Let me preface this review: Are you a Digimon fan? If not, this game is absolutely not worth your time and if you want a monster game to play, Pokémon awaits. For the rest of us, however, this game is what you'll have to deal with if you want to fight with your favorite Digimon, and even then, you may get short changed. However, the game is not without its occasional strong points, so if you're willing to endure  what the game puts you through, you might find something worthwhile.

So let's get the excuse of a story out of the way: You, the player, are a nondescript avatar human entered into a fighting tournament. Depending on the version you're playing, you'll be a member of one of two gan-... organizations, Light Fang or Night Claw. Dusk gets a brief prologue sequence while Dawn does not, but it's meaningless and doesn't help you understand the story better, so don't worry about missing it. Anyhow, you win the tournament, but the city which you're affiliated with is attacked by some nondescript digital entity and ends up cutting off your connection to almost the entirety of the Digital World. In addition, it degenerates everyone's Digimon back to eggs, or in your case, child level. No using Perfects for the first part of the game. Anyway, seeing as you're one of the very few Tamers in the city whose Digimon managed to avoid getting completely degenerated, you save the city by forcing the program back. After that, the city chief asks you to go investigate the little bit of the Digital World that you can still get to, and that's pretty much the whole game. You go to one area, find whatever will get you to the next area, lather, rinse, repeat.

I wasn't expecting much, but somehow, I still felt let down. I mean, I knew I was playing a Digimon game, but I thought I'd see at least a little more. This game doesn't even mention the existence of a "Real World," much less actually show it. You're in the Digital World for the whole game. There's no real character to speak of; unlike the first Digimon Story game, your protagonist doesn't even get any lines. Not that that made much of a difference, but at least it was a nice change of pace for a monster game to have a talking player character. The only characters you'll persistently interact with are the chief and the chief's Digimon, Glare and his Ophanimon for Dawn or Julia and her ChaosDukemon for Dusk. You'll also meet up with the player character for the game you're not playing now and then as well, and he or she is the only other remotely memorable character because you just don't interact with the others enough. It's hard to think this came from the same franchise that made something like Digimon Tamers. I know I can't expect as much from a video game instead of a full anime, but I at least wanted to see something on the level of Frontier, which still had a weak and barebones plot, but it tried harder than this. The villains of the game are barely around either; the Kowloon Co. is amusing, but they're not really villains. The true villain is the indistinct digital entity from earlier (possibly combined with a Digimon known as Grimmon? I didn't quite understand the script), and its presence in the game is minimal. Practically the only noteworthy thing about this is Chief Glare and Ophanimon, quite possibly the only real male human/feminine Digimon team in the franchise.

But enough of that. The story is an excuse to collect monsters, and it certainly allows you to do this. If you haven't played a Story game before, here's how it works: every time you encounter a Digimon, you scan a certain percentage of that Digimon's data automatically at the beginning of the battle. Get it up to 100% and you can convert that data into a new Digimon of that type. Get it over 100% (to a maximum of 999%) and the Digimon you create will have higher stats, but this is largely pointless because the time you spent collecting all that data could have been spent levelling and raising the stats of a Digimon converted at 100%. And it isn't as if there's a limit on how much you can raise a Digimon's stats either. Both evolving and degenerating return a Digimon to level one (slightly increasing stats for evolution and somewhat more substantially decreasing stats for degeneration). Both evolving and degenerating may be done whenever you meet the requirements to do so, and if you degenerate, levelling up enough in the form you degenerate to can surpass the stats you were at before degeneration, meaning that the potential stat increases are limitless (though each stat caps at 999). You may also use farm goods to increase stats, but outside of the early game, this is generally slow and ineffective.

Let's talk about the farm, shall we? The farm is easily the best and most unique feature of the Story games. Think of it as what the Pokémon day care center would be like if it were awesome. I'll try to explain: there's a time system in the game (which has nothing to do with anything except for the farm). Doing battle furthers the time along faster than pretty much anything else, so make sure you do it. Basically, you have a gauge at the top left of the top screen, and once it fills, a farm day has passed. All Digimon present on the farm will gain a set amount of experience per day. Farms may be customized in different ways: firstly, in order to do anything with a farm, you have to set a "terrain board," which determines the type of experience Digimon on the farm will receive every day (more on that later). Once you've brought a terrain board, you can also change the background music of the farm to one of several different tunes, affecting the amount of experience that each type of Digimon receives each day, and you can also place farm goods. Farm goods either raise one if your Digimon's various stats or give extra experience of one type to Digimon on the farm. Throughout the day, Digimon on the farm can interact with farm goods during "Live Events," which may or may not randomly raise the stat that the good effects. Placing farm goods also allows you to manually train Digimon in the stat that the good effects, and each Digimon may be trained up to five times a day.

Sound good? Well it's definitely better than Pokémon, but the problem is that compared to the first Story game, farms seriously got nerfed. In the first game, you could place far more farm goods on a farm because that game had a flat number of goods that each farm could be upgraded to hold (up to 8 on a Normal farm). In this game, each good is assigned an arbitrary number value (anywhere between 4 and 16), and you can only place goods that fall within the value that the farm can hold (up to a maximum of 32). Of course, better goods have higher values, so if you want to place the highest ranked goods, you can only place two of them, whereas you could place 8 in the first game. In addition, farm goods in the first game had a chance to raise stats each day for every Digimon on the farm regardless of whether Live Events happened or not, and given that you could have up to 8 goods, what this basically boils down to is that your Digimon could have stat increases every single day even without level ups, making farms a serious alternative to being in the party, unlike how they are here. Finally, training could be done many more than five times a day in the first game if you knew how to manipulate it. There is no manipulating in this game. Overall, it's a change for the worse and adds a lot more unnecessary grinding to the game.

So how does raising Digimon work? At first glance, it's rather intuitive: you scan and convert a Digimon, every Digimon comes equipped with a handy requirements list as to how to move along its particular evolution line (something that I can't believe Pokémon doesn't have even today), you fulfill the requirements to get the form you want, and you evolve or degenerate to get there? Requirements can range from getting a certain amount of experience points from a certain type of Digimon (if you're trying to get a Holy Digimon, for example, the evolution requirement may need you to kill a lot of Holy Digimon to get enough Holy experience points), having a high enough friendship level (just talk to your Digimon at the farm) or having enough of a certain stat. Simple, right? Well... to begin with, you may see some Digimon NPCs in the game, but not actually know how to obtain some of them because you can't find part of their evolution line in the random encounters. This is because a lot of unrelated Digimon lines in the game are tied together at the same baby form, and you wouldn't know it without either checking a guide or mercilessly scanning every Digimon and checking every evolution tree. What's that you say? You're confused as to why Megadramon and Alphamon share the same child level? Well they both have metal on them, so it makes perfect sense, right?  However, there's also the matter of special evolutions (armor or jogress). These have no requirements listed for them at all. Certain helpful NPCs may give you hints as to what you need to do, but for the most part, you have to check guides from people who have broken the source code, because there's no way you'll ever figure it out without accidentally stumbling into it, and even if you do stumble into it, you won't know what it was that caused you to stumble into it. I might have been okay with this if there weren't several, several Digimon that cannot be obtained without using either an armor or a jogress evolution, but unfortunately there are. I wouldn't have guessed that my V-mon needed to be over level 40 to become Magnamon either, but them's the breaks.

Which brings me to the one legitimately solid thing about this game: the battle system. Now granted, it was the same battle system as the first game, but this is the one place they decided not to fix what wasn't broken. Both you and the enemies occupy five "zones" on the battlefield, Mega Man Star Force style with one Digimon per zone. Every attack can hit one or more zones and one or more times. Of course, the more zones or the more times an attack can hit, the more generally useful it is. You can have up to three Digimon in combat at once and three in reserve, but unfortunately, if you have less than four in your party, you are forced to have them all in active combat. The game stupidly does not allow you to have one in combat and three in reserve, even if that one is much more powerful than the others. At any rate, because you can only have up to three Digimon in five zones (a limitation that does not apply to your enemies, mind you), it is possible and encouraged to do some strategic zone placement. Each Digimon has a support ability that will increase a stat of a Digimon in an adjacent zone, but if you put two Digimon next to each other, an enemy is more likely to hit them both with a multi-zone attack. Fortunately, you can move your Digimon around mid battle if this becomes a problem. It's a neat system, and I enjoy its execution.

Now, like Pokémon, each Digimon and move has a typing and you can take advantage of elemental weaknesses, but you won't know what the elemental weaknesses are unless you're paying close attention to the damage numbers because the game doesn't tell you what's effective and what isn't. Also, each Digimon only has one weakness, so look out for common ones among the Digimon you obtain. They're not overly important though; the extra damage you'll do is negligible if you have a high enough attack stat. Buff moves are similarly useless. Status effect moves, on the other hand, are surprisingly helpful, so keep one of two around if you can.

As for presentation, the game's music is forgettable and its graphics are downright depressing. Not only does the game look like it could have easily been on the GBA, a lot of graphical assets seem to be outright stock effects. Many of the moves certainly seem that way. The attacks are outright one of the most disappointing things I've ever seen because Digimon attacks are generally flashy and spectacular. Here they just look like a lame ball of energy bursting into a powdery cloud or a simple punch effect. What's that? You thought Full Moon Meteor Impact was awesome when you saw MirageGaogamon Burst Mode using its energy mace to spin around and throw an exploding ball of light and make a huge crater in the ground? Well surely it will be just as cool when you see it have a stock punch effect followed by an yellow cloud, right? And furthermore, while I do like the look of the individual Digimon sprites, the only ones you can actually see in battle are the enemy sprites. Your own Digimon are completely absent, making the battle look as if it takes place in first person. What sense does this make? Why did I bother raising my Digimon if I can't actually see them fight? Why can't I look at the designs I actually like? It's frustrating. The game does nothing with the DS's 3D rendering potential either, so for better or worse, get used to 2D again. Again, the overworld sprites really look on par with a Mega Man Starforce game, except that that game was filled with 3D models as well. Here, it's just... disappointing.

I really wanted to like this game. I really wanted for there to be a legitimately good Digimon game where I could play with almost any Digimon I wanted. It'd be better than playing that pay to win MMO, right? Well, while the Digimon variety is really, really large in this game thanks to everything being done on sprites, it feels like this was done at the expense of almost everything else. Whether you play it or not is up to you; the core battle system is solid even if many other things are not. I still haven't run through my list of gripes, but I figure if you're still reading at this point, you've probably already made your decision on whether to play or not. Just know that if you play, you're going to have to suffer. Suffer for your favorite Digimon. Or not because Aero V-dramon evolves into Goddramon. Argh.

In either case, if I were you, I'd just wait until Cyber Sleuth comes out, because it promises to be the best Digimon game ever made, and from what I've seen of it, it is. Look up some footage of it right now. If you're waiting for it to come out and you think you can tolerate subpar DS graphics and grinding, then this game may be enough to tide you over in the meantime, but once that comes out, I know I won't be looking back.

Final Fantasy V is not the kind of game you'd see in the current console generation. I doubt any game like it will be produced ever again outside the indie scene because the fact of the matter is that people have expectations of a little more pizazz, something to spice up your standard turn-based, menu scrolling, random battling adventure. Perhaps that even means mostly eschewing the menus altogether. And that's fair. Were we to have the same game made over and over again, it would get stale rather quickly. I'm bringing this up, however, to illustrate how that's not necessarily a good thing, because I am of the firm belief that even now, over twenty years later, Final Fantasy V still holds up as an enjoyable, quality RPG, and it does so on the sheer strengths of its fundamentals. No matter what new additions a developer makes to the formula, no matter how many times they try to reinvent the wheel, the question of whether a game is good is going to depend on whether it has a solid core. And Final Fantasy V's core is about as solid as one can get.

But that's not where I want to start, because it makes more sense to give that core context by digging through the outer layers first. By which I mean that I'm about to discuss Final Fantasy V's story. I suppose it's there. Like many Final Fantasy stories before it (but unlike those that came after), the story of FFV is focused on neither character nor plot, but rather on theme, the theme for this game in particular being sort of a halfway between coming of age and the passing of responsibility from one generation to the next. It plays these themes out well, allowing for several moments that are surprisingly touching. By and large, however, the plot is mostly very standard Final Fantasy stuff. The evil warlock Exdeath is out to destroy some power crystals and drag the whole world into the all-consuming Void, and of course, our heroes must stop him. That's really about all there is to it. Of note, however, is the fact that the game is very light-hearted and filled with jokes, which I can't say I was expecting when I first played the game. It added a lot of life to an otherwise dull plotline and was much appreciated. Those expecting a more serious, gripping tale in the vein of VI-VIII are going to be disappointed. I do want to mention, however, that this game is one of those rare gems in fiction that seriously got me to like just about every character. Though they may not have much depth,  every one of them barring perhaps Lenna is full of personality and makes the story actually work on some levels just because of how likable everyone is. And even Lenna is usually good at making setups for other characters, so it's not like she's wasted either. Of course, they're all total stereotypes at heart: Bartz is the moronic hero, Lenna is the naive princess, Galuf is the wisecracking old man, Faris is the gruff tomboy, Gilgamesh is the cowardly braggart, Exdeath is the over the top ham of a villain (what else could he be with a name like that?), etc. But the personality and life they bring to these stereotypes is enough to make them stand out and still be entertaining. So while I wouldn't exactly call the story good, I would call it enjoyable in spite of itself. And not in a bad way either. It hits that rare mark of "uninspired concept with masterful execution." Which means it certainly won't work for everyone, but the people who it does work for are probably going to love it.

But anyway, as for what we're really all here for, the gameplay of FFV is almost total perfection, as I've been implying before. It is so simple, and yet it works so marvelously well that I am disappointed that it didn't become the standard for how all turn-based menu RPGs function. Basically, how it works is that everyone, of course, has a class. However, no one has a specific class, the system is far more akin to FFIII than any of the other games. Basically, once you've unlocked classes beyond the base Freelancer class, you may change any of your characters to any of the classes you've unlocked at will. Progression is not tied to taking character levels, but class levels. Character levels only get you an HP boost. Take a level in a class and you unlock an ability of that class that may be equipped to any other class. You could have your Black Mages punching enemies to death thanks to Monk abilities, or Dancers blasting your foes to bits with item-based artillery powers you got from the Cannoneer class. Each class has a set number of levels because they have a finite number of abilities, obviously. Level up a class to the maximum and you have "mastered" that class. Mastering a class means that your original Freelancer class gains both the highest stat boosts that that class provides as well as any passive abilities that that class was able to use, eliminating the need to equip this ability to the Freelancer. Say, for example, you mastered the Ninja class. Ninjas have the unique passive ability to Dual Wield, which you can unlock as an ability to equip to other classes. Since you've mastered Ninja, however, you don't need to equip it to your Freelancer because the Freelancer can do it naturally just like the Ninja can now. What this amounts to is that by the end of the game, the Freelancer will be your most powerful class if you've been mastering classes. Freelancers have other benefits that you might not expect from the only class you have at the start of the game as well: they are the only class that can equip any and all pieces of equipment, and they are also the only class to be able to equip two abilities at once. Every other class has its own special ability that takes up an ability slot. Summoners obviously need to be able to cast Summon magic or else they wouldn't be Summoners, right? Because the Freelancer has no special abilities of its own (in the sense of commands that you can activate, that is), you can instead pick any two from whichever classes you want. No restrictions. If you want a Chemist that uses Samurai Bushido arts while wearing a wizard hat and knight armor and using a bard's harp to attack, no one can really stop you. Mimics get a whole three ability slots, but their utility is a bit more limited than the Freelancer because they cannot equip all types of equipment. It's still very good if you want to make use of Dualcast and spam Bahamut for no MP with a party of Mimics by using their Mimic command.

And that's the beauty of FFV. You have so many options on how you want to develop your characters, and you can take them down any or all the paths you want, and by the end of the game, you can use everything all your characters have ever learned all at the same time. It feels immensely rewarding to go down one particular class, master it, and then go into another class and find all kinds of abilities that perfectly complement the abilities of the class you just mastered. Dualcast and any kind of Magic. Rapid Fire, Spellblade and Dual Wield. Mix and Combine. Alternatively, if you're like me, you'll get a thrill of going on gameFAQs, planning everything out in advance and then watching with a smug smile on your face as all the pieces fall into place, just as you had envisioned. 

However, this does bring up the one glaring issue I have with the gameplay, and that's the fact that without looking it up online, you have no idea what abilities a class will give you until you actually get the abilities, which isn't helped by the fact that you unlock a number of classes relatively late in the game. At the beginning of the game, enemies will seldom give more than one ABP each (ABP being ability points, the experience bar for your classes, if you will). Even by the end of the game, you will still get at most, 25 ABP or so from a non-boss battle. Classes take hundreds of ABP to master, with the absolute worst being the Red Mage, taking an unholy 999 ABP to unlock its final ability, Dualcast, which, although undeniably useful, is nowhere close to being worth grinding that much, especially by the point in the game which you would realistically get it. I can understand the sort of childish joy in being surprised by a new and useful ability, but I would readily trade it to avoid the irritation of learning that I spent all that time grinding for an ability I didn't actually need. This lack of foreknowledge will also probably affect your approach to classes, causing you to avoid classes you really should be taking and taking classes that are absolutely pointless. Take, for example, the case of the Ranger. It gets a few nice bonuses, but its Rapid Fire skill doesn't seem particularly useful... until, that is, you unlock it for your Freelancer class to use, combine it with the Ninja's Dual Wield and the Mystic Knight's Spellblade and suddenly your warriors are attacking eight times per move with Excaliburs enchanted with the Flare spell. On the other hand, you have something like the Red Mage, which seems useful at first, but is easily outclassed by the end of the game. Same with the Black Mage. There's little reason to use either of them, Summoner makes Black Magic obsolete (other than for use as Spellblades), and Red Mage makes itself obsolete with the inability to cast any magic over level 3 or outside the standard Black/White tree. Which this game has a lot of. There are Summoners, Blue Mages and Time Mages as well. So because of that, you're advised to look everything up instead of going in blind. It's important to plan, folks.

Graphically, the game looks fine. It could have stood for an update or two for the GBA, but I'll take what I can get. The sprites still look a little pixelly in places and it's obvious they didn't put as much effort into updating this game as they did FFVI for the GBA, but even still, the environments are generally pretty decent and the in-battle sprites all work pretty well. And hey, there's no ridiculous Mode Seven either, so it has that going for it. I jest. Still, it's nothing that will blow your mind, so remember that you are playing a game that debuted on the SNES in 1992. There is some good variety in the environments too. From a ship graveyard to a dragon mountain, to a fleshlike, organic tower, the game does its best to keep itself interesting. I do love how every class has its own individual sprite as well, it really shows how they were putting focus on making your gameplay as diverse as you wanted it to be.

In terms of music, the game is fantastic, I still listen to many of the tracks even now. The main theme, Ahead on Our Way, is something most people recognize from FFVII, so it says something about the quality of the soundtrack of this game that it debuted here. Other tracks are great as well. Everyone knows Clash on the Big Bridge, of course, but the standard battle theme has just as much energy, the final boss themes are appropriately energetic and foreboding, the overworld theme has a strange sort of... upbeat wistfulness that makes it appropriate for all kinds of situations, not to mention very catchy, and the Final Fantasy main theme played on the music box for the final cutscene is almost tearjerkingly beautiful even if the scene itself is a happy one. And then it immediately goes into the credits theme, which is just about as good. This game's soundtrack is seriously underrated among fans, more really do need to give it a listen.

I'll continue to stand by what I said in the opening. The foundation of this game is brilliant. It takes your standard turn-based game and gives you every little toy imaginable to play around and experiment with, and then makes a whole game around it. No other turn-based game I know of gives you that much freedom, not even something like Golden Sun, where you can change class at any time but your core commands remain the same. If you're looking for the definitive example of how to do a turn-based menu RPG correctly, then look no farther.

Super Robot Wars is one of those series I've always wanted to play, but haven't been able to because of the limited availability of the series in English. I haven't been terribly interested in the Original Generation games that have been localized either, seeing as they lack the crossover element that is the main draw to the series. So I was delighted to find this hack when I went looking, and though this game took a long, long time for me to beat once I finally got around to it, I can say without a doubt that the experience was well worth it.

So let's get into things. The story, as one might expect from such a crossover, is a beautiful mess. There's a cast of about, oh, I don't know, 300 or so (about six pages in pilots alone), many of which have similar appearances and characterizations. And of course, that's not even getting into how all the stories of the various series are meshed into one. However, what I was surprised to find is that the game does a very, very good job of getting you to know which character is which, what series they belong to, and whatnot, even if you're unfamiliar with the series in question. The game features a good number of series; to be specific, it has SPT Layzner, Martian Successor Nadesico, Space Knight Tekkman Blade, Combattler V, Voltes V, Mazinkaiser, Full Metal Panic, Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, Super Bestial Machine God Dancouga, Brain Powered, Hades Project Zeorymer and Mobile Fighter G Gundam alongside the original characters they created for the game. Full disclosure here: I'd seen all of Mazinkaiser, G Gundam and Dancouga before playing this game, so that probably helped in making me familiar with the cast. However, these aren't the primary series featured in this game. That honor goes to Nadesico and, unfortunately, Gundam SEED. SEED makes up a large portion of the plot, and even though I have not seen a minute of that show, I am now sufficiently turned off from it based on the events I've seen in this game. But anyway, it is surprisingly hard to get everyone mixed up when they all have their own specific robots, power suits or support craft that they pilot. You associate the character with that machine, that gameplay function, and your brain is just able to compartmentalize it to the point where you remember. Though granted, the huge amount of time you spend playing the game helps.

That said, it's obvious that some of the series fit into the main plot far better than others. Zeorymer, for example, integrates all of its own events fairly well with the knowledge of the mysterious figure of Masaki Kihara. He's able to provide info on what happened in the original plot. Of course, Gundam SEED and Nadesico fit in pretty well too, what with the story being designed around them. Brain Powered also unfortunately gets lots of focus, and that was another series the game turned me off to due to the dull characters and the uninspired mecha. Beyond that, however, it starts to get... interesting. You have some series, such as Mazinkaiser or Voltes V, which make up a small share of the story and are fairly self-explanatory, but seem more like distracting divergences from the main plot. And then you have others like G Gundam that make very little sense in context despite the story's best attempts at explaining and shoehorning elements from the series in (I'd be very confused as to who these people were if I hadn't watched the series). And then finally, you have series such as Dancouga and Combattler, which have little to no relevance to anything at all and are pretty much only there to give you an extra unit or two and have a token cameo from a series character. It's a bit confusing in Dancouga's case. Given the military aspect of that series, one would think it would fit right into this game. But I digress.

As far as the original plot of this game goes... it's not very well done. Granted, at the time of this review, I've only done the playthrough for the female character, but I assume the male one is largely the same (and judging from what little I've done on my new game+ file, it is). It's another one of those instances where they don't introduce the villain until the plot is almost over and then proceed to dump info on you to make you care before you kill him. In fact, most of the plot is like that. They keep you in the dark about almost every single detail until the story's almost over, and even then, you still have a few questions remaining once all the answers are given. It needed better pacing, and it certainly needed to fit in better, because like many of the series, it doesn't really mesh well with the UEFA vs ZAFT conflict that so much of the game revolves around.

But enough about that. The bottom line about the story is that it works in some places and in others it doesn't, which is inevitable when you have a crossover like this. There's a very, very small chance that any person will enjoy every single series in this game, even when you factor out those series that have no representative events. However, I can say that if, like I was, you're not familiar with every single series in this game (and I doubt that most people are), this can be a good way to get acquainted with them. For all the bad things I said about Gundam SEED and Brain Powered, the game now has me keenly interested in watching Nadesico, Tekkaman Blade, SPT Layzner and Voltes V, and I've already seen a fair bit of Combattler V since I started to play. I just couldn't resist watching a robot that fights with yo-yos.  Zeorymer and Full Metal Panic, I find myself favorably indifferent towards. I enjoyed what little I saw, but it didn't quite inspire in me a want to watch like the others did. Well, Zeorymer did at first, mind you, but then I looked up some info about the series and got turned off to it, which I could see happening if I saw more of the Zeorymer events in the first playthough.

Let's talk gameplay. It's pretty obvious this is where most of the effort in a SRW game goes, and this is where the game really shines. I mean, it is just a standard turn-based strategy game at its core, but here's the thing that makes it special: just about every unit in the game is unique. Oh sure, they all share some common features. Some even have the exact same design (though this is true of surprisingly few of them). But each and every one has something that makes them stand out in some way. Kurz's Gernsback, for example, has a different attack from Mao's otherwise identical Gernsback. Not to mention a different pilot with a different set of spirit powers and a lack of a fin on its head. Most of the Brain Powered units are clones of each other in terms of design and abilities, but their pilots set them apart. And really, this is what sets the game as a whole apart from any other bog standard strategy game. Instead of having a bunch of no-name grunt units to command as you would in something like Advance Wars, you have a whole cast of unique characters with unique robots with unique attacks and their own personalities and uses for each one. You'll get attached to each character and each mecha as you play and you'll really try your hardest to prevent any of them from being shot down. I restarted entire missions just because my Blue Earth support unit got destroyed. I could have likely finished the mission without it, but I certainly didn't want to.

And in all fairness, the units in this game (and SRW at large, I presume), are incredibly versatile, each having a surprising number of functions. Take Mazinkaiser, for example. At first blush, it's an obvious tanking heavy hitter, and indeed, that's mostly what it's good for. Slap a ton of mobility upgrades on it, however, and suddenly you have yourself a nigh indestructible god of war that won't ever get hit and will take barely any damage even if it does get hit. The problem with this being that enemies will know better than to target Mazinkaiser and will aim for someone less mobile instead, transforming it from a tank into merely a heavy damage dealer. More positively, Boss Borot from the same series looks like nothing more than a support unit at first, having little armor, horrible mobility and laughable attacks. Upgrade its weapons and wait until its pilots level up and you'll find yourself with a legitimate boss killer on your hands, pun fully intended. A boss killer that, mind you, still functions great as a support unit because it can still repair and supply other units. Because of this kind of versatility, the loss of even one unit can be fairly profound since it limits your options on the battlefield quite a bit.

Take, for instance, the case of Gundam Rose. It's a fantastic unit, able to hit enemies close and far away, it has a map attack that can damage multiple enemies at once in an area of your choosing, and its pilot has a fantastic set of support abilities. Not to mention it is required for and has access to the most powerful attack in the game, the Erupting Shuffle Alliance Attack. Now imagine that your fighting the final boss and out of nowhere the boss hits you with an atrocious map attack that ends up blowing up Gundam Rose in the crossfire. Not that I'm speaking from experience, but you just lost one of the best distance fighters, a unit with a map attack of its own, and the ability to do the Erupting Shuffle Alliance Attack for the rest of the battle. Now do you see why the loss of just one unit can be devastating? Granted, not all units are capable of all the things Gundam Rose can do. Some will always have a particular role that they will stick to. The aforementioned Blue Earth will always be a support craft, as alluded to earlier. Its attacks just don't measure up to anything else you can put on the battlefield. The Aestivalis units will pretty much always be hit and run light attackers. But for a lot of units, there's so much that they're capable of that losing one feels like the worst thing even if it means nothing other than the fact that you can't use it anymore and that you'll be paying a small fee to have it repaired at the end of the mission.

Unfortunately, however, that is this game's main strength, as the attacks have surprisingly little in the way they vary themselves other than animation. You have a few attacks that will lower a stat or two, but nothing that will cause serious change, such as a "poison" status effect or whatever the robot equivalent of that would be. There's not much variance in the missions either, with most of them amounting to "kill all enemies." Granted, I'm happy to see that, but I'd like more changes than I got.

Graphically, the game is a bit of a mixed bag. The attack animations, of course, look splendid, but other than that, there's really not much to the game. There's some nice maps, I guess, and a few backgrounds, but that's about it. There's no character sprites outside of battle sequences except for the OCs and their mechs (and these are shown very rarely), so most of the story is just character portraits and textboxes set against a backdrop. Now I can tolerate that, but I do find it rather jarring when having to switch from gameplay and back, and it doesn't do a whole lot to keep your interest if you're not into the story. You kinda just want to skip the dialogue and get to the gameplay, because that's where there's actually stuff to see. On the bright side, there are a few CGs for certain events, and while they're nice, I do feel some of them could have been done better. The final scene in the G Gundam plot comes to mind; you can barely make out the characters.
 But other than that, it all does look well done. That's about all I can say.

Musically, you've got mostly remixes of songs from various anime done for GBA, and some of them impressively sound better on the GBA. "Reason" comes to mind. "Fire Wars" and "Majin Kenzan" unfortunately got the short end of the stick, but they're serviceable enough. It all sounds good, though some tracks are a bit dull, such as "You get to Burning." And it is a little irritating how the music reverts to the same song after passing every turn. It's alright until you're 30 stages in, look at the turn counter and realize you've heard that song come on literally 500 times. Especially since almost all of the other music in the game is better.

SRWJ is a really nice package for we English-only plebians. It's a stand alone title, so no real context is required (though doubtless some knowledge of Gundam SEED would help), and all in all is a great strategy game featuring lots of characters you probably like. Enjoy it, and make sure you light a fire in your soul.

If you're reading this because of the relatively low score I gave this game, understand that I had a lot of built up hype going into Final Fantasy 6. I had heard a lot of claims of "best Final Fantasy" and whatnot, so I very reasonably thought it was going to be the pinnacle of the Final Fantasy gaming experience. At least, it would be better than what I had played before, so I thought. Now understand that, having never experienced these games as a child, I had also decided to play them sequentially. I started with FF1, moved to FF2 and so on. Now as it turned out, FF5 ended up being my favorite of the first five I played. Its gameplay was so good that I couldn't wait to see how much FF6 had improved on it. Unfortunately, with the bar set that high, I couldn't help but be disappointed.

To elaborate, we'll begin with the story. Final Fantasy 6's story comes with few surprises if you've already played previous Final Fantasy games. There's an evil empire, your characters are going to join the resistance movement, it's all fairly standard stuff. The surprises lie in two things, the first being the game's setting. While the traditional European Fantasy stuff is largely intact, in FF6, you get the sense that it underwent an industrial revolution without bothering to change to the Victorian style. You'll be riding the occasional steampunk mecha and piloting an airship that's far more like a blimp than a boat with propellers. I think it fits the somewhat darker tone of 6, kind of showing how there's not as much innocence in this decaying world anymore. The other surprise is that you'll be seeing the game's main villain and final boss quite frequently throughout the game, even right at the beginning. Now mind you, this doesn't actually mean much as said villain is a really bad character, having almost no backstory, character development, or even well established motivation, but it does mean that the fact that what you're fighting is EVIL is much more readily apparent. You actually get to see the evil empire's people do evil things, and you see them do it quite often. It goes a long way in making the player really want to defeat this heinous person.

However, on the other hand, the playable characters are almost all well-established, each going through a character arc or two of their own. A substantial part of the game is spent exploring the people you're playing as, to the point where it really eclipses the main plot of the game in an almost Evangelion-like narrowing of focus. It's a culmination of the direction the stories were heading in FF2 and FF4. 2 was almost all plot and no character, 4 had a decent mix of both, and 6 is almost all character and no plot, which is especially apparent in the last third of the game, which is spent merely traveling around the world and regaining the party members you lost in the transitory event by finding them and working through their various neuroses. Or not. You are only required to have three party members to beat the game, and while it's easier to beat the final dungeon if you have everyone, it's by no means necessary. I completely passed over rescuing main character Locke, for example, because he was my least favorite party member in the entire game, and I did this at the cost of the game's most powerful spells. But it didn't matter, I still stomped the final boss flat. Like many, many turn based games, you can feel free to reduce the difficulty as you please merely by grinding enough. But anyway, please do note that this doesn't evenly apply to all characters. Gau, for example, will get very little development or even much of anything. Same with Strago. But your main characters, Terra, Locke, Celes, Edgar, Sabin, etc. all do get their share of screentime with stories that surpass anything you've seen in a Final Fantasy game before in depth. Not that this is necessarily a good thing (I will always despise Locke even if he is more developed than the entire cast of FF5), but it certainly does make the characters, and thus the world around them, feel more alive. But anyway, barring a few particularly memorable moments, the actual plot of the game isn't likely to leave much of an impression on you. It has been a while since I last played 6 at the time of this writing and I struggle to think of more than 2-3 things that actually happened in the game and had a significant bearing on the plot as a whole rather than just the story of some character. But the moments you do remember, however, are likely to stay with you for time to come.

On to the gameplay. In short, the gameplay of FF6 is not only a step down from 5, it's also a step down from 4 and 3 and yeah it's pretty much the worst of any of the 2D games. But why is this so, you ask? It's a bit complex. Allow me to explain. Now, similar to how each character has their own personalized place in the story, each character also has their own personalized place on the battlefield. Every one of them is wholly unique, with the exception of Terra and Celes, who are near clones of each other in terms of what they can do and what they can equip, which is not a bad thing at all as the two of them are arguably the two most useful, powerful and versatile characters in the game. These align heavily with the classes of prior games (so you'll get Terra and Celes, who are more or less Red Wizards, Locke, who is an obvious Thief, Edgar, who's obviously meant to be a Dragoon, etc.) However, the game does throw you a few curveballs in regards to this, such as Sabin, the monk stand in who ostensibly has fighting game command inputs in order to do his special attacks, but falls behind in the equipment department and is thus fairly weak at the end of the game in contrast to your standard FF monk (unless you equip him with the relic that allows him to equip anything, that is). And then you have Gau, who is a totally off the wall ridiculous character that attacks by going into "Rages," in which he basically goes berserk after you choose a rage for him to go into, using random attacks based on the enemies that Gau has encountered. If Gau encounters an enemy, he gets the Rage for that enemy, so the game has over 200 rages for him to go into, and many of them have abilities beyond anything you'd expect, making him a very powerful character if you're willing to put some effort into experimentation and/or gamefaqs research. There are others as well, such as Setzer, who has attacks based strangely on gambling, or Relm who has an (exceedingly useless) painting gimmick. But the main problem is, for all this variety, the level progression of these characters is all mostly the same. True, they start off with different basic stats, but by the time you get to level 30 or so, their stats stop increasing entirely and the only further boosts you'll get from levelling up come in the form of Esper bonuses.

Let's talk about Espers, shall we? In essence, they're a simplification of the ingenious job system in FF5, but when I look at the way it was simplified, I can't help but think "if it wasn't broken, why did you fix it?" So here's how it works: the game has no traditional "Summoner" class like prior Final Fantasy games do. Instead, throughout the story, you'll find spirits who will choose to fight with you called Espers. These you can equip to any character, and they may then be summoned for special effects on the battlefield. However, these also cause two separate effects for the person equipping them, the first being what magic they learn. A few spells are indeed learned naturally, but most are acquired through Espers. Each Esper has a set of spells a character may learn from them, and while some Espers have some spells in common, the rate at which the character learns these spells will be different. And do note that this applies to absolutely any character with one rather unfortunate exception. Even Gau, the boy you resigned to doing nothing but letting the computer do random attacks for, can spend the entire battle casting Ultima over and over again if you so choose. While this is clever, magic is generally so useful that it overrides many of the individual abilities that your characters have, meaning that because every character can learn magic, you'll start to have characters blend into one another using similar strategies. This is made worse by the fact that, as I said earlier, after a certain point all the stat boosts you see from level ups come from Espers as well, meaning that you can influence what your characters' strengths are, and unfortunately, it's terribly easy to hit a stat cap for either physical attack or magic if you train properly. So if you play your cards right, by the end of the game you'll have characters with exactly the same stats and exactly the same spells, differing only in what equipment they can use and what their special abilities are. This truly is problematic, because as I've been alluding to, the special abilities generally do tend to lose their effectiveness as the game goes on (if they were ever useful to begin with) to a point where ultimately, the only real reason to use one character over another lies in what they can equip. But do keep in mind that the game makes it terribly irritating and time-consuming to actually max out a stat using Espers, even if it is easy to do. The reason for this is that you only get one Esper for each particular stat boost. So if you want to have multiple characters get the +2 to magic upon level up at once, tough luck, because only one character can get that boost at a time. So if you want to max out your party, you effectively have to put all but one of your party members in reserve and go grind with one character and the Espers you want on him or her until he or she is maxxed out, and then do it for the next character, and so on, because they don't get anything for levelling up without an Esper on them and the level cap is at 99. For what reason could they not just have a simple level up system for the whole game? Or perhaps use the FF5 system of level ups meaning nothing but HP/MP boosts and your actual stats being determined by job abilities and equipment? Either would have worked far better than this system, where you can lose stat points forever if you plan poorly. Things like this sour my enjoyment of the game.

But, as for the presentation, the game looks absolutely gorgeous for an SNES game. The sprites and environments are beautifully rendered, the spell animations are appropriately engaging, the colours pop everywhere, the designs for the characters and monsters are really nice, and overall it's just a really good looking game. Regardless of whatever other faults I can find in this game, I will never deny that it looks pretty as all get out. And the music is oh so fine as well. Each character generally has their own theme, and some of them are just amazing. Setzer's theme for example, is awesome, full of the grandeur you'd want of a swashbuckling airship pilot. Cyan's theme is pretty great too, can't help but love the haunting flute that accompanies him even if he's not the best character to play as. The boss theme is kind of goofy sounding for the tone of the game, but I can't help but enjoy it as well. However, while many have praised the opera house sequence, I didn't particularly care for it. I think it was a bit too ambitious for its time. Something like that would have sounded great on, say, the Playstation, but the Super Nintendo just wasn't the right format for it. Nonetheless, it's memorable as well.

Regardless of anything I've said, I'm still going to recommend playing Final Fantasy 6. It's an iconic game, and there's just no way to get into a serious discussion of the series without playing it. You'd be forgiven for not having played, say, FF2, but this game? Not so much. However do take all the praise you hear about it into careful consideration and temper your expectations, because if you didn't play this game as a child, you probably won't enjoy it as much as some other people seem to. The rose-tinted glasses around this game seem to be heavily in effect, and while the game does have its merits, I don't think it warrants that much praise. But, that is for your own discretion. Game responsibly.

Shin Megami Tensei is, of course, the granddaddy of Atlus dungeon crawlers, and thus I thought it was the best place to start. As of the time of this review, I've yet to play any of the other games
in the series (no Personas or SMTs, though I've seen glimpses of them and I have plans to try both
eventually), so you'll get a pure, unsoiled opinion of how this game
stands on its own.  After playing it, I can definitely say that it truly does show its age a lot worse than other games of its time. It is a Super Nintendo game, and yet graphically, it's not far above one of the more high end NES games, and the mechanics of the game are similar in that regard as well. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. There's surprisingly a lot to cover for this surprisingly low end game, so on with it.

The story feels less like a story and more like a template for what would form the basis of future Atlus games. It does not even attempt to have any complexity, and given the time it was made, I don't think it would be truly fair to expect it to. Still, it definitely does show more ambition than games of its time, forgoing all pretense and diving headlong into Christian lore, along with Norse lore, Hindu lore, Shinto lore, and about every other religion you can think of. Sensitivity clearly wasn't on the developers minds here, and it does show since the opening of the game involves Tokyo being destroyed in a nuclear armageddon. Bear in mind that this is a Japanese game and that nuclear weapons are quite the taboo in Japan for obvious reasons. If this was some sort of ploy to be controversial in order to attract media attention, I wouldn't be surprised, but I only wish it would have worked more. A more successful Atlus may have created a very different gaming environment than the one we see currently. Nonetheless, for all its exploration of quasi-religious mythology, post-apocalyptic human behavior and thinly veiled potshots at the government, Shin Megami Tensei feels surprisingly "video-gamey" in regards to the rest of its plot (or lack thereof). Consider that your main protagonist is an absolute mute cipher. There is no legitimate reason for this because (A.) this is an RPG that's supposed to have a somewhat more intricate story to distract you from the repetitive gameplay and (B.) One of the main mechanics of the game is negotiating with demons in terms of words, so it makes no sense for him (or her, we never get so much as a character portrait, sprite, or even a name; all the playable humans in the game are named by the player) to be silent in regards to everything else. You receive your game-changing powerups from Steven Hawki- a brilliant scientist in a wheelchair in glasses named STEVEN. You must combine your dog with a demon to have a realistic chance of progressing. The entire second two thirds of the game is more or less just the player character wandering around doing random things to build up either Law or Chaos points; especially notable seeing as the story doesn't have significantly branching pathways for either until the final dungeon. All these things taken together make Shin Megami Tensei's plot feel like it was working against what it was trying to convey. It couldn't stick with silly or serious, so it kind of tried to split the difference and ended up getting nowhere on either end.

But anyway, story's not what you're playing this game for. Let's talk gameplay. Shin Megami Tensei 1's mechanics are a lot like what I've heard other Shin Megami Tensei and Persona games are like: they rely far more on the more unconventional tricks a character in a turn-based RPG typically has. Things like status conditions, instant death spells, and elemental weaknesses are far more at play here than they are in your run of the mill turn-based game. Unfortunately, this can lead to some instances where the game becomes rather... unfair, shall we say. And to be clear, this doesn't necessarily mean it's being unfair to you. Oh no. It's often quite unfair to the enemies if the player knows what he's doing. Several bosses are entirely possible to defeat by simply stun locking them using the Zio spell and using the 5 other characters on your team to simply wail away on them. Which brings me to my next point: the party in SMT1 is unusually large for your standard turn-based game. It's six members total, including however many humans the plot says you should have at the moment and demons making up the rest. So for example, if you have three human characters and one of them drops out, you may simply replace the human with one of your demons in reserve.

Now, we've probably all had our fantasies of using every character available to us to crush our enemies in certain RPGs. Just going by the FF series on the Super Nintendo, in FFIV and FFVI, by the end of the game you had loads of extra characters you couldn't use in your standard 4 or 5 person main team. You wanted to use them all at the same time, didn't you? Or perhaps you played a Pokemon game and wanted to send out all six of the Pokemon you could carry at once? Well, this game kind of shows why that's not really the best of ideas, especially with mechanics such as the ones Atlus comes up with. You see, having that many people in your main party causes problems in that not only do enemy parties increase in size as well to compensate (you'll occasionally be fighting full enemy parties of 8-10 demons), you also arbitrarily have loads more to keep track of. Six health bars, six sets of spells, six sets of stats, etc. Fortunately, you do not have six sets of equipment to keep up with because the demons are rather simplistic. You can't equip anything to them, they don't level up, and they can only have three unique moves (either spells or special attacks). However, where it's easy to lose track of things is in the face that on the battle screen, your party has absolutely no character sprites to themselves whatsoever. You're going purely off of text names. And that's what most of the game is. Text. It all feels much like a text-based adventure game with combat. But anyway, the fact that you have six active party members does sometimes make resource management a real issue. Your main method of recovery will of course be healing spells, but the problem is that you don't ever seem to get enough mana to cover the entire dungeon, especially without a guide, and the mana recovery items in this game may as well be nonexistent. And do bear in mind that if one of your demons drops to 0 hp, there is a very real chance that he may die and be removed from your party entirely. Fortunately, most of them are relatively easy to replace, but nonetheless, it can be a concern.

And that brings me to the next, well, quirk about this game. It's very heavy on the dungeon crawling, obviously, but given the limited resources you have to work with, this will probably change how you're used to playing a dungeon crawler type game entirely. Granted, you'll still have to run through a gauntlet of enemies and conserve your resources for the inevitable boss at the end, but the difference lies in how you run that gauntlet. Chances are, you'll be trying to talk your way out of most encounters. Fighting causes a loss in precious health and potentially MP or items. On the other hand, if you try to negotiate with the demons, you can just as often get them to give you money or convince them to join your quest. It's especially a smart idea to recruit as many demons as you can from the dungeon you're about to face because any further demons you meet of that type will automatically be friendly and give you something if you try to negotiate with them with that type of demon in your active party. For example, if I had a Tenshi Angel in my combat party and randomly encountered another Tenshi Angel, I could just press the talk button and the Angel I was about to fight would automatically give me money or an item and then go away. Now, it is important to note that you gain absolutely zero experience points from doing this, however, I don't consider it much of a loss. First of all, your demons can't level up to begin with so it's pointless thinking in terms of them. Secondly, while your stats are important, it's a bigger deal to have good equipment on your characters than lots of stat points. Thirdly, you'll find a lot of items that will improve your stats anyway if you look hard enough. And lastly, while level growth may affect what spells your characters have available, you gain most of the spells early on and your main hero can't use spells anyway. By the end of the game, you'll only have one human character that may use spells, so it's a bit pointless thinking about the other ones who can anyway. Anyway, a problem you may encounter with demon negotiations will occur through alignment shifting. You start to kill too many chaos monsters, for example, you'll become Law aligned and all the Chaos monsters will attack you on sight. While this isn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself (Law alignment is basically the game's easy mode, you get the best equipment and demons), it does mean you won't be able to negotiate your way through a whole dungeon. Now, this doesn't apply if you're doing a neutral playthrough, as I did, but if you decide to do something different, you'll probably have to be a little smarter about how you use your recovery items. And if that makes neutral sound like the easy mode, believe me, it isn't. Law and Chaos both get really overpowered demons to use in the final dungeon. Neutral has to kill both sets of said demons. One last note about negotiating is that the game is on a timer system based on the phases of the moon, and it is completely impossible to negotiate with any monster on the full moon because they all go feral or something. I'd strongly advise avoiding dungeons until a full moon passes. Whether you like the negotiating is up to you. I think it's an interesting concept, but it gets boring quickly since all demons respond pretty much the same way every time, so all you have to do is memorize how to talk to each one. Demon recruitment and fusion are like that as well, since there's a limited number of fusions you can realistically do and most of the demons don't end up anywhere near as powerful as your human characters anyway.

In terms of presentation, as I said before, most of SMT1 looks on the lower end scale of the SNES's output. Honestly, the game sort of looks like your standard NES Dragon Quest game with uglier, more pixellated sprites trying to represent more realistic looking characters. Much of the game is, of course, flat black menus, particularly in dungeons or in combat, where you only get a tiny centered window to display movement. Slightly more interesting is the world map, with colours and expansiveness more befitting the system it's on, but still not living up to the quality of something like Super Ghouls and Ghosts, for example. Musically, the game strangely sounds like something off the Genesis rather than the SNES, which is a shame because I vastly prefer most of the SNES's tracks to the well-known Genesis "twang." SMT1 is not without its good tunes, however, and the battle theme and the theme of the Ginza area really do stand out.

But what about replay value, you ask? Well, you could see how the game changes from each of the different alignments, but sadly, I don't believe those changes are enough to justify a full replay. There's also a fair bit hidden items and secrets you may want to go back and look for if you missed them on your first try because you just couldn't get stick around in the dungeon long enough, but honestly a lot of them seem so frustrating to get that I wouldn't bother, especially because a lot of them aren't worth it. Bear in mind that this is a game where you are absolutely forced to cross trap spaces that you have no way of seeing or avoiding being damaged by once you touch them (and yes, you must cross them to progress, there's no way around them). The optional areas are even more obnoxious, particularly in the final dungeon, made even worse by the fact that you have little to no landmarks and the place is ridiculously huge.

Should you play SMT1? That's up to you, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone but hardcore fans or those looking to experience the novelty of an Atlus style RPG without all the bells and whistles of newer offerings. I managed to complete it, but I probably only did so because this was my only experience with the Atlus RPG, so the whole system was somewhat new to me. Had I been more familiar with it, I would have likely put the game down and never picked it back up. SMT1 probably won't appeal to most people but will be catnip for those it does appeal to, but, as always, use your own discretion.

 

earthwarrior : Not sure how they can be running out of ideas when they always seem like they're doing that. Look at gen one. Voltorb is a Pokeball and it's evolution is upside down with ANGRY EYES. Ditto's a blob with eyes. So is Grimer, except it's a poison blob. Muk is a bigger poison blob. Sorry if I sound a bit mean, but it does upset me a little when I see people say things like that.

Anywho my least favorite is easily Pikachu, for hogging the spotlight of more interesting Pokemon and getting useless clones of itself made every new generation. At least it ain't as bad as it used to be.