Well I certainly hope it’s the last.
Now I’ll freely and openly admit that I’ve not been looking forward to reviewing this game. In fact, I’ve been putting it off since I was sent it well before Christmas. The reason for this is not that the game looks badly made (as some of the budget games I am sent do) or I have more interesting things to play, which is often the case when I put off writing reviews. The reason is plain and simple – I don’t ‘do’ JRPGs. From my first experience with Final Fantasy 4 I’ve always believed them to be overly pretentious in every single aspect, and much more complicated than they should get away with. Add to this the often-annoying anime characters, bad scripting, and (sigh) turn based combat, and you have a recipe for a very bored Sam (me).
What this means for you, the reader, is that this review will be a bit different. Since I have no reference games to compare this to, I’m reviewing it entirely on my experience of this game: the story, characters, battle system and the technical aspects. This means I may bring up a criticism that unbeknownst to me is par for the course in JRPG games. Please feel free to ignore this.
The game is centred around a young teenage boy named ‘Rush Sykes’ who is playing in a field one day when a message arrives from his researcher parents, asking Rush and his sister to go and live with them. Shortly after this, Rush’s sister is kidnapped, and he sets out alone to try and rescue her. He winds up in the middle of a battlefield and finds himself tagging along with a local leader of some importance named ‘Lord David’ (pronounced daveed) who rush annoyingly refers to as Dave, and this leader’s generals. Add to this a convoluted plot involving powerful remnants of a lost civilisation, and evil monsters who apparently have no purpose in the world but to do evil, and you could probably guess the rest.
I’ll start by briefly stating that I cannot possibly like any game where the main character is just plain annoying. I found myself regularly wishing that Rush would take an aided nosedive off a tall cliff, and would be replaced by a more likeable main character, but no such luck occurred.
When 5 hours had passed, I could force myself to play the game no longer
The first thing that hit me when playing this game was the mixed bag of graphics. I’ll admit I was playing this game on a HDTV, which I never use for games normally, so I was probably being blinded by much more ‘Bloom’ than is normal. Some of the background and setting were something of a sight to behold though, and the cut scenes were particularly cinematic. Unfortunately this is regularly soiled with heavy texture pop-in, which can be a real mood killer, and very noticeable frame rate issues, especially in battle sequences. At points these problems become so apparent it makes a player question whether the game was really ready for release. For example, during one fairly short battle, the frame rate issues slowed the game down to the extent that it briefly appeared to be some sort of slideshow, and after it was won and my team were pulling off some pretentious victory stance, a huge bolder appeared right in the spot where they had been standing for the past 2 and a half minutes.
Soundtracks in games are usually not particularly noticeable, so I was pleasantly surprised by the quality and epic feel of this one. Unfortunately even this is soiled by mediocre voice acting in places, and a complete lack of voice acting for the most part of the game, including the main story missions. Even when the voice acting is present, the lip syncing is sometimes so far off its awkward to watch.
I’ve been lead to understand that the turn based combat systems in JRPG games are usually very convoluted and difficult to pick up for beginners. Luckily I managed to pick up this battle system fairly quickly, but it seemed to me to be more about luck than the tactical decisions you make. Although you can choose from a limited menu of usually 5 or 6 attack types and other options, the descriptions of these are extremely vague, and more often than not I found myself simply choosing the attack type that required most attack points to perform, as I assumed it would be most powerful. This proved to be the case, and I never really needed to know more about the attack system than that. In the game, characters are grouped into ‘Unions’, which consist of a leader and several other members. These unions are assigned a collective battle command, making it very easy and quick to issue orders. It is possible to change the formations of your unions, but I found this to be of little consequence. It does not seem logical to me that you cannot change any of the other characters’ equipment. At several point I wished I could have equipped some of the members of my unions with better weapons, but to my surprise Rush is the only customisable character. If this is normal in JRPG games please forgive me, but I felt it left the player at a distinct disadvantage.
After reading a review from another well known website, it is my understanding that this game will take a player 50-60 hours to complete. I tried various side quests and tasks when playing it, and there are a small number of shops to buy equipment and provisions (again with descriptions which are vague to the point of being useless), but I could not possibly see how this game could keep anyone interested for that length of time. When 5 hours had passed, I could force myself to play the game no longer, as I simply was not having fun. This is probably more through my lack of knowledge and experience of JRPG games, but this game does not go any way towards changing my opinions.
If you are a dedicated player of JRPG games you may well enjoy this game more than I did. I suspect this will not be the case however, as the game is a technical mess and although it does have some redeeming elements it is impossible to overlook the bad points this game has. As I said in the opening, I don’t have much experience with JRPG games so I can’t say for definite that none of the things I’ve criticised in this review are normal in games of this type, but to me this game seems way behind the times considering the technology at our disposal today. If Square Enix had spent a few more months developing this game, it could have been pretty good, and may even have changed my opinion of JRPG games, but as it is, it feels rushed (no pun intended) and unfinished, and is merely long for the sake of being long.
The Bad: Filled with technical flaws, feels like a watered down JRPG, lack of complete voice acting, has a general unfinished feel.
