So I recently started playing this game after me and Bulma (somehow) got each other to review each other's game, even though I'm not exactly that great at reviews myself. I came into this game expecting half-decent story, gameplay, graphics, etc., but...it's a bit lackluster, let's say? To note, I played up through getting the 4th crest, so it's not a 100% review on the entire game. Just what I've managed to play through alone:


Story: From what I can gather about the story, the game takes place in 6000 or something AD like that, on a New Earth because the old Earth got blown up by God or something because of some demon, and then he created a new Earth, whereas religions merged into one essentially. Your hero, Ambrosia, has been chosen to be the new Oracle and has to collect 8 (?) crests and...do something with those crests, I forget. While the idea of a new Earth after the old Earth was destroyed and religions being merged into one has potential, this game doesn't really do it very well. Most of the game's backstory is found within books, and...well...they're books alright. If you try to read each and every book without skipping through them, you're going to be there for quite a while (I was going through a book and skipping through text because it was taking so long, and I swear at least a minute or so went by before I finally got through the book...). While it's a good idea to have some backstory to your story in the game, I think it should've been done in a more "cut-to-the-point" way, and/or integrated through the story moreso than through the books. Just even mentioning a little of how Taoism, Shinto, and/or whatever other religion there used to be became one and why they did would've done wonders instead of sitting through book upon book upon book to find out why.

Speaking of backstory, there isn't too terribly much on the characters themselves. Ambrosia's is talked about throughout the game at the very least, and I think it does a fairly decent job with her, but the rest of the cast has little to no backstory to them at all. Why should I care about this exorcist who just randomly joined me out of nowhere when I know absolutely nothing about her? When did this elf chick ever said she wanted to be a musician BEFORE she told us that she told us that she wanted to be a musician? What is this scholar's dealio and how is he inside a place that's meant for women only!?



Gameplay: The gameplay (this is separate from the Balance section to come afterwards) has some rather interesting and unique things that makes it stand out a bit. Your main hero, Ambrosia, starts with no actual abilities until she gets her first crest, at which point she gets access to the Predict ability (which is a typical Scan ability), Oracle (which are different abilities gained from getting crests), and the Trigram ability, which acts as a random elemental attack I guess. When using the Oracle command, the command will disappear for one of Ambrosia's turns, and then on her next turn afterwards, the command will reappear. Interesting gimmick, but is pretty flawed (see Balance) and Trigram will hardly see use due to its impracticality.

Your second character, the Cloud-wannabe Nevras, is well...more of a Warrior type character. He swings swords, and he's good at it. He does come with his own skillset, which over the course of the game you can upgrade by buying the upgrades, making him even more useful.

Next up, the third character, the elf musician Aqorm, is a Thief/Geomancer hybrid, which is an unique twist for a class. However, don't expect to use her Geomancy skills very often, due to her never going above 100 MP (from what I could tell) and every Geomancy skill costing exactly 100 MP. She CAN dual wield, at the very least, so it gives her SOME attacking options other than being an item user, if need be.

The fourth character, the scholar mage Elias, is well...a mage. He uses nothing but magic, ranging from HP recovery to status healing to elemental buffs to status buffs to status debuffs to finally Holy/Dark elemental spells. If there's something you need in terms of magic, this guy has it. Oh, and he also has Prayer which I have yet to figure out what it does. And he can use Alchemy, combining 2 items to make a new item (I have yet to ever use this ability myself though, as there's never any real reason to do so).

The other 2 characters, the exorcist Azarael and the Monk Anideshi, I haven't used at all, because well...see Balance afterwards for why.

As for the battle system, it follows a day/night system, where enemies are less likely to attack during the daytime, but are more aggressive at nighttime. In addition to this, during night your characters tend to start the battle in Sleep status, leaving you wide open to getting your behind ripped apart by monsters. Other weather conditions, such as Snowy, Rain, and Heat, adversely affects the battles as well (Snowy makes the player lose HP over time while making it harder for them to hit with physical attacks, Heat makes the party constantly lose 10 HP each turn from what I've seen, Darkness disables most physical skills as well as makes using regular Attacks unreliable, etc.). These are some pretty neat ideas, although the Night condition is somewhat annoying whenever you just want to flee from battle/end the battle and just move along.

In addition, when using the regular attack command, characters can restore MP to themselves. While this is a nifty way of handling recovering MP, the shear amount of MP regained from it makes using any MP restoring item moot really, and I think it could've been handled a lot better than it was.

In terms of outside of battle, it's the standard fare. Roaming around maps, talking to NPCs, exploring dungeons, and the like. There is a bit of a puzzle element to the game, though some puzzles are a bit...much, let's say? Some are a bit more obvious than others, but others are rather vague in what you have to do. Oh, and if you goof up? Sometimes you just have to restart the puzzle, sometimes you're teleported to the start of the dungeon (ffffff!), and other times you...instantly game over? Yes, there's instant game over puzzles if you do them wrong (granted, you CAN save in the dungeon itself so if you DO game over, you can just reload your save), which can be a bit...infuriating at points, especially when you don't even expect to just game over randomly from having not understood a puzzle. To make matters worse, some puzzles have to be dealt with by dealing with random encounters, and...well, random encounters that aren't map encounters have a really high rate of occurring, making traversing some dungeons extremely annoying.



Balance: This is where the game falls apart heavily is the balance. At the start of the game, you start with Ambrosia and not too later get Nevras in the party. So you figure "Oh, my party is level 1 and I need money to buy stuff. I'll just fight a few battles outside of town to get some money and EXP", and go outside and fight your first battle. Then you find out the enemies you're fighting are dealing 200-300 damage in one attack to a single party member, and there's 3-6 of them in the party. Your max HP for both characters are roughly 500-600 HP. You do the math, and then you die and reload your save. Now, you somehow BEAT said monsters (how, I don't even know at that low of a level), and you come across a custom EXP and money system, and find out you gained about 600 EXP but no money. So how do you make money? Well...it seems that most of the money making is going to be done by selling the Alchemy items, as for the most part, monsters will NOT drop a suitable amount of money, even later in the game. This makes keeping up with items that you NEED (Phoenix Meats are highly important, as are Healing Herbs and the like) as well as equipment (3300 for a Power Bangle? That early in the game??). In addition, to make matters worse, the custom EXP system is flawed heavily. There are times from a group of enemies where you can gain say....5000 EXP, then the next time you fight the same group of enemies, you gain 12000 EXP, and then the NEXT time, you gain...800 EXP? What?? Why such a big influx in the numbers for EXP??

To top it off, once you are suitably leveled so that the first set of overworld monsters don't maul you to death, most monsters in the game, as well as most bosses, become a joke as you just pummel them into oblivion while they barely do 300 damage to you or your party. Yes, there are some monsters that will wipe the floor from you (you're usually given an option to immediately run at the start of the fight), but granted you can just easily flee from the battle with Ambrosia or Elias, and if you're lucky enough with Stealing, Aqorm will steal something powerful from the enemy before you flee (stealing from this Ultima Weapon enemy before fleeing got me a ridiculously powerful sword that I gave to Nevras, and now he attacks 6 times in one turn for a crapload of damage...). To make matters WORSE, due to the day/night system, you can wipe monsters without a big fear of even being attacked for the most part. And if they do attack? Big deal, Elias can reverse just about ANYTHING the monsters did to you, unless something happened to him in which case if you have Healing Herbs/Phoenix Meats, then it's all good anyways.


There is a bug in the system, which I'm going to assume is due to the fault of RPG Maker 2k3 and this custom battle system or something, where if you use an action, such as attacking, and the monster so happens to decide to do something right as you use that action, it'll get cancelled out completely or halfway through the action. This makes for some rather annoying instances where you have to waste a turn and wait until that character's next turn in order to do anything at all, but I can't really give that a point against the game at all. There's also another bug where while running sometimes your party will be attacked one last time by the enemy and incur damage/statuses before actually running from the fight, which is...a bit annoying as well, to say the least.


Now, about the characters: There is hardly an instance where you'll ever really need to use abilities for most characters. In some instances, using said abilities is just an auto-win button in most fights. Ambrosia is a prime example of this: For the most part, unless the enemy is weak to Holy, all she'll be doing is mashing the Attack button (Trigram? Why use that when it's so unreliable? And who needs to Predict when you can just simply attack!). If they ARE weak to Holy, then Ambrosia automatically goes to Oracle > Alexander and most of the time the enemies die in one shot (start of the game, and it does like 5000 damage? Um...ok??). Nevras will usually be either spamming Attack, Jump Thrust, or the Void-elemental attack, and nothing else. Elias is usually spamming spells the entire time (either Recovery, Light/Dark, or Twilight/Radiance), since there's no real penalty for NOT spamming them as he can simply attack once and gain a crapton of MP back. Aqorm is...kinda just there to Steal really. Steal and/or use Attack or Items, because Geomancy isn't exactly used very much due to the MP limit. Granted, Geomancy can be strong, but it's still not going to be used very much as there's no need to really use it. The other 2 characters I don't even know what they're capable of as I never used them...there's no real incentive TO use them as the game doesn't really force you to use them, nor is there no real reason NOT to use the characters you start with.

Oh, and speaking of Aqorm, while it's an unique quirk to the Steal system, it's a bit abusive. You see, when you Steal, you well..have a chance to Steal an item from the enemy. However, due to the quirk in the system, you can Steal up to X items in the fight, where X equals how many enemies were in the fight. What's the quirk? You can continuously steal from the same enemy X times until you can't steal anymore, making it easy to farm rarer items to sell for profit. This also means you have to be careful whom you steal from, as if you steal just from one enemy alone, you can't steal from the others later on.

This is all just the battle system itself. Other things not balanced include equipment (that Power Bangle that's 3300 gold at the start of the game? +250 something Attack? Sure, I'll go with that! Oh, this Dark Sword? Let's me attack twice in one turn? Sure, why not!) and items (there's hardly a reason to ever use items thanks to Elias, and he's the ONLY reason to ever use an item. Most of them are just underwhelming and/or never used due to being Alchemy items, and there's hardly a reason to use the Alchemy system from what I found). Granted, SOME things are a bit more cleverly hidden (I shall not spoil what, but let's just say I was surprised when I found out, and found out how ridiculously broken it just makes everyone else).



Miscellanous: Now, to point out some things that I have noted down for the game:


*The menu is really buggy if opened during the middle of conversations, and there's no options to just leave menus as there should be.
*In order to advance the plot outside of the first town, had to find a NPC whom is the next party member with no indication of such, making it tedious to know what to do next.
*The auto-scroller moves WAY too fast for dialogues. If it's going to use the auto-scroller, make it have a 3-5 second delay, and not a 1 second delay.
*Title screen has some of the most annoying sounds I've heard for a title screen. Please do something about that.
*If you're going to make hints extremely vague, at least make it so that there's still SOME kind of hint to progress. The puzzle at the "Tower" or whatever it's called was so vague that there was no way knowing that the solution was right there at all. A lot of it was just trial and error which...while it can be done right, is kinda annoying when there's multiple puzzles that require you to do the same thing in the same dungeon.
*The game doesn't do a good job sometimes of pointing the player in the right direction. There are times I had to wonder where I had to go because the game didn't say (oh, this is here!). For instance, after the first dungeon I was told to go to the boat pier in town. So I went back to the unnamed village you could name at the start of the game looking for a pier (as it was represented by a town, so I figured it was a main town and the shrine was a shrine place). Didn't find the pier, so I went looking around. Turns out it was in the shrine place, after you follow a slight dirt trail with a sign that says it's there. Maybe it's just me, but it isn't exactly obvious that there was anything in that direction.
*Some maps are just WAY too big. For instance, the first town is ridiculously huge and empty, and could do with being cut down to a 1/4 of that size, as well as another town that could do with being split into multiple maps...




Overall, the game had room for potential with the story, characters, and gameplay, but suffers from heavy imbalance in the battles, storyline that isn't exactly made to be very interesting and of which you have to spend hours reading backstory to know everything about what is going on, characters that aren't exactly that likeable and/or overpowered, and gameplay that, while has unique ideas and features, isn't implemented well enough to make battles or the game exactly interesting.