A Home Far Away

Story:
Two siblings, a child named Danais and his big sister Farrah, gets stranded far away from home. In order to make it back, they have to solve a lot of other people's problems via a quest bonanza. This sets the premise for both the story and gameplay.

The story can get a little frustrating when detailing the part of how the siblings gets stranded on a different landmass. You switch between controlling Danais and Farrah which results in you knowing far more than either character does. Sometimes you will know where a character should go for everything to work out only the character him-/herself doesn't see a reason to go there from his/her perspective and instead you have to lead that character astray. It is kind of adorable though watching the siblings work really hard with trying to make everything work out when the universe seem to conspire against them.

Once you get to the part where the siblings try to get back home there isn't much of a story left other than "do a lot of quests". The ending is however very rewarding if you make it there.

Characters:
Imagine the generic adventurous teenage hero. Now, remove some years so that he becomes a pre-teen instead of a teenager. There you have Danais. It does work out well though. Instead of being in charge, he lets his big sister make all the decisions and is also rather obedient towards her. The combination of making him a child and not letting him be in charge makes this archetype make sense.

Farrah is Danais' big sister and as a person she's very mature and extremely resourceful. Appropriately, she is the one who leads the party and takes care of the decision making.

There's also a third guy tagging along who's not as important as Danais and Farrah, but still receives a respectable amount of characterization and even some (to good to be believable) character development.

None of the characters are very complex. Mostly their purpose is to in one or another way be adorable. NPCs follow a similar formula where none of them are particular complex, but the game still tries to make you care about them. This is a much needed effort since interacting with the NPCs, never mind solving their problems, is a large part of the game.

Gameplay:
The meat of the game is solving quests. You get a large list of problems people have which you solve by playing mini games, killing bosses, finding items and sometimes by just taking to the right person. Some quests are very simple and straightforward while other are more complex and requires multiple steps to get trough. Some quests will require you to solve other quests first. To spice it up, the game feature a day and night system which changes the availability of almost every NPC.

The quests feels rather varied and are in general rather well done. There's however the catch that you really have to do all of the quests. Sooner or later there will be quests that you simple don't enjoy and/or don't figure out. While none of the quests exactly takes a genius to solve, they are not always intuitive or logical. For example, one quest requires you to help three poor people, but I could only find two of them. After a lot of fruitless searching I found out that another NPC had to witness the act of charity, but I hadn't progressed his quest enough for him to be there, so one of the poor people kindly put existing on hold to avoid breaking the game.

The game has two failsafes to help you trough though. One is in form of a hint dispensing fortune teller who will randomly drop clues for the various quests. The other is a walkthrough included in the game folder. Neither however helps with what I've dubbed "The quiz of doom".

"The quiz of doom" is, as the name implies, a quiz and naturally it tests your knowledge of the game. You are asked questions randomly decided from a large list and if you fail five times you are treated to the game over screen. While most of the questions are about things you should know provided you do the quiz as one of the last quests, some questions are more obscure like "which enemy does not exist in area X?" and "what's the name these three rather unimportant characters?". Some questions are also related to a part of the game no longer available meaning if you don't remember the answer you can't go back and check.

This wouldn't be so bad except that the number of questions you need to answer is ridiculous. On a single run you will end up answering a lot of the questions twice and some more than that due to the sheer number of questions you will get. If you're not good at the quiz then prepare to answer several questions more than ten times during the various attempts.

None of the other mini games are that bad though. Most are a variant of "touch good things and avoid touching bad things" where bad things usually consist of dangerous fishes, butterflies or other mean creatures who you for some reason can't fight and instead has to avoid. Most of those mini games are hard enough to require attention, but not so hard as to cause frustration.

Combat is less prevalent in this game than in most other RPGs, but still quite common. Combat is also not particular interesting, but effort was put into spicing it up with at least some degree of success.

Danais and Farrah are both magic oriented staff wielders and aren't very good at physical attacks. They can however charge their staffs and the next turn shoot a powerful projectile. Change twice and they can now hit every enemy. This mechanic works really well at the beginning of the game.

The game uses a Final Fantasy like ATB system. Enemies are really slow early on. Danais and Farrah are usually able to act twice and sometimes even thrice before the enemies gets their turn. This is good since you do need three actions to fully utilize the charge up strategy. The ATB bar will also fill up fast. However, once you get your full party of three characters, the ATB bar will fill up really slow. Enemies also becomes faster and some will use status moves that can interrupt the charge up strategy. At this point battles transition into spamming attack spells.

Some battles are set up to encourage various strategies. However, no battle is ever threatening if you have enough restorative items. You can generate a lot of money very fast via a fishing mini game, so chance is you will soon have more restorative items than you ever need. On a positive note, this game uses touch encounters and you don't need to fight that many battles, so you are spared from the pain of fighting the same monster dozens of times.

Visuals:
The game looks really great. Both the wilderness and the towns look alive. The quest town also has a lot of different areas ranging from the slums to the upper class area and the game does a great job of showing the differences. Battles have a nice isometric view and the animations are good. The only complaint I have it the portraits of Danais and Farrah. They clashes with the rest of the graphics and Farrah's portrait also clashes with her personality.

Overall:
Since you're all but guaranteed having to do a few quests you don't enjoy, this game will require some patience. Other than that, the game also relies heavily on you actually caring about the characters and wanting to help them. If you don't find yourself caring about the characters there's very little reason to play this game. If however you can tolerate some occasional boredom and do care about the characters you should find yourself enjoying A Home Far Away.