Phantasia Gaiden

I'm a fan of RPGs from older systems, even when they're often overly grind-heavy and cryptic. Seeing the history of the genre and how many of the conventions we take for granted started is priceless as far as I'm concerned. Retro RPGs like this one, then, are in an odd spot - evoking nostalgia of older games but not actually being older games and being held to a higher standard. After all, it's easy to complain about Dragon Quest 1 being grind-heavy before you realize that RPGs on home consoles were still new at the time, but nobody will forgive your Dragon Quest fangame being 95% grinding no matter how much nostalgia it can carry.

Graphics: 3.5/5
Graphics were entirely ripped from older RPGs, although I didn't find any parts where they massively clashed with one another. The biggest issues I could find is bland tileset usage and mapping in many parts of the game, but it was overall fine to look at.

Sound: 4/5
As a nostalgic game like this, all the music and sound is ripped from other games, but it's used effectively here. From what I've heard, some of the music was given some editing to make sure that it fits in with the rest of the soundtrack, which is a very nice effort and an even nicer touch. Sound effects, however, were not given the same level of care and sometimes sound a little off with the rest of the game's Game Boy-esque approach, like stuff from FF6. Overall, though, the audio experience was above what I expected.

Story: 3.5/5
I might just have low standards for a nostalgic game like this, but I can imagine a game of the era having a storyline like this. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there was one. The biggest issue I found was that some parts of the plot weren't especially clear on explaining wha4 to do next.

Gameplay: 2.5/5
This is where the game falters most. You're given a choice at the start of the game between two extra characters to take with you, without any chance to change them once you've selected them. Let's just say that some party combinations will be much harder than others, but I went with a team of Wataru and Reina and generally had an alright time. The fourth party slot is reserved for "guest" party members, and they have their own issues to be explained later.

Combat balance is good, with a difficulty spike right near the end but nothing too major. The biggest issue is just how frequently you'll be thrust into combat - dungeons are surprisingly large for a game claiming to be as small as Phantasia Gaiden and encounter rates are high enough you'll be fighting a new group of enemies every few steps. You could probably get along just fighting about half of the enemies you encounter and still be able to make it to the end just fine, though. Combat does get repetitive at times, though, with most of it resolved with healing and hitting attack over and over again, sometimes throwing on buffs and debuffs when needed. It's only rarely that you'll be forced to use skills to attack enemies or that doing anything besides standard attacking and healing is anything more than a waste of resources.

Navigation was a huge issue I encountered. The plot isn't always obvious on where you're meant to go to advance it, leaving you to wander the world in search of the one thing you were supposed to do to make progress. I was stuck for a while until I found out that the place I was supposed to go, after being told that it was in an area to the north of a certain town, was actually to the west of said town - for added confusion, there's a tile usually used to mark a place you can enter to the north of the town, but it's just there for decoration and cannot be entered. Immediately afterwards I was told to go to a town...except nobody in said town speaks to you to tell you what town it is and nobody in the game ever tells you which town it is, just the name and that it exists. If you're going to emulate older RPGs, it's best not to emulate the frustration caused by their sometimes overly cryptic nature.

Guest party members are also an issue. They end up either being extremely useful and helping you a lot in dominating the battlefield, or they're almost completely useless weights holding down the fourth slot in your party. They're also stuck with AI control, which means that they waste all their MP as soon as possible in a game with very rare opportunities to recover MP outside of inns and certain pools of water and render themselves stuck with their nearly worthless basic attack. The worst part about this fourth slot is that, for some reason, it's just left empty for the final dungeon, which is the one place where you'd think you'd be sure to have one, leaving your last slot lonely and unfilled for the rest of the game.

Overall, there are plenty of issues with the gameplay, and many of them would honestly not be that difficult to fix. There were plenty of minor errors, ranging from a Life item with the same description as a standard healing item and an ice sword that states it deals fire elemental damage to a chest that contains an infinite supply of endgame-level armor. I feel this is the weakest part of the game by far, and it's more a large amount of small issues rather than a few big ones, which makes the lack of polish even more sad.

The bugged chest in question.

Overall: 2.5/5
I feel that this game has a lot of serious issues that stopped it from living up to the full potential that it could have had. It does a good job in terms of storyline and audiovisual presentation of mimicking old RPGs, but it mimics some aspects of them a little too well to match up with the rose-tinted memories anyone old enough to have played the games it's trying to imitate would have. I do have hope for this game series, and for a lot of these flaws to be fixed up for the next game that ends up being put out.