Pretty graphics are wonderful things. Original storylines are admirable, too, but when it comes down to it, a game has got to actually be playable. Even a non-gamer should be able to play it, and not be dying frequently. After all, this is not a first person shooter! (A game type where frequent death is anticipated.)

Well, that's what happened here.

Now, it would be one thing if you could traditionally "level grind" ... gain a few extra levels here and there, move on, and be fine... but you can't do that here. The monsters in each new area are pretty overkill, so that you can die more or less at any area you advance to. If you gained a few levels in the last area, you'll hardly even notice it in the next, if at all. Used up the only items that made winning against the last boss possible? Too bad. You'll die frequently in boss fights without serious help from something that isn't you (which you won't get but maybe once or twice, and maybe only then if you checked nearly every tile that you've laid eyes on), but evidently, you're otherwise just plain out of luck. Not what I would call a good gaming experience.

How bad was it?

Well, my experience was (without spending hours level grinding) the average boss fight goes like this:

1) You have approximately one round to use up whatever help you have on you... which you will probably die instantly, without. If you're lucky, you may actually get a WHOLE ROUND to attack! But it won't accomplish anything, even if you do.

2) Then, the boss promptly reduces you to near-death (as in one-hit) state. If not your whole party.

3) Now what?

Yeah... "now what?" is right. Because in the time it takes you to heal everybody (if you have enough MPs or whatever to do that), you've just wasted your next round. At which point, the boss promptly reduces you (all?) to one-hit life status, once again. So for every round that you heal yourself beyond having only one hit left, the boss simply undoes whatever you just did, pretty much the next turn he gets. Okay, you MIGHT get a single round between, sometimes, in which to attempt pathetically to attack... but often not. I say pathetically, because you are basically fleas as far as the bosses are concerned. You do fairly negligable damage to the boss, no matter what you use, while the boss, on the other hand, mops the floor with you every single round.

Basically, it's a viciouis cycle of getting knocked down, healing and then getting knocked down again.

So get ready to waste countless hours level grinding!

Or, you can just do what I did, and uninstall, and hope for another game to come along where you can actually survive long enough without truly ridiculous emounts of effort, in order to see the entire game. Or even the first half of it.

So if you actually like level grinding for hours on end, go for it. Or if you just like looking at the pretty game over screen. Or if you've got a program that allows you to hack save files, maybe. (For the first time, I really, really wished I had that, and normally, I hate even using walkthroughs, because I dislike any kind of "cheating".) But if none of that describes you... I'm afraid you might not have much more fun playing this game than I did, even if it was pretty.

Finally, I felt that in all honesty, I had to give it a pretty bad rating, and not just to be a jerk, or because I personally didn't care for it, but for a pretty striaghtforward and valid reason: like I said... a game should be playable.

Any way you look at it, no matter how beautiful, haunting or grand the music and graphics were, or how original and deep the plot, not much of that is really going to matter if the player faces what feels like literally "mission impossible," from the moment they start. If you're dying almost the moment you set foot outside of the first town, at monsters that are not even bosses, and when fighting bosses boils down to a never ending circle of "die now or die later" choices (see above), chances are, at least some people are never going to stick around long enough to see those beautiful graphics, hear your best music, or enjoy your story. Think about it: how many times does the average person... the AVERAGE person... have to end up dead in an RPG (again, not a first person shooter, or some other game-type where you'd EXPECT to die often, but in an RPG of all things), before they simply go away and find something that actually amuses them, instead of just frusterating them continually?

The cold hard truth is this: no matter how great your game is, if the player quits in frustration before they ever get to see %90 of it, then for that person, none of that remaining %90 really counts for anything. It's the same for that player as if the game ended where they quit. Or you might say, it's almost the same as if the play was somehow "broken" and you simply could not continue (even if it is actually technically possible, by some means involving epic patience, to do so).

Now, a person might object and say that's not fair, because the player COULD have played it, and it's not the game maker's fault that they quit. Oh sure. They could have continued to play... with a ridiculous amount of effort. But in this case, we're not talking about people quitting because they're lazy. We're talking about people quitting because an absurd level of effort is required by the game. In this case, it's the game, not the user, that's unreasonable. The fault, in this case, lies with the game.

For this reason, in trying to give an honest rating, I rated it subpar.

In my book, a game is "not playable," if it's not playable for common people without an insane/ridiculous amount of effort, and if a game is "not playable," then it fails to meet the most fundamental criteria of all games: that to begin with, you can actually play it! It should not just be TECHNICALLY playable, if, for instance, you're willing to frisk every tile on every screen of the game you can physically access, and press up against every inch of wall in every map, and waste days of your life level grinding like you were playing Maple Story (where at least the players would have the option of talking to their friends rather than just dying of boredom or quitting in frustration). It should be playable for anyone willing to put forth a reasonable effort. But a REASONABLE effort, not just for those who are willing to sit up all night with a pot of coffee frisking tiles and level grinding for hours on end. (Definitely not reasonable.)

It would be far better to do a less glorious job with your game, and at least to have a game that everyone can actually play... and dare I say, maybe even enjoy? ... than to have a drop-dead-gorgeous game, that you have to have no life at all (eg, the countless hours for level grinding), and endless patience, in order to play.

And by "play" I do mean without a walkthrough. Cheating should not be a prerequisite to being able to play the game. It should be pretty straightforward and fairly balanced in difficulty, for those who know what to expect in an RPG of this kind (in this case, the mainstream kind, as opposed to, say, puzzle RPGS, where it's taken for granted that you pretty much have to be a genius to play without a walkthrough).