I will now play A Video Game

I don't think I'm equipped to handle how good this game looks

quick manual
read me!

..

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There does not appear to be any sort of tutorial it just made me fight a dragon and I pushed Triangle and was presented with literally several HUNDRED screens' worth of explanatory text

extremely into this dude explaining his acronyms mid-sentence

A thing I remember noticing even as a kid: PS1 games are SO DARK. I dunno if it's something with the limited color palettes or what but like the quintessential PS1 look is just dark as all hell

I love CRTs as much as any gamedev but the majority of them were horrifically miscalibrated. Feel like most PS1 games would've been impossible to even see on my woodgrain-ass coax-only 70s TV

(I had an N64, and those things are brighter than the sun, so it wasn't a problem)

this is definitely the prequel to FFXII because the plot just dumps you In Medias Res straight into like a half-dozen backstabbing political factions with zero context and I'm expending all my attention on taking screenshots

yeah that's right

going to bed now but that was an incredibly strong opening followed by an extremely dull hour or so of actual gameplay lol

this game opens with like 30 minutes of incredibly cinematic cutscenes about political intrigue and assassinations and then you open the menu and it goes HA HA HA I HOPE YOU LIKE SOKOBAN LOSER

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Every room on the map is named like this it rules

this game contains *fifteen pages* of instructions regarding CUBES but I just had to dig through the paper manual to figure out how the hell you're supposed to read the enemy HP gauge

for those following at home:

it says "HP" but it's lying. It also doesn't mean 16 of 14% of anything. The total HP isn't displayed ANYWHERE. 16 is the amount of damage my attack should do. 14% is hit chance. EDG/PHY is the type of MY attack and Evil is the ENEMY type

the slashes mean literally nothing, and worse they're implying grouping/relationships where none actually exist

there's an ENTIRE SCREEN yall could have drawn this information on! Why are you packing it into two lines of abbreviations at the very bottom of the screen! Aagh!

so uh this spikes from "tutorial level" to "nintendo hard" real suddenly huh

there are very low inventory limits on most items

if you loot a chest and you don't have room for whatever happens to be inside it, TOO BAD GONE FOREVER

quick question does this game ever turn into something more than Sokoban With Way Too Much Bad Combat

I really want to like it because the art's incredible but boy it's thoroughly unpleasant to play

You enter a room

It looks exactly like the previous 20 rooms

There are two bats, a wolf, and a skeleton

Killing each one takes Way Too Long

When they are dead, you move a bunch of crates around very slowly to reach the next door

I've been doing this for four hours