RINE'S PROFILE

You only go through 1 dungeon (approx. 3 levels) before you can simply buy a staff back at the village. You could've even kept the old staff, when buying a new staff at the first visit.

The problem here was not that I didn't have a staff, it was that an entire tier of the characters development required that I either lose all the old stuff in order to use it, or just not use it at all. I liked the old spells more than the new ones, so I didn't switch weapons, meaning I would have had to sit through an entire tier learning nothing I could use. In my opinion, it was rather frustrating to know I wouldn't be learning any new useful skills for another 12 levels.

Chests have 1 or 2 accessories and healing items? I mean, that's all pretty standard for the start of an old school rpg.

Except it is really not. The first final fantasy had plenty of reasons to loot the treasure chests, as you would find gear you could not buy in shops, including weapons/armor. So there was a reason to go out of your way to get those chests. Other than the mountain dungeon which all but required you to find the no-berserk charm, every time I opened a chest I was dissapointed, and started to consider not bothering. Chests should feel like rewards, not let downs.

Overall, I did appreciate the effort put into the game, it is really nicely presented, and I didn't hate it so much as I was bored and uninterested with the mechanics. There is 'old school' design because we simply hadn't developed new techniques and hadn't figured out how to make things fun, and there is 'old school like' where it has that veneer, but we've obviously improved. It's the difference between old-school Wizardry and Etrian Odyssey. One is nigh near unplayable nowadays, and the other is much more fun. Remember: Just because it flew on the NES back in the day, doesn't mean it should fly for modern players.

Yeah, I think it would have worked better if it was explained, and then one use did something other than RPG-ish changes. IE, using a determination item to change depression into sadness, and then using a happy memory to slay it.

I didn't want to point out any examples, but notably the first fight with three enemies was sheer luck for me, because you only have the kill and drain abilities. I had to retry it upwards of ten times to A) Figure out what order to do things in, and B) get lucky enough to actually win. That became less of an issue later, but I felt I was basically waiting for an enemy to miss in that first fight, so I could kill one without being immediately killed the next round by the other two.

I really did feel there was a good idea in the combat though, if you took out the numbers entirely and made it more about applying things to enemies to get rid of them, and made more use of the psychological aspects, but I said as much in my review.