Interesting Artistic Concept; A Frustratingly Simple & Repetitive Game
The amount of random battles in this roughly 4 hour game will make you want to throw a controller at a wall, which may be why it doesn't have controller support. Actually, the ability to use a controller was added after release, but even that feature is a glitchy mess that requires a workaround to actually use. So it is.
The idea behind this game is phenomenal. An adventure game that starts out like the earliest examples of the genre, with mechanics and graphics that evolve over time along with the advances made over the years. Except it doesn't quite work out that way. For some reason, you start on a 2D plane, with the ability to only move in one direction. Then you get the second direction, and before long you're playing a GameBoy adventure game.
I seem to remember Zelda being on the NES and in color before the GameBoy even existed, but sure, artistic license.
The randomness with which features are added doesn't stop there. You'll get graphical upgrades in rapid spurts in the first half of the game, but some of the earliest adventure game conventions don't appear 'til much later, like the Zelda style 3 heart bar. Which abilities that are unlockable seem puzzling, like having to unlock actual merchants from chests at two different points in the game.
Somehow console RPGs get lumped in with the idea of adventure games, which may easily be the most frustrating part of the game. Random map battles are constant, irritating, and nearly devoid of strategy. At first estimation, they could have been halved and the game greatly improved. Later on, I'd say actually reduced by a third. They're so grindy & repetitive, that the one companion you receive for these battles is a limitless heal bot. The idea of gameplay evolution is completely missing from the overland random battles, as you start with Final Fantasy IV style ATB, and absolutely nothing changes except the graphics for the entire game in this regard.
At another point, the game suddenly turns into Diablo, which is as confusing as it is unnecessary. You'll get a ton of items that have no value besides funny descriptions ("+17% damage to cows") which is out of tone with the rest of the game, sadly. A little more humor in other parts would have been appreciated, instead of all crammed into this one section. Oddly enough, for a game designed around console adventure games & RPGs yet for the most part forced to be played on a keyboard, there is no mouse support in this section.
All of this is crammed into a very small package, roughly 4 hours to complete the main game, which is why it is odd that this game is so frustratingly repetitive. There's just not a lot here, especially in comparison to the much longer and denser games that it is inspired by. And what is there is frustratingly random & highly repetitive.
