Do you want to play a game that starts out mediocre and ends terribly? Do you enjoy slogging through dungeons with the same enemies that are palette swapped after the first dungeon? Do you enjoy having to cure status ailments, after each and every fight? Then this is the game for you.
I've played a lot of RPGs but this is by far one of the most memorably bad that I've had in a very long time. It starts with the absolutely boring story. It starts out pretty typically but ends up just completely falling flat. The developers obviously had plans for a sequel but that will never happen. Which is all the same because the main character is completely unlikeable. By the end, I just wanted to see it all end so I wouldn't have to play the game anymore.
The story and characters aren't the only terrible parts. The enemy design quickly gets re-used. It is almost as if they gave up making new enemy models at the very start. Get used to the enemies you see in the first couple of dungeons, because you will see slight variations of them for the rest of the game. None of the bosses really stand out and I honestly can't remember any of them. The dungeons are also just bland mazes that often times hide absolutely nothing in the hard to read reaches. To make matters worse, traversing dungeons takes far too long because the encounter rate is absurdly high in some dungeons.
The combat system is the only thing that kind of has some sense to it. Each character has a MIND and they act as your special abilities. When the MIND is active, it allows the character to use skills and MINDs have their own health bars or the MP bar. When attacked, the MINDs MP bar will decrease instead of the health bar of the character. For 90% of the game, there is no reason to not have your MIND active. In hindsight, it is kind of short-sighted and really drags out some fights when you fight MIND-resistant enemies.
Skills range from elemental attacks, which the game never explains which elements are weak to what. Not that it really matters, most enemies you fight can be killed with normal attacks. You save your big skills for bosses. There are other support skills like buffs/debuffs, healing, etc. but for the most part, you won't use them much. The biggest problem is that you are supposed to use skill points (SP) and duplicate cards to power up the cards you want to. This really leads to picking a select few skills to keep leveling up until they max out and then upgrading them to the next tier and repeating. I don't know why they felt the need to have the played use other cards and SP to level up skills, it just makes things more tedious as you will often run out of cards before maxing out the card you want. They could have just had you spend SP, which is also decently hard to get, to level them up. It wasn't well thought out.
I rarely call a game mediocre and in this case, I feel mediocre is too nice to call this game. It wasn't fun after a certain point because every enemy would cause status ailments. Sure, there are items/skills you can equip to negate these but you need every equipment slot and skill slot filled with stat boosting items to survive. I kept count and throughout one dungeon, I was poisoned over 20 times often after every encounter. It was really unnecessary and just made the game all the more tedious. Do yourself a favor and don't pay this game any MIND. I also never end things with a pun because I don't like puns but I'm going to do it here. I dislike it that much.
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