Developed by: Media.Vision | Published by: Sony Computer Entertainment | Played: 10/26/02

+

The western cell-shaded look and feel is very unique and gives the game it's own character. It's also put together really well in a compelling way.

Sound and music is done fairly well... sort of. It's flows very nicely.

Well-tuned battle system and controls. The camera rotates at a nice speed, autobattle lets you slide through trivial battles, you level up at a nice speed and run into monsters that are appropriate to your level.

There is a wide variety of fun things to do besides fight monsters: climb grates, fall from cliffs, rotate valves, light candles, throw boomarangs... each room of every dungeon has more for you to do beside just walk and fight random battles.

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No voice acting.

Manually rotating the camera.

The story is scripted very poorly, and the charaters were poorly designed. I really couldn't see myself in any of the characters, and they never seemed to say things where I could not understand where they were coming from. The character motivations were somewhat vague and unclear. The story also did a bad job of showing the ever-present struggle. A lot of times you're just wandering around and then, oh, look, it's a bad guy lets fight him. The thing about guardians, the medium, the prophets, Janus, Drifters... it's all really vague and it's difficult to see what it all represents.

The graphics and sound are really nothing spectacular. Very unique, but nothing cutting-edge.

The game stays very firmly within it's genre. There are no new unique features, except for maybe the western feel, that set it above the rest.

No descriptions of spells and items in menus. You find out what they do by trial and error.

Save points and Gimmel Coins take away from escapism.

The western theme remains constant throughout, all the ruins look the same, the landscape is all the same everywhere... it's repeditive architecture. The ruin dungeons are also filled with puzzles that do not relate to the story or characters in any way. They are just there to solve.

The battle system is a little too simple. Very little strategic thinking is required, and there's almost no challenge.