Story/Characters: For the point I’ve reached (mid-1993) this is not bad at all. The story is based on mixing together a bunch of different mythologies and providing “explanations” for certain myths and religious elements. There’s reincarnation, gods, ancient intelligent lizard people, and more. Sometimes I found things a little hard to follow but overall this is a strong point of the game.
World: It’s earth! There are three time periods — prehistory (ice age), 1300 BC, and 550 BC. Each has areas roughly appropriate to the time period. Maybe the individual towns and cultures could have been a little more developed but overall it’s not too bad.
Game Flow: The game plays smoothly. You can turn on fast running in the options, and there are several auto battle options including one that automatically exits autobattle when someone is in critical. Some dungeons have ridiculously powerful grunts but you can run from them. The bosses don’t require grinding. Perhaps the only issue is that sometimes it doesn’t seem like there are enough hints for what to do next.
System: Basic AMID for the most part. You can equip magic, and each magic can be used either offensively or defensively, and you can raise the power level as your caster gains levels. This game shares a quality with GDLeen and a few other games on this blog — innovations or unusual features that don’t affect the game much. In this case I never changed my stat allocations or the style of attack. Although maybe you can make the main character an effective magic user; that might work.
Side Quests/Optional Content: None that I know of.
Interface: No big complaints here, but we still can’t see the power of weapons/armor before selecting them. I also don’t like that you can’t buy a weapon without equipping it on someone.
Graphics/Sound: Commenters pointed out that the enemy art is well-done. Other than that, we’re slowly moving towards the richer, larger graphics of the later SFC rather than the Famicom-style graphics of earlier games. The music was fine — maybe a bit above average but none of the songs stuck in my head.
Next up on the list is Estopolis, released in the US as Lufia and the Fortress of Doom. I played this a few years ago recovering from the flu — at the time I thought it was slow moving and tedious but having played 26 games on this blog it’s really not that bad. It’s the kind of average, plodding RPG I thought I’d see a lot on this blog.
So the next game then is Silva Saga II, which I will get to after a few more PC Engine games.