This has been a long time coming. I first purchased this game about 7 years ago when it came out. I listened to the soundtrack and it was pretty good. I was hyped but it went into the backlog. 2 years passed and it finally came up in my queue to play.
Everything started out okay, pretty standard Strategy RPG. The characters were pretty neat, although some were a little annoying at times. Nothing terrible but then a trend started. See the main character, Alto, was pretty much requisite in every fight. That is pretty standard for games like this. They want you to use the character because they are important.
The trend was, almost every story fight had a lose condition if Alto fell in battle. Okay, that makes sense story-wise. Can't let the main character die before the end right? Only, it didn't make sense after a while. He could have easily just retreated, see other characters don't die when they are defeated. There is no perma-death, they simply retreat and come back at the next fight.
Why is this a problem? Because after a while, the enemy AI would exploit these lose conditions with precision I've never experienced in any other game. Alto became a huge target and liability but I had to keep him leveled because he was decent and in every fight. Then started the other lose conditions with the one protection mission being where I lost it with this game.
In one mission, you are required to protect an AI controlled unit. You can't tell the unit to do anything, it will move, attack, whatever, all by itself. Problem here, this unit was suicidal. It would literally walk into groups of enemies and end the turn exposing the back to the highest attacking unit. I lost 3 times with nothing I could do differently.
This game was way too random number generator dependent. I would constantly miss attacks with 90% accuracy, only to turn around to have the enemy hit me at 43% and critical to boot. Through out the whole game, it just felt like I could never get an advantage. No matter what equipment I had, levels I was at. The game was unrelenting for no reason.
This all culminated in the last boss. I won't spoil it but let's just say, as soon as I was done with this one, I wasn't going to touch this garbage again. Not only did it always get two turns every 3-4 of my units but it had constantly respawning friends to help it out, giant attacks that were near impossible to get away from, and health regeneration. I get that it was a last boss but still.
I've played a lot of SRPGs in my life and this without a doubt is the first I have truly hated. Not because it was bad or the story was trash but because it was completely unfair at times and I only won because the game let me win. No matter how well thought out my strategy or how much I planned, the game would consistently change the rules in the middle of the adventure to the point that it was just frustrating. This was Imageepoch's swan song, the last game they made. I can see why now. Don't punish the people playing your game and that is what this felt like, the whole way through. A punishment I imposed on myself for completing this game.
