had that, but I had no reason to.

They had made the warping "feature" unusable in certain other screens, so I'm imagining they just didn't test or do this one.

This all could have been solved in a couple easy ways.

1. If you're going to make most of the previous locations inaccessible, then why the fuck give me access to an area that has literally NOTHING IN IT TO DO, and not have it trigger a save or anything, or have a save point?
2. Instead of making these six or so places dependent on a "vehicle," just make all of the warp points work to go to each other. I couldn't get out of this predicament not because I didn't have access to the warps, but the vehicle.

This is stupid. Normally I would take this more in stride, but this is just the shit icing on this crap game. So here's my review now, I guess.

The game starts out with one plotline that expands a bit and grows to another, more complex one, but along the way, the game jumps the shark a bit and slips in a "Zeromus," we'll call it.

Background and most location graphics are decent. The character portraits and still frames are ok, but some of them look weird to me.

All other graphics - sprites, monsters, spells, animations, NPCs - look horrible. I go back to this well often, but if Final Fantasy 6 made all this work in 1994, why can't a game made today with all the tools available?

Sound effects are annoying and repetitive.

The music is super weird, I'm not sure how to describe. Not weird as in ooky spooky, but like kind of amateurish? Like they're really into scales? I don't know, I wasn't a fan, there's a couple of okay tunes but it's mostly not great. And what the fuck is the sleep-at-the-inn music even supposed to be??

Okay, so the world design and gameplay. Fucking. Suck. First off, everything takes forever. Thank god they let you turn off animation and speed up battles. 4x is still not really enough. Powerful abilities are kept not only behind your MP pool, but you also have to spend turns "gather"ing energy, up to five levels, to use them. Some items and gear raise your gather level, but it also wears off, sometimes as quick as one turn, which means if you have a 5 gather attack queued up, and you lose the gather, then your turn is just wasted. Ok idea, awful implementation.

There are maybe 12 or so different enemies. A couple palette swaps. A handful of bosses, some of which are repeats. For a game as long as this was, where dungeoning and fighting take up as much time as they do, I would think there'd be some variety.

Mercifully, you can also adjust encounter rate, so most of the time I just turned it off unless I needed some grinding, then could crank it to 8x.

As far as grinding goes, levels in this game just aren't important. There's even a trophy for only fighting mandatory fights, meaning you beat the game around level 6. But, equipment is important. And equipment is all STUPID EXPENSIVE, meaning most of your grinding is farming money. Especially as there's a steady increase in difficulty, but gear becomes obsolete very quickly. You do get a money boosting accessory, but only near the end of the game where you don't even need it anymore. Luckily, all your best equipment is free, you just have to obtain keys and open chests in one town. One characters' stuff is part of a game long side quest, so if you skip a step, you're fucked, but it's not that big of a deal.

The pacing and design of the game is fucking atrocious. NPCs talk about nothing important, but sure have a lot to say. Every town, dungeon, house, tunnel, whatever, is laid out like a goddamn labyrinth, so you waste SO MUCH TIME getting back and forth from point a to point b. Oh, and you WILL, absolutely, be going back and forth a lot. Obstacles, one way paths, and deadends are everywhere, making the simplest tasks take forever. One interconnected dungeon and town - Meho and Teusa, if you're familiar - take what feels like an eternity to get through. THEN you get to a big city called Verahansha or something like that, and that takes HOURS LONGER to get through. It also seems like half the game is hidden behind invisible pathways, so hope you enjoy pressing up against every fucking wall in sight. Lol, and rubbing salt in the wound, a couple towns boast about their lovely maze gardens, and I'm just sitting here like boo, your whole damn town is a maze, but go off, queen. Like you just have to laugh at how silly it all is. One dungeon you navigate almost entirely in the dark. There's not even a reason for it.

So yeah, this game is a boring slog at best, and a time wasting, not enjoyable, amateur piece of untested/un-criticized garbage at worst. By that I mean, someone needed to take a critical eye to this before selling it. No one told them their game sucked to play and navigation was awful? How this sold out two runs or something of physical Genesis cartridges and a Dreamcast version is beyond me.