Legendary Legend

Battle System- 2/5
Easily the weakest point of the game, battles are very traditional. The random encounter rate is high, though fortunately it is easy to escape. You start the game with a full party, which gives you plenty to do, but when it comes down to it the battles just aren't interesting. Thankfully even with the high encounter rate you won't be spending a lot of time here unless you want to do a lot of grinding, which is not required as all the bosses are quite easy.

Storyline- 5/5
The game begins with our heroes, three students at a university kicking it in front of a soda machine. Suddenly a mysterious figure appears and thrusts them into a world of fantasy and magic. After wandering around this mystical world the three are recruited by a down on her luck Ranger who just got dumped by her adventuring party. A few crazy events later and they're off to the save the world. Putting aside the fact that this is the plot from Magic Knight Rayearth, the storytelling in this game is amazing. The writing is superb, and constantly hilarious without relying on inside jokes and pop culture references (though to be fair, there are a few of those as well). The game starts off as complete parody and slowly develops into an interesting tale with solid pacing and plenty of twists and turns along the way. Most importantly it will leave you laughing, a lot.

Characters- 5/5
Every character is superbly developed. Even though many of them appear to be nothing more than stereotypes at first, they're all instantly likeable and you'll probably be in love with the cast before the prologue ends. Everyone has a well defined personality and there's plenty of chemistry between every party member. As the game progresses the complexity of each character is slowly revealed, which excellently matches the pacing of the overall storyline. The villains are completely over the top, from the Dr Claw style emperor whose face you never see to his frantic sidekick who shouts out attack names before he strikes at the party. Even great care has been put into developing each NPC. Your own party often talks with them at length, even though most of them are insane in their own ways. One of the few games where I made sure to seek out every single NPC before leaving a town.

Level Design- 2/5
Another weak aspect of the game. The towns are designed well enough, but are nothing amazing. What hurts this category is that nearly every dungeon is just a random encounter filled maze designed to eat up time between cutscenes. Thankfully every dungeon is rather short and usually contains a decent amount of storyline to distract you from the level design.

Graphics- 3/5
Aside from a few modern tilesets and the main cast which seem to be custom made for this game, everything else is RTP. The original artwork is not always pretty, but the faces of each character are very expressive and serve to enhance their already well defined personalities.

Music/Sound- 4/5
Half of the soundtrack is ripped from various games, and the other half uses the RTP. The song selection fits each scene so well it is almost frightening. I found myself humming along to songs that I had previously ignored in the RTP as they were used to such excellent effect in the game's various scenarios. My only real complaint in this category is that some of the midis are lacking in sound quality.

Random stuff I liked-
The humor in this game is overflowing, and so much of it is laugh out loud hilarious. It's rare for me to crack a smile in most games so this came as quite a shock. It consistently oozes charm and wit.

Status effects actually worked, even on bosses!

Random stuff I hated-
It pains me that I have to place something in this category on a game I enjoyed this much, but sadly they opted to use the Guage battle type in rm2k3, making battles even more annoying than they had to be.

Final Thoughts-
This game is the best kind of parody, one that skewers the genre with reverence for its source material, and still manages to be consistently hilarious from start to finish. The Princess Bride of the RPG world. It's a short run that will be over in only a few hours, and is not without flaws, but every minute is worth the download. Play this game.