Phantasia Remake

I'll start this review off by saying I was unable to finish this game. Not 5 minutes into the game I encountered so many bugs I felt like turning it off right then. You can walk over shop counters, the first town is lacking exit events, you can walk on top of certain doors rather than being able to enter them. Some doors just plain have no description at all. Once you get past that intro area you'll find many of the custom systems just don't plain function and a lot of the game to be broken in general.

Battle System- .5/5
The game uses a traditional ATB system, though it attempts to go that extra mile to implement a few new features. The first of which is a limit break of sorts which is supposed to grant you new skills when you are in critical condition. Unfortunately you'll be introduced to this system during a cutscene, and after the battle your ultimate skill is never actually removed from the character. In my two hours of playing I had several other party members reach critical condition, but none of them ever gained any extra skills.

The other extra system is the addition of Elemental Fields, which randomly appear in battle changing the form of certain skills. For example the main character begins with a standard sword technique that will suddenly change to fire element if a fire field should appear. Sadly you don't enough control over this system to really make it work for you. Even though the mage party member eventually gets a skill to randomize it, since so few skills actually utilize it and in some cases an elemental ability is worse than a standard one, it's more of an annoyance than anything else.

The balancing is where this system really breaks down. The disparity between one area and the next is just staggering. At one point of the game enemies were dealing roughly 7 damage per attack, and one map later I was suddenly being hit for 300s which would instantly kill any of my characters. As soon as I left that area the new enemies, which gave far more exp, were back down to hitting for 10-20s. Generally any time there are enemies that use physical attacks, they will be pathetically easy. Any time an enemy is capable of using skills, particularly spells, you're going to die horribly unless you've spent a lot of time grinding.

The only thing saving this battle system from a 0 is that it doesn't appear the game physically crashes at any one point, and if you felt like grinding enough you could probably pass anything the game threw at you.

Storyline- 0/5
The world is rotting, and you're going to need to find the four elemental orbs to restore it. Sound familiar? If not, this is the plot from Final Fantasy 1, and anyone who has played this game will recognize it as soon as the intro movie plays. For the first two hours of that game you pretty much follow this plot verbatim. You'll be rescuing princess Sara from Garland, beating down some pirates to acquire a ship, and eventually trekking off to a cave in order to reclaim the Earth Orb to save your dying village. The names have been changed (some of them not by enough), and there are a couple of extra events thrown in but that doesn't really excuse the fact this plot has been stolen. None of this is played for comedy at all. The author plays the whole thing straight and having to sit through this irritated me to no end. On top of that spelling errors are everywhere and grammatical errors are plentiful enough that you'll often be confused about what's actually going on. The game is also rarely clear about where you have to go next, and is usually satisfied with telling you to go directly North or West even if that's going to lead you straight to an ocean or mountain range.

Characters- 1/5
I'll start this category off by saying the main character is completely obnoxious. He starts off by leaving his village for some vaguely defined reason, and spends most of his time listing the measurements of every female you'll encounter and saying how hot everyone is. The rest of the characters have confusing and often inconsistent personalities, and although it made sense for them to join up with you in the context of saving the world there was never really any point where I thought this group of people should be wandering around dungeons together. I don't particularly have anything to say about the villain other than he is completely stereotypical, which I suppose is fine for a game like this.

Level Design- 1/5
I'll begin this category by describing the dungeons. Most of them are full of small empty rooms, and you'll usually only spend a few seconds in one before moving on to the next. There's really no real sense of direction to the layout, though since every dungeon is so small and lacking objects in general you'll be through all of them in a few minutes at most. The one puzzle I did encounter (a teleport maze) frequently broke and I found myself having to exit the area several times in order to get it to work. The towns seem haphazardly thrown together, often with the same exact building pasted around the map with a few trees and paths thrown in to separate things. Some towns inexplicably have two of the same shop.

Graphics- 3/5
From what I could most of the graphics here have been ripped straight out of various Tales games, and although it generally sticks to this consistent style there are a few areas that use the RTP and completely clash with everything else. One thing in particular that bothered me is the game does not have a large selection of sprites, so occasionally you'll see the odd thing like an NPC walking around town who looks identical to a villain you just killed moments earlier. Aside from those complaints the game looks decent enough.

Music/Sound- 2/5
Nothing but rips here. The songs I could pick out were from various Tales games and Star Ocean. Since pretty much every song is used in the exact same context that those games themselves employed it tends to be more distracting than anything else.

Random stuff I liked-
The title system. Sure it was shamelessly ripped from every Tales game ever, but it was still a clever use of the 5th equipment slot.

Random stuff I hated-
Nothing I haven't mentioned elsewhere.

Final Thoughts-
This may turn into a decent adventure at some point, and in many ways this is a complete game. Unfortunately with the multitude of bugs and hideous balancing it sure won't feel that way.