Graphics: The overworld sprites are okay, it's the side-scrolling platformer segments that shine, with detailed sprites and backgrounds, ranging from a war-torn village with dead bodies and bloodied swords everywhere, an abandoned cathedral with broken stained-glass windows, to a tree with grotesque human faces growing on it.



The game also has fairly impressive cinematic stills in some cutscenes. The animation isn't all that great, usually consisting of about 3 frames or so per sprite, with Sadler being the only obvious exception.



Sound: Instead of going for a more fitting Eastern motif, most of the music sounds like generic 90s pop muzak. The sound effects are also fairly weak, and somewhat irritating. The worst part is the awful dit-dit-dit sound that plays as the text scrolls.



Addictiveness: Y'know those door-mazes everyone hates in platformers? Every single area is like that. The level design is never very creative, and the game's linear enough that you're likely to see the whole thing in one playthrough.



Story: This was what drew me to the game. The plot starts out with Sadler and co. receiving a message from Yuug, leader of the Luciel army, saying he'd like to discuss some things with them. It builds up as he joins them on a quest to bring world peace by... Here's the problem.



The plot has Sadler and Yuug travelling to all sorts of locales, meeting historical figures, kinda like an arab Indiana Jones. Thing is, the game doesn't spend much time explaining WHY we're doing all this, we go from breaking into an abandoned cathedral while Yuug goes nuts over Stonehenge, to resurrecting Moa, to dimensionalizing mandalas, and all sorts of craziness, but it doesn't feel like there's a real connection between all this.



I'm not sure if this is just a problem with the translation, or if the story is also confusing in the original Japanese.



Also, the tension between two people on opposing sides calling a temporary truce is only brought up once, and then they're buddies for the rest of the game.



It really looks like it could be a genuinely neat story, but it's just so badly explained.



Depth: This game does take about 2 hours to beat, pretty lousy for an RPG, but pretty good for a platformer. There are plenty of NPCs to talk to, with some interesting dialogue here and there, you can upgrade your armor and weapons, and buy healing items.



Problem is, the armor and weapons are redundant, for reasons listed below, and it's never made clear what the items actually do, scaring anyone away from trying them all out, and the magic spells you later get render them mostly redundant as well.



Difficulty: The game starts out quite challenging, with a tough antlion boss that requires good timing and reflexes, but by the end, the even the final boss barely scratches you, with the insane exp rate throughout the game leveling you way higher than you should be at any given point. You can literally leave Sadler in one spot and put Sword on auto-fire for a few minutes to gain several levels.



This could easily have been a favorite of mine, it had plenty of good ideas going for it, but most of them were half-baked in execution, and I wish someone would do a remake of this, maybe then it could live up to its potential.

Popful : Good review. This review has lots of details and it was broken down into different categories very well. Also I nearly forgot to mention that this review was well written. Keep up the good work. Have a great day.