Alter A.I.L.A. Genesis

I should probably preface this review before getting into the “nitty-gritty,” as it were. This game is a remake of another RM game, the widely-acclaimed Alter A.I.L.A. I have not played the original, and so forfeited any benefits that playing the original would have bestowed upon me. So if there was anything I would have understood better if I played this original game, I did not have this benefit. Nor did I benefit from any “nostalgia” either. I went into this game with only very general knowledge about the Alter Aila universe, that it was science-fiction, a post-apocalyptic setting, there was a dictator, a rebellion, pretty much only really general stuff. Of course, I have heard only good things about this original game, so I went into this game with a lot of optimism even though I had never played the original myself. Let’s begin, shall we?



You begin the game as a young man named Leon, a very shy, quiet fellow who conveniently has amnesia and apparently finds himself in prison for some reason. He quickly forms an alliance with a few other inmates who offer to show him the ropes. The prison serves as a “game” of sorts, where prisoners fight against each other in war games for the amusement of the populace (basically its “The Running Man: The anime: The game”). Only the strong survive these games, with the winners being recruited into the military forces of Kugar, the dictator who rules this decaying world with an iron fist. But not everyone is happy with the totalitarian regime, and a rebellion has been brewing for some time. Eventually, Leon escapes the prison and is caught up in the machinations of both the government and the rebellion. Along the way, he will discover his own origins, learn the secrets of his friends and enemies, and the truth about who is really controlling events in the world.

Balance 3/5

A very curious thing happened to me the first time I played this. A mere 45 seconds into the game, you are thrown into your first battle. It’s a pretty standard set-up really. Your beleaguered protagonist finds himself ambushed and overwhelmed by enemies, only to be rescued by the fortuitous arrival of some allies who will teach him how to fight. Nothing wrong with this.

Except I really needed them to tell me how to fight beforehand.

I cannot adequately express just how daunting this battle system is at first glance. For the first time in nearly twenty years of playing RPGs, I felt like I had no idea what I was doing. Fortunately, a pretty decent tutorial was waiting for me a few minutes later, that would help explain the byzantine combat mechanics. Still, it is definitely worth mentioning how off-putting and unintuitive this all was. Be aware, player, if you should pick up this game, there is a considerable learning curve.

You see, you have two stats you must keep track of in combat, AP and EX. AP are used for all abilities, and every ability used causes the character to gain 1 EX. With enough EX, you can use stronger abilities in combat, and if you get 5 EX, you can unleash the devastating “Exceed” abilities to really ruin your enemy’s day. An ability can only be used if you have both enough EX and AP. Since you have no default “attack” option, each character has a basic attack ability that will be their mainstay in combat, generally using that ability to build EX to gain access to higher level abilities. Enemies use this system too, so you need to pay careful attention to what they’re doing. If you suspect they’re about to unleash an “Exceed” ability, you’d better be ready for it. If you find yourself in need of AP, you can spend a turn guarding to recover some, or use items to replenish it.

Each character starts with 5 abilities (generally) and will never learn any new ones over the course of the game. You can unlock new abilities for characters by trading in items to specific NPCs, but these NPCs are hard to find and chances are the average player isn’t going to unlock many over the course of normal gameplay. Characters also don’t really gain any stats upon level-up aside from HP. So how do your characters grow, then? Mostly, you equip them with “modes” that change how they gain EX and AP in battle, generally balanced by a trade-off of losing HP each turn. . You could turn a character into a conservative character with slow growth of AP and EX, or a super aggressive character that gains very rapidly but loses a great deal of health with each action.

So it seems there’s quite a bit going on here, being as I had to spend two paragraphs just describing the basic mechanics of the game. So how does it actually work in practice? Well, there are issues. The primary one being that your strategy throughout the game will never really change. I always found myself simply using my basic attack over and over again in combat waiting for my Exceed ability to be ready. Most of your other attacks are really not worth the expenditure of AP and EX, being as most of them are just fancy ways of dealing extra damage without much in the way of added benefit. True, you can sometimes hit an enemy’s weakness this way, but generally you can either hit something’s weakness with an equipped weapon, or just ignore the enemy’s weakness entirely. And you can also inflict some status effects, but these can easily be replicated with item usage, and the game literally throws items at you the whole way. Once you’ve figured out the ins and outs of combat, you’ve really experienced all the system has to offer.

Another serious problem comes from the way certain characters are balanced. Some characters are outrageously stronger than others. A handful of characters have such pitiful HP growth that a single blow will end them, at nearly any point in the game. In fact, almost any character could be killed instantly since all enemies tend to attack at the same time. All you can really do is hope they miss. Some characters also have multiple hitting basic attacks, while other characters do not even have a basic attack (they must spend a turn charging first.) Since there are many ways to manipulate your damage output, not the least of which is the ability to buy an infinite supply of attack-boosting items, it quickly becomes apparent that hitting more times is always better than hitting fewer times. This makes Violet, the only character with a triple-hitting basic attack and an astounding nine-hit exceed ability, far and away the best character to use in any situation, regardless of who or what you’re fighting.

Sure, you can make almost any character viable with creative combinations of syncs, moves, gear, equipment, and stat-boosters, but it’s a lot more effort for a lot less pay-off. It makes using most of the characters feel unrewarding or even frustrating. Especially since a lot of them will die if they get hit no matter what you do. Sure, you have a dedicated healer character who can fullheal the party every turn, but only if your character can live through a hit, which some won’t without an absurd degree of grinding. And some characters have very low base agility, which, in RM2k3 land, is the worst thing you can ever have
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Is this a problem? Well, not really. You can put together a decent party without any hassle. But it feels like a cop out to have ten playable characters, exactly 3 of which are actually any good.

There are also sequences where you’ll only have access to certain members, including the aforementioned characters who die in one hit. Have fun with that.

Enemies usually come in moderately-sized groups, and enemies have very specific archetypes they can fall into to easily identify their weaknesses. This makes it easy to figure out what move to use on them on the rare occasion that you aren’t just spamming your basic attack. Bosses, mostly, use the same techniques and strategies as you. They’ll use their lower-end abilities while building up to wipe you out with their more powerful ones. Sometimes, anyway. Other times, they won’t do anything particularly interesting at all.

Bosses in general tend to have a lot more HP than feels necessary as well, meaning you’ll have to repeat the same actions ad nauseum until it finally dies. One fight that comes to mind was near the end of the game. This was a one on one duel boss battle that had a great deal of storyline build-up. But once the battle started, the two characters were quickly locked into the exact same pattern forever, with no possibility of me being defeated, and them never doing anything to end the stalemate. This went on for so long that the fight actually became boring, in spite of the implications this battle had for the storyline. This same problem would arise again during an end game boss, who again, had a mountain of hit points while also being exacerbated by said boss having periods during which he couldn’t be damaged. (By the way, having invincible enemies in a turn-based RPG where your characters only ability options are to attack the enemy for no damage? Not the best idea.)

In spite of the long rant I just had regarding this game’s balance, I actually didn’t think it was bad, I feel like most of the serious issues were more in the RM2k3 side than the developer’s side. But given the huge amount of work that went into coding so much of this system from the ground-up, it is sad to see a lot of very easily-solved issues become such serious problems.

In closing, the combat in this game was too cool for me.

Level Design 2/5

The first and most obvious thing you’ll notice about the levels in this game would be that it is side-scrolling, not the traditional top-down view most RPGs have. This has a few obvious advantages, like being able to emphasize vertical designs in dungeons.

Unfortunately, it also makes the level-designs unintuitive as all hell.

Since the perspective of corridors changes depending on what direction you’re moving in, you might walk into a door way in the foreground (down, from your perspective) and suddenly be walking to the left. This can make it very hard to tell just exactly where you are now in relation to where you just were, which is often important if you’re looking for a switch or a key or some means to open a locked door. Sometimes you’ll go through a series of seemingly unrelated doors and end up right back where you started with no clear idea how that was possible. This can make navigating extremely frustrating until you get used to the fact that dungeons are shaped like Gordian knots. One particularly confusing dungeon at least had the decency to show me a map so I could know how lost I was. These would have been welcome additions to many other dungeons.



Fortunately, this problem gets less and less pronounced as the game goes on, later dungeons have more coherency and a bit more logic to their layouts, but they can still be confusing. In this regard, the game does not put its best foot forward.

Throughout the game you’ll go through the typical array of switch-hitting, key-finding, water level-raising, all the typical RPG elements here, but the sideview gimmick gives each of these a bit of a spin. The water levels, for instance, are often used to great effect. The downside to this, of course, is that I haven o idea why someone would intentionally try to replicate the Water Temple form Legend of Zelda that we all cringe just thinking about.

The game loves to hide items all over the place, so a dedicated explorer will turn up mounds of items over the course of your adventure. These can vary from merely useful items to “modes” that can make your characters far more powerful, so it’s almost always worth the time and effort to explore every room to make sure you don’t miss anything. There are also a wide variety of secret passages scattered throughout the game for all you completionists to hunt down.



There are other issues though. Having a side-scrolling game where you can’t jump feels like it has something missing. You’ll also find a lot of times you’re simply climbing ladders or walking left or right endlessly without a clear idea of exactly what you’re supposed to be doing. Sure this is what you do in a lot of RPGs, but since this game uses a side-scrolling view, there is some expectation that there would be a little more action; more obstacles to dodge, enemies to avoid, and the like. A lot of dungeons end up feeling pretty empty. It’s a psychological thing, and I might be the only person who has a problem with it.

In short, the level-design in this game was too cool for me.

Characters 3/5

I’ve already mentioned a bit that not all the characters in this game are created equal. That’s understandable to a large extent in a game with so many characters. Obviously, not all of them are going to get the exact same amount of screen time or development. But the game seems to introduce a lot more than it intends to resolve, leaving the player often puzzled as to the motives of certain characters. I understand a sequel is in the works that will likely address some of these, but the nature of the game’s ending seems to suggest that many of these questions will be left forever unresolved. Maybe some of these things were better explained in the original, but it still left me feeling pretty unfulfilled.

Most of the characters have very basic, easily-identifiable character traits to exhibit for most of the game. After a while, you’ll almost get the feeling that the creator was simply going down a list of stock anime characters and checking them off one by one. This would be fine if the characters ever went against or defied these conventions, or underwent significant development, but really none of the characters seem to grow or change from the experiences in any noticeable way. This can lend itself to a lot of awkwardness when you realize that many of these characters would not work well together on a team at all.

This lack of depth on the characters’ parts works against the narrative, unfortunately. We begin the game with Leon, who is quiet, stoic, and unaware of the world he has found himself in. But since Leon rarely talks and never expresses his feelings, it’s really hard to identify or sympathize him. This makes the first phase of the game feel somewhat awkward since we’re following the point of view of a character we really have no grounds to understand at all, and staggeringly little of the plot has the slightest thing to do with him. This becomes less of a problem later in the game, when the real protagonist, Erin, who has discernable motives, ideals, and beliefs, starts to take center stage. But we’re still following Leon’s point of view for most of it and we never really gain any new understanding of him. This is unfortunate, being as we’re stuck with the most boring character for most of the game, while potentially more interesting ones are off-screen a lot more often.

As you get further into the game it becomes harder and harder to understand a lot of the characters’ motives. Some villains will seem to change sides back and forth for little discernable reason, to suit whatever needs the plot has for them. Again, maybe these villains had clearer motives in the original, but I do not know for sure.

Among the main cast, Scott is the only character who really seems to stand out as having any real personality. Most of the rest have one defining character trait that governs their every action (Except Violet, who has none, but we can forgive her because she rules.) There are a few characters who I suspect have little real role in the plot and were only included because they were in the original (where I assume they had more of a defined role.) All in all, most of the characters fulfill whatever small part of the plot they were necessary for and silently exist in the background for the rest of the game. I suppose it could be worse!

Story 3.5/5

I understand that one of the major draws of the original Alter AILA was that it was very non-linear. There were various factions you could join that would completely change the storyline as you played. Well, not to spoil anything, but no such options are given here. The story is completely linear and you are never given any options to choose what side you want to fight for. It seems a fairly odd choice to remove the main hook of the original game, but I suppose that would have interfered with the story-telling planned for this installment if it had.

This game takes place in a dystopian sci-fi world in a post-apocalyptic era. The world feels very lifeless and dead, and achieves excellent atmosphere in most areas. However, most of the obvious elements of the setting, like the desolate slums, abandoned cities, and reality-show prisons seem derived more from the ruthless dictatorship ruling the land, or in some cases, from specific events explained in the game’s backstory that have nothing to do with the world being in a post-apocalyptic era. In other words, I wasn’t sure what this game actually gained by claiming the “post-apocalyptic” tag, because almost nothing in the setting can’t be better explained by something else. The world doesn’t feel post-apocalyptic at all, in fact. The villain has a huge, lavish, well-furnished palace, there are well-maintained military installations, and a large, thriving city. I never felt like this was an “After the end” sort of scenario at all, just a story taking place in a country that sucked.



The main story is nothing outstanding, it might be what you would describe as a “Typical anime story,” but it is serviceable and manages to be fairly entertaining even if it is never blasting any new ground. One of the strongest points in the game is the presentation of the plot, which is conducted almost exclusively in hand-drawn cutscenes that not only look nice but are very expressive and help convey the story in a way that simple sprites never could. While there are a few nonsensical plot twists, for the most part it is enough to keep you playing even if you’re never really on the edge of your seat.

While a handful of sidequests can be found during the main game, this project features a very extensive post-game during which several brand new dungeons open up and a variety of new things to find become available. You can search for each character’s hidden super weapon, unlock their special abilities, take on some end game bonus bosses, and a bunch of other fun stuff that give the game a lot of replay value. Unfortunately, the scant character development taking place during the main game comes to a complete halt in the post-game, as there is no longer any dialogue at all.

Music and Sound 4.5/5

The soundtrack from this project comes almost entirely from various anime (sensing a pattern?). For the most part, the soundtrack is excellent, high quality and fits together very well, making the entire game experience more pleasing. The tracks do an excellent job establishing the atmosphere and setting in each area, the battle music is suitably exciting ,and some of the boss tracks are downright epic. Very possibly the strongest point in the entire game, at least in my opinion. Some people have complained that the final boss music is unfitting though. I am afraid I have to agree.

Overall 3.5/5:

It probably sounded like I disliked this game more than I did. I definitely think it is an enjoyable experience if you are willing to put up with some of the more frustrating aspects of the game. If you’re on the fence about trying this title, I definitely recommend at least giving it a try. However, in spite of the excellent presentation of this title, I feel like its various flaws drag it down from true greatness.

In the end, this game was just too cool for me.