As I mentioned, RPGs are my favorite type of video game, and my reviews of them tend to be slightly more wordy than those of other types. That may be good or bad, depending on who you are and how much you want to read. Well, here they are.
This game is one of the few RPGs in the RPG-starved library of the PlayStation. And as far as I can tell, it is the absolute worst. Battles happen so frequently that you can't go anywhere without being delayed for an excruciating amount of time. And if you aren't precisely sure where to go, wandering takes so long due to the endless battles you eventually want to axe something, most likely your TV. That's how I felt after a while.
Graphics are also bad. The in-game sprites recall 16 bits a little bit too much, and the battle graphics are so chunky I was reminded of a bad Super FX attempt or something, albeit with more colors. Camera angle changes so often and so wildly that some players may actually get a bit dizzy or even feel seasick. I can't say much about character development or story since I didn't get far enough. I cursed this game, and if we could find its owner I'd get it back to him as soon as possible, just to get it out of my house. Shun this one like the plague.
This is a title that doesn't quite fit into what most people consider an RPG. Gameplay style is reminiscent of Myst, except you have yourself and other people to look at, it's much less interesting, and far less fun. Here's why. Progress is very slow, very tedious. Animation (from what I remember) also leaves a bit to be desired. Here's the sitch. You're a page in the court of King Arthur and Merlin sends you on a quest; I don't remember exactly what. You don't talk to the king during the part of the game I played but you can speak with Lancelot and Merlin on occasion. Perhaps it's because I've never been very good at this type of game, but I got stuck early on. There's a tower where I believe you must go, but some power always pushes you back as you try to go up the stairs. I always ended up going back to the same people and learning nothing. I had expected to enjoy this game, mostly because of the setting and the potential of the story line. But.....it was too frustrating to get very far into it. An interesting element (that got uninteresting rather quickly) is conversation. You have a number of questions to ask people you talk to, and they in turn have a number of responses. But both are limited. It's less clunky and aggravating but has far less potential than the much more detailed system in Sentient. Overall, not very high on my ranking of games for the PSX.
Oh my goodness, what can I say about this game? If I let myself, I could run on and on and on about this very, very fine piece of work from the mighty SquareSoft. And I have. This review has its own separate page, for crying out loud. Here's the link. Final Fantasy VII editorial
The first thing one notices about this game is that it plays a LOT like Vandal Hearts. That is, if you've played Vandal Hearts before. FFT is a not-too-complicated-compared-to-PC-strategy-games game that, despite its slightly derivative nature, holds my interest once it gets going until I either become too stuck or something else (i.e. Gran Turismo) comes along to take my attention away.
While this may not be saying a whole lot, Square shoves into this title the most impressive sprite-based graphics I've ever seen on the PlayStation. Konami did decent with Suikoden and Vandal Hearts in that respect, but nothing compared with here. Granted, they break down a bit if the camera ever zooms in a bit, but since that rarely happens, the visual lushness remains intact. Square once again shows their mastery of graphics on the PSX, particularly in the extremely well-done intro FMV. Which happens to be, by the way, the only FMV in the game.
I'm realizing as I write this that a concise review that does justice to all the games aspects is going to be difficult, if not impossible, so I'm relegating myself to the fact that there will be features that will get overlooked or ignored. The game's most intriguing side is the job class system, pioneered in earlier Square titles such as Final Fantasy V for the Japanese Famicom. You'll have to hit a FFT-dedicated site to get a good handle on this feature. But the basics are that there's two types of classes: warrior and magician. A character's effectiveness in each "path" depend on two personal characteristics called "Brave" and "Faith". A character with higher brave does more damage and strikes more often, therefore lending him/herself to the warrior class, while high faith has the same effect with magical endeavors. If you have the patience, there are ways to manipulate the brave and faith of your party members.
Your army, which you are using to try to stop an all out war between two of your nation's nobles, can consist of 16 members. These troops can be human or monster. (Monsters can be invited by a certain job class called a Mediator.) While this may not seem like very many, you'll likely find yourself using from 6-8 people most of the time. Only 5 to 6 are allowed in each battle. These battles are set in a specific order; the plot is completely linear. Scheduled battles either set in motion a certain event in the plot or open up the way to other locations where there will be another battle that will motivate a certain plot twist. If this sounds tedious to you, it's not as bad as it sounds. And besides, the emphasis is not on plot but combat. Although the story, while unlikely to win a Pulitzer, is clever enough and contains enough twists to make you wonder what will happen next. And hence give you reason to progress through the game.
Now to say a bit more about jobs. The interesting thing about jobs is that while you naturally have to learn new skills by spending time in a class, you get to choose what skills you learn next by using accumulated "job points." More powerful or useful skills almost always cost more points than those that are more mundane. Trade-offs, such as execution speed or number of magic points consumed, sometimes severely limit the usefulness of more expensive jobs. Some skills you can learn are increased movement range, steal abilities, sword and combat techniques, and higher level magic. The magic isn't particularly innovative, and will immediately scrounge memories in the minds of veteran Final Fantasy gamers, the Summon spells particularly.
The real secret to playing this game is to not get overly involved in the details. Even if you don't choose to learn all the jobs, this means that the jobs your characters have learned will be at higher levels, know more abilities, and likely be just as effective. A completely unheralded hidden genius in this title is the ability to go into any level of detail you want. You can make exceptionally strong warriors, master magicians, take strategic advantage of the special classes, or just do many many random battles until your characters are levels ahead of your opponents. My brother, for instance, is trying to have each member of his army master EVERY job class. While this is only because of a competition he has with a friend and means that his characters were up to level 99 well before the halfway point in the game, it is an extreme example of the "get really strong so you blow away even the tough enemies" strategy. If you're really good, you can try to go through quickly and rely on your military genius to win skirmishes in which you are completely outmatched. Or you can be like me and play through until you find a battle where you get slaughtered, then go back to random battling until you're at a reasonable level to fight your next opponents. (Random battles automatically provide enemies at your approximate ability.)
Bottom line: 4 stars, 85-95%, however you feel like rating. Very good, but not quite a masterpiece. Damned close, though. Square fans, this is a must. Strategy fans, take a good hard look. RPG buffs likewise. Even gamers that normally play in none of those categories should give it a try. Square, once again, is essentially right on the mark.
Granted, this title ranks closer to an action game than an RPG, but it has a lot of RPG elements, just happens to be in first person perspective. The original King's Field happens to be no longer in publication, and I don't know whether King's Field II is or not. All I know is that I like both games quite a bit, though some have digressed on that point. A certain gaming magazine (I don't recall which one, but I assure you I am telling the truth) gave both iterations a gold rating. I think it was PSXtreme. Of course, the first KF came out soon after the release of the PSX, and hence is no longer that graphically compelling. Detail is very low; textures are abysmal; the characters in the game have no faces. Control is also rather slow, and gameplay (particularly in KFI) takes a little while to get rolling. You're probably asking yourself why I like this game if there are so many apparent downfalls right from the beginning. There are a number of reasons.
One thing is the seeming vastness of the world. Okay, the world is really an island, but there are so many places to explore and venture to. Gameplay is also, especially for the time it was developed, relatively non-linear. Linearity is very strong in the beginning, but later there are multiple directions you can go in no particular order. The island is also littered with people, mostly in small village-like settlements. People give you information about items, sell you things, and often give you an idea about what to do next. Most also have a number of things to say. So many games have NPCs say one or two things to you and you get nothing more from them for the rest of the game. Here they have quite a bit to say right off in most cases, and if you do something for them or come back later, you may get even more out of them. The NPCs are also avenues for some very important items, and there are many items to have. ASCII Entertainment wisely provides a "seer" (pronounced see-er) that can tell you the use of a number of special items, or the history of many of the elemental weapons.
Magic is learned by obtaining elemental crystals of earth, fire, light, water, and wind. You learn a spell when you use a crystal as an item. While it may not be strikingly original, I found it to be an adequate system for obtaining new spells. Part of the quest is seeking out these crystals so one can increase one's magical arsenal. Some of the high-level offensive spells have some pretty cool visual pyrotechnics. I could go into the story of this game, but the plot (mostly the background) is pretty involved, and takes a long time to explain. Unfortunately, and here the game is rather unlike an RPG, not much of the plot takes place during your quest. I encourage fans of both RPGs and first-person-perspective games to try these titles. Individual tastes are a major factor in deciding on this game or not. But if you can get yourself to play past the first few minutes of KFI (KFII is much easier to get going), there's a good chance you'll like what you see.
I haven't decided where this stands in the ranks of current PSX RPGs. It's good, but so are Suikoden and Wild Arms. It's main downfall is complexity, among some other nagging imperfections. The magic system is one I like very much. You have to bargain with the enemies to gain their spell cards. You then go to Igor in the Velvet Room. He fuses two cards in any combination you like to form a new "Persona." A Persona is a bit like an elemental that you call upon to cast spells. The Persona that forms from two cards can sometimes be altered by throwing certain items into the fusion. An interesting thing is that early in the game you can fuse the cards of two low-level enemies and form an extremely powerful persona that none of your characters can even handle yet. I may need to start a new page describing this game for those that are interested.
The complexity that I mentioned earlier is both this game's boon and shortcoming. If you wish to mess around with various combinations of personas and items and such, you can, but if you don't have the patience you feel like you're doing something wrong; like the game will go badly if you don't fuse the correct cards. That won't happen, but the game tends to fool you into thinking so. I also like the weapon and armor system here. Characters aren't limited to a single type of weapon, but they can't equip every one. A neat addition is guns. Guns are even more personalized than the weapons. The physically weakest character, Mary, can only equip various handguns and specializes with the bow as a normal weapon. The trade-off is that the bow is only effective in the back, while her guns only work in the front. I may describe battle setup later. Armor is divided into head, body, hands, and feet. Again, certain people can equip certain armor. But all ammo works in all guns, which is nice.
Battles, while not overly frequent, take a little longer than one would like. They also seem much too numerous when one is wandering around lost in the first-person "dungeon" areas. You switch to this view in the hallways of buildings. In rooms you have an overhead 3/4 view (which takes some getting used to), and outdoors is an above-and-behind view. In this field view the party is depicted by an inverted green cone. Other people, and there aren't many outside, are red. The buildings are relatively undetailed. This may sound like it wouldn't work well, but it does. You can also "run" while outside. But you can only walk on the sidewalks, and can only cross at the crosswalks. No jaywalking here.
The worst part of this game is that when you get farther into it, the save points become much farther apart. This is normal, but here they take it to the extreme. My brother, who is much farther than I am, has been to places where you have 2-4 hours of gameplay between saves, and you fight numerous battles that have a good chance of wiping you, and all of that progress, out completely. But if you have more experience by this point, it may not be so bad. Overall the game gets a bit tedious toward the end, although I do recommend the purchase of this title for any RPG fan that owns a PlayStation.
I like this game. Especially the huge range of playable characters. Unfortunately there's no way to give them all decent fighting time. Oh yeah. It's an RPG, so I'm already biased toward liking it. ;-) Graphics in-game are relatively good, but battles aren't so hot. But it doesn't seem to matter, really. Spell animation is interesting enough, and battles are fairly quick but not all overly easy. After saying so much about Persona, I feel like cutting this one a lot shorter as atonement. I'll end by saying it's a good game to play, but a bad game to finish. The ending is very anticlimactic in my eyes. Kind of a letdown, and the last battle was too easy. Kind of like FFIII for SNES. Kefka's a wimp compared to the Megaesper you defeated a few minutes before. But that didn't stop it from being the greatest SNES title in existence. But Suikoden is definitely not the best PSX title there is. It is, however, worthy of purchase, pretty much a must-have for RPG people.
What we have here is a decent RPG. Not nearly the spectacular graphics fest that is FFVII or the study in detail that is Persona, but a good stand-alone title. What so many RPGs suffer from is just plain being bad, and this one escapes. Graphically, it may seem like it's oriented toward younger kids, but I don't think it is really. The in-game sprites are very good, and the battle polygons, while not extremely sophisticated and somewhat cutesy at times, are reasonable. Some of the bigger monsters are pretty neat. Manually variable battle views are a nice touch. Puzzles I encountered are simplistic for the most part, but that's better than excruciatingly frustrating. Each of the three characters has his or her own requisite special skill. Rudy Roughknight gets various powerful weapons. Cecilia Lynn Adlehyde is Miss Magic. I forget Jack's last name and his skill. But he's got a cool rat that can run out in 8 directions and hit switches and such. As a character, the rodent is sometimes smarter than Jack. Rudy can set unlimited magic bombs, and Cecilia has a magic pendant that does certain mysterious things before it gets stolen by the enemies, which I will not describe here. RPG fans would do well to buy this one, even though I haven't. I probably will, though. Others will likely not be impressed. A solid offering is found in Wild Arms, and the PSX gets one more much-needed RPG.