Customer Reviews

Crimson Gem Saga

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I will admit, this game caught me off guard. Crimson Gem Saga is a sequel to Astonishia Story, a game that came out a few years ago for the PSP. However, there are so many differences that they chose to release it under a new name, or from what I understand anyways. When I originally heard that it was from the same team, I grew rather worried because Astonishia Story was a very lackluster title, or at least I thought it was. However, any doubts were immediately washed away when I first started playing this game.

Crimson Gem Saga was brought over to the US by Atlus, which means that we'll be getting a high quality translation along with great care to the product. One can immediately tell by the beautiful anime introduction that they didn't skimp on this title. The story is about a young man, Killian, who strives to be the best, but always ends up coming in second. The game starts you off, waking up late and almost missing your graduation. I won't go into any more of the story, for this is something that needs to be played to really enjoy it. Granted, the story isn't grand by all means and some might consider the beginning to be slow, but Killian soon discovers that he has a much greater adventure than just simply trying to figure out what to do after he graduates. Killian is met by a very well rounded cast. Spinel, who is your elf treasure hunter and is probably by far one of the best voiced characters in this game. There is also Henson, the arrogant-ish mage. Gelts, who is a former holy man, though he looks more like a warrior. Lahduk, who is the silent and very powerful monk and Acelora, whom I haven't encountered so far in my 8 hours of playing the game.

While I haven't played the Japanese version, I can say that Atlus did a superb job translating this title. I don't think I've played an RPG in the past few years that had me smiling as much as Crimson Gem Saga has, nor enjoying it as much. They even go so far as to break the fourth wall rather early in the game. However, none of this ruins the mood of the game and only adds to the enjoyment of what otherwise would be a rather typical plot line. What also caught me off guard was the voice work. This is by far the best voiced title from Atlus and one of the best for the PSP. They chose a very well rounded cast that perfectly fit each respected character. I personally consider the principle of the school Killian graduates from to be one of my favorites. There are dips in performances here and there, but overall it's a very well done game. There is not a Japanese VA option, so for those who prefer the original voice work, you might be disappointed. However, I don't think it would of synced up very well with the English translated scrip anyways.

Crimson Gem Saga is also a rather gorgeous title. It uses sprites and strives for a more traditional feel, which works very nicely. The backgrounds for all the areas I've visited so far are all quite lovely and there is a variety in monsters, skin swapping included though. Sprites have a nice look to them and each character has a death animation as well. They even provided Spinel with some 'bounce' to her character, but it depends on if you look at that as being unnecessary or generous. Either or, you still have to admit they put a lot of work into the characters for this title. Characters interact in a traditional manner via one still portrait and text below, sometimes accompanied by voice work with the text. As previously mentioned, this is a very well translated title, with some rather unusual NPCs. The sound is another aspect of this title that caught me off-guard. I wasn't expecting such a different style of soundtrack for this RPG, or at least I felt it differed from the norm. I found that CGS offers a rather enjoyable score on the overall.

Battle is also rather traditional, being turn based. Monsters are visible on screen and you run into them to initiate battle. CGS also has a pre-emptive system, which is highly recommended. If you initiate a battle with the enemy from behind before it can spot you (it'll have a ! over it's head if you've been spotted), your entire party will attack however many enemies you may be fighting once before going into turn based. This can be reversed, however, if the enemy spots you and runs into you after the exclamation point goes away. This makes fighting much more than the standard formula. What also breaks it up is if you get a critical, you have a chance of continuing your attack. Near the bottom of the screen, just above your team's health and mana status, an 'X' will appear. Pressing it allows your character to attack once more and if their lucky again, they'll get another 'X' in which they'll preform yet another powerful attack, more so than the first two. This can really turn the tide in a battle and, in some cases, kill an enemy in one turn or severely damage it.

I'm close to 8 hours into the title and I've got quite a bit of gameplay left to go. I have to say that I highly recommend this game. The only downside is CGS likes to do quests within quests. Being that you might be assigned one quest by someone, but the individual you need to go talk to might want you to do something for them before they give you what you need, etc. This can become rather tedious and unfortunately there are a decent amount of fetch quests in CGS, but the quests within a quest scenarios don't happen often. That's probably the only downfall I can really think of this title, but I don't personally consider it a problem or find it hampering to my experience. Even then, I'm absolutely enjoying this game and considering it runs at $29.99 I can't see a reason as to not picking this title up.

I have been a bit skeptical when picking this game up. There are a lot of bad RPGs out there on the PSP and Nintendo DS.

This game though is just amazing. It is a very simple old school turn based RPG done right. It has amazing graphics. The whole game just looks beautiful from villages, towns, castles to characters. You will never see a boring looking location or character and the battle animations are top notch as well.

The dialogue and story is VERY well written even between regular villagers or people you meet. It also has a bit of humor thrown in. When I entered one INN in a village and talked to the girl behind the counter she said "I am running the inn because my mother is sick, and NO this is not a start of a medicine fetching quest. You adventurers are all alike." Or I found a bomb in a treasure chest next to a bed in an INN and the main character stopped and said "A bomb, at an INN next to the guest bed?"
This sort of writing and interaction makes you actually WANT to talk to all the villagers instead of just running through the game doing the main quest.

Anyways, pick this one up. It is really a great game. I am very surprised that it received so very little hype and marketing. It could have really made the headlines.

Crimson Gem Saga is great for what it is: traditional JRPG. It does not set it self up to be the most innovative new game so the expectation from the beginning is that this is an excellent solid turn based role play game. Does it deliver on the expectation? Yes.

The graphics are quite nice with clear sprites and lush backgrounds. You can see some of the expressions on the sprites which is very neat. In some of the dungeons it can be hard to tell the difference between what you are supposed to interact with and just regular dungeon as the color scheme is so neutral but you do get used to it.

The characters are as standard as it gets--and you can read about them in the booklet. You've got recent graduate boy out to make a difference in the world, your mage, your thief, etc etc etc.

Localization: In a word--AMAZING. This title will have you smiling and laughing at what some of the characters say--early on Killian (lead) opens a "treasure" box in an inn (standard for RPG...the ones in this game are green) and there isa comment from him "A BOMB! Next to a guest bed?". Moments like this are why I developed a hearty apprecation for the localization crew for this Atlus title--and Atlus can be hit or miss on this. I find it fairly unique that when Atlus gets it they literally knock it out of the park--this game and Luminous Arc (first and second) just have wonderful dialogue between characters and they've retained all the humor, sarcasm, and uniqueness even with a tranlsation which is not easy to do. THANK YOU ATLUS!

I was very shocked to hear the voice acting which I found *really* superb---and I rarely say that about a RPG for a handheld. Wherever they got these guys I hope they go back for any future games--the emotions are spot on and the voice acting (it is only partially voice acted) really conveys the characters emotions and personalities very well.

The music is another area where I was very pleasantly suprised. There are some great tunes for battles and the bosses and overall I found it well crafted. The energy of the music is used very well as it fits within the story.

The gameplay is standard. Dungeon's, quests, towns. I did like that it was not really random encounter based--you can see the enemies and it becomes a game of who can catch who first---proper benefits (ambush) to the victor. Neat! The menu works fine although I wish when you went to shop you knew how many of something you had--but that's a minor issue and the information is accessible just not on the same screen.

I like the use of skill tree's. I find this greatly enhances gameplay and I appreciate being able to choose how I will allocate those points. Revealing all the levels on the skill tree is kind of a waste--because you may not want to have all those skills or you may choose to allocate your skill points across characters--but, as always, this is an RPG so you will be grinding anyway so SP isn't that hard to come by if you know where to look.

Difficulty: Medium. I had heard this was too easy---I don't think generically this is easy---but I do think that you can "over" skill or level your characters thereby making combat a breeze. This would be up to you though as a player. If you choose to get Ultimate Skills with tons of power early on you really can't expect that this choice isn't going to affect the gameplay. And you as a player have a choice with whether to use any of these special skills in each round--so really it is all about the player.


Overall--Excellent game. Doesn't push any boundary's (although it does break the fourth wall) but is a solid enjoyable experience. It is not really long so if you are looking for a 60 hour complicated masterpiece with a New Game+ at the end this is not your game. For anyone else this title should simply not be missed. The price point is standard. I was kind of bummed there were no spoils for this title but that has nothing to do with the game itself.

As a Korean-American, I like to try out a lot of games from Korea. There hasn't been a lot of games from Korea that make to U.S., and there are a lot of flat-out unpopular Korean games, like.. Magna Carta or the first Astonishia Story for that matter. Nevertheless I was pretty excited to see CGS come here in English. I'll now present my reaction in details.

I guess a little backstory is in order. This game is called Crimson Gem Saga in North America, but in other places it is named Astonishia Story 2. It follows up on the first Astonishia Story, which wasn't very successful. The first Astonishia Story, first published in mid 1994, was pretty standard game of its time; considering games like Final Fantasy 5/Dragon Quest 4 and such came out in those time frame. However, most folks in U.S. didn't know about that and when it was released for the first time in Western consumers on Playstation Portable, they probably thought Astonishia Story was made for PSP instead of old port of an 16 bit RPG, hence the harsh reviews the first game has been getting by NA reviewers. Now, nearly a decade and a half later, the old Sonnori team of the AS got together, changed their development team name into Iron Nos(sonnori spelled backwards), and tried a gamble of reviving their biggest game series as they face hard financial challenge and bankrupcy.

Ironnos/sonnori team are not an exceptional team. Historically, they have been making OK games. It isn't surprising that Crimson Gem Saga too is a pretty standard game for its time. However, what they have been good at is little details of their games, and it shines here too. Let's talk about the game's features to clearify. The game is a standard "j"RPG(although clearly it was from Korea), where you have a very linear, set-in-stone storyline to follow. Some hints of "w"RPGs are present, such as being able to build up a skill tree, recording quests, and customizing equipments. Unfortunately most characters' equipments don't change in actual appearance, though. Visually it can be compared to PS1 era 2-D RPGs; at times I had a flashback to Tales of Eternia while playing CGS. Lush colors cloak the 32 bit color palettes and they are not bad on the eyes. Some battle attack sequesnces are rather crudely animated with few unique frames, and it is a dissappointment considering the first Astonishia Story had very good animated sprites. A lot of same melodies from the first AS return in CGS, but in a much better quality. Imagine the jump from, say, Lufia 1 to Lufia 2, then it'd be pretty close. Now that we're in 2009, the musicians were able to present their scores the way they were meant, it is much better sounding in CGS than in AS, though they are of the same composition. Not one single voice acting is terrible, Herbert sounds homosexual at times, but even his lines are done badly, just with a lot of colour, and he is a very minor character anyway. There are parts of story where you face very tough opponent, and it's OK to die in those battles but if you manage to beat them you can skip an entire section of the game. In combat, Ironnos team took a lot of clues of current RPGs, and I'd say it works for the most part. Characters are laid out not unlike the way in Valkyrie Profile 1, although the farthest characters still can get hit; enemies are seen on screen before combat like Grandia games; there are multiple character combination techinques like the ones seen from SaGa Frontier and Chrono series; character orders are visible much like a lot of PS2 turn-based games. There is a slight twist in the battle mechanics that keeps things dry-such as very powerful block that only blocks once, and the way they set up each battle is very brutal(ambush or be ambushed). This game is mash of good things from a lot of different games and I applaud the project team for successfully managing to make game such way.

So the game played pretty decently, basically. The remaining issue is the translation - while it is not nearly as crappy as the first AS one done by UBI soft, I feel I need to warn other Korean Americans. It is clear that Atlus USA, which handled NA localizations, translated from the Japanese version. They did the same thing with Magna Carta too, by the way. The result is while Atlus' know-how of quality localizations show, there are a lot of hiccups in the game. A lot of lines are flat out rewrites, and they added jokes here and there in the North American Crimson Gem Saga that weren't present in the original Korean language Astonishia Story 2. Also, there is a lot of Japanese reference that weren't translated that I felt was unnecessary; most people-either Korean or American-wouldn't know what "kitsune udon", "kunoichi" etc are supposed to be. When I see a gang of spiders and their names say "Guh Mi" which means 'spiders' in Korean language, "Hwal"(bow in Korean), "Cal"(knife in Korean) - you know, completely left alone untranslated - it's just not a good feeling. Localization hiccups like that makes me wonder if Atlus tried to present the game as a Japanese game, which I find offensive to be honest. With that said, the game still feels natural, though.

I like the game. The game has so-called "new game plus" where players start the game again from the beginning with all the techniques they earned from the last playthrough. If you didn't unlock them all, in the next playthrough the game lets players KEEP the points from last playthrough to help unlock them. It's a really nice gesture considering that the game is probably about 15~20 hours long for most people. This game was meant to be a second part of multiple chapters, thus naturally the game may seem like unfinished story. For me thought, I am really looking forward to Astonishia Story 3. I also hope that since this game is solid, they'll be able to call it Astonishia Story 3 because I've became a big fan of the series thanks to Crimson Gem Saga.

Crimson Gem saga was a game I took a chance on after reading the description here on Amazon. I liked what I heard which was that this game is essentially an old school experience. For the most part its true save for a few little additions which I will mention more later.

I enjoyed this game quite a bit, and though I feel it was a bit short, and a bit rushed at the end I was able to play all the way through it without getting bored and switching games. Atlus has a pretty good reputation in the JRPG community for producing fun games with good localization, and this title is no exception.

Graphics and Sound

The Graphics in the game look pretty nice. Everything is done in an anime style, but the characters have a nice level of detail, and even have some exaggerated facial expressions, which makes interactions more fun. The animation both in and out of battle is fantastic. You can see a character's hair move, or their chests heave when breathing heavy. All of the attack animations for characters look pretty solid. One of my minor complaints is that some characters have really boring attack animations. The main character does a sideways slash with his sword that could really be a lot more exciting considering he is the main character, and he will be using that same move over and over again throughout the game. Even a downward or diagonal slash would have been better. The Cleric Geltz is even worse, wielding a massive war hammer, that he just sort of impotently drops on the enemies. Oh well its small potatoes.
In addition to that the spell graphics are fairly uninteresting until you get the best ones, and even then they won't melt your eyeballs out of the sockets or anything. Most of the time whatever spell effect it is will just sort of fall out of the sky on the enemy...

The sound in the game is nice, with some interesting choices in music for towns and dungeons. I don't feel I need the soundtrack, but there are certainly no complaints.

The voice acting is wonderful in the game. All of the main characters have well cast voice actors, that bring them to life, and the characters themselves have such interesting personalities as well. The main problem I see is that there isn't enough voice acted character interaction in the game. there is a decent amount, but just not enough, especially towards the end. You will find yourself wishing for some more conversations, even pointless ones, as the group dynamic is so well done in this game.

Game play

Get ready to save every lead dime in this game. Not since Final Fantasy 1 have I played a game with such expensive items, requiring hours of monster fighting for gelders. I personally hate this as I feel its a cheap way of milking some extra hours out of the game. Fighting monsters for money and experience, or "grinding" as many call it can be fun for some, but there is definitely a point, where you will get tired of fighting monsters in an area you can't leave for hours so you can buy a couple pieces of armor and a weapon maybe. There are some really cool items in the shops too, but good luck having any gelders left over after buying your armor and weapons. Heck good luck just buying your armor and weapons for that matter. This right here is what will kill off any player that is not an old schooler from the days of yore. If you started playing RPGs with games like Final Fantasy 7 you will probably find this aspect completely unbearable. On the other hand I do get a bit tired of more modern games just handing you everything, as it makes gold a fairly meaningless reward. I like a good obsessive grind-a-thon myself, its in my blood, and I can do it while I watch TV but even I was a little put off by how steep some of the items in the game were.

This game has a combat system with some great pros and some major cons, depending on what bothers you. First off let me just mention that the game is turn based, so if that is a deal breaker then you need not bother with this one. However it is well implemented and fairly challenging compared to most RPG games that have come out recently. The monsters really don't cut you any slack. Some of them can wreck you fast if you make a careless error in judgment.

One thing I loved about this game is the fact that status effect attacks such as poison or confusion, not only work, but can really turn the tide for you. However that can go both ways, should your enemies manage to confuse half your party. You may find yourself just barely limping away from some random group of enemies. In fact the normal monsters you fight in this game can hardly be brushed off. Its a challenging game. The bosses are also fairly difficult in the beginning but begin to become somewhat arbitrary towards the end of the game particularly when you have a 4 person combo move that just makes the party invincible for 8 turns. Its clear that they realized this and so their solution for the last couple of bosses is to take away all your party members except 3 which you cannot even choose.

I think this is what really pissed me off about the game. I don't want to spend an entire adventure leveling up 6 characters and buying them ludicrously expensive equipment, only to have 3 of them completely removed from the most important battles of the game. It does make sense for the plot which I will not give away, but let's just hope you have been training everyone...

There is a quest system in the game, sort of. There are really only about 3 side quests, for all the big deal the game makes about this quest tracker thing it has. The quests are generally boring, and offer little in the way of rewards. There should have been way way more of these little quests. It just doesn't feel like it belongs in the game. Usually the side quest is just something in the dungeon you are about to go to anyway, so its not really like you have to go out of your way, unless they fluff the game time out by making you go back through a whole dungeon just to pick up some thing which will get you a marginal reward. it wouldn't be so bad if there were more and you could do them as you go. This just feels like some half cooked up idea that got all but dumped as time constraints got heavy.

One other game mechanic I want to mention is the critical strike system which is fun, if not totally unbalanced. Oh and when I say fun I mean its fun to do it to the enemies. Its not real fun when they do it to you.... You will see what I mean. You see every time you get a critical hit on an enemy you have a chance of having the X button pop up on screen. if you hit it fast enough you will execute a few more attacks. If those attacks also "crit", then you can hit the X button again for even more hits. This makes your Will stat, which governs critical rating, the most important stat for a physical fighter, even more so than strength. Most normal enemies will not survive one of these attacks, and boss monsters will eat it pretty fast with this kind of punishment happening. Critical hits happen fairly often in this game as well. I'm not sure what the math is exactly but at least two of the characters get critical hits with a percentile chance over 50% for certain. The big downside to this is that the enemies can do the same thing to you. Its just not a strategy element I feel was necessary. Sure challenge is important but the game just becomes a matter of kill them fast before you get hit, and that's not very fun. Honestly no one wants to have their strong and noble hero obliterated by one attack from a slime or a goblin, but it can happen if the laws of chance are against you. Maybe they should have put a similar button timed block in the game to balance this out. I don't know. The enemies already hit you hard even without critical hits so you have to be extra careful, and most of the strategy is about deciding which enemies to kill first. Sometimes you may actually need to gamble on a death spell or a confusion spell, rather than face a volley of slime beatings that could potentially kill you. In other words its a mixed bag.

Plot and Characters

This game has a great set of main characters. They have fairly generic job classes, but the underlying personalities of each along with the overall group dynamic serves to make the group memorable and fun. The plot is pretty cut and dry without many big twists and turns until the end. Even the major twists at the end are either unsurprising or are surprising, only because they hadn't been set up properly.

The main character is a man named Killian who is a Chevalier, or knight for the less French oriented. He happens to be the second best soldier at his academy (A fact which the game humorously doesn't let go.) and he is set upon the path of adventure inadvertently while looking for a good job and a stable future. The other characters include a quirky and larcenous elf girl, an oddball sardonic wizard, a wacky old cleric, a strong silent type monk, and a personality-less female knight who doesn't join up until near the end of the game.

The plot of the game revolves around the adventurers seeking out rare magical items of great evil called wicked stones. The game doesn't go into great detail about them until near the end of the game, but suffice it to say that they are magic rocks that make you powerful, but in one ring fashion corrupt your soul. This is a serviceable idea if not a little unoriginal, and the game sets itself up as a travel the land collecting the X number of rings/crystals/magic wands/other plot device, type of ordeal. Now I sort of suspect that this game was intended to be much longer, or at least have several sequels. it does describe itself as a saga after all. If there does end up being a few installments, then you can disregard my following remarks...

The game feels very rushed towards the end. For the first part you go along and collect a couple of wicked stones, then it almost feels like the developers started to run out of time and just rushed for the end of the game. It creeps up suddenly and very anticlimactically and leaves you feeling a bit cold. The ending is barely more than a quick whats everybody doing now and there is literally 0 closure on the major plot twists of the game. Its really sloppy. I was left feeling a bit pissed, having enjoyed the ride up to that point. i can only imagine that they intend to release at least one more title to sort of fix this, but knowing how these things usually go, it probably won't sell enough copies and be forever doomed as an abandoned project. Perhaps i am just being pessimistic only time will tell

In the end its a good solid game with a few idiosyncrasies that you may be able to deal with just fine. All of my complaints about this title seem to creep up in the last 2-4 hours or so of play and there's plenty of great game before, with fun random humor

I am liking this game very much, the graphics are beautiful, Is very easy learning curve to a gamer like me , i only have played like 3 RPGs(Puzzle quest, Jeanne DArc) on the PSP, I m in like only 4 hours so far so theres a lot more to come, buy this one PSP owners, is very good.

Love this spritet based rpgs the best. There's beautiful graphics, great voice-work, interesting and quirky characters, fun combat (everything you'd expect out of a classic rpg). This may be an RPG for hardcore gamers though. Even if you level up a lot, monsters are still a challenge. Some people say it's a flaw, but I think it was made this way to be hardcore. The only thing I don't like about this game is that you can learn the characters skills to fast. Other than that, it's a great RPG.

Game came in perfect condition.
A very sterotypical korean turn-based RPG with plenty of grinding to be had.
Great graphics and fun combat that doesn't get to boring. Would loved to see more questing besides the lame few there are.
4/5

Ok I have to admit anything that is Atlus I will probably like and there is a lot to this game that I do like:

1- Good storyline and there is some things that will make you smile or chuckle.
2- Good combat system which is good old turn based system.
3- Voice acting is a little decent but then again voice acting to me is really not a abig deal when it comes to RPGs
4- Leveling is ok not to much grinding to level up and going through the story to do it is not to bad.

Now the things that is kinda frustrating with the game:

1- The character drawing that pops up for everyone in your party during some major parts in the storyline. It happens all the time when there is major dialog as well. Really annoying and no way to turn it off.
2- Monster interaction is something that either should or shouldn't happen not forced into all the time. Not saying that there was not times I squeaked by a whole level without fighting but that is far and in between.
4- There should be a map somewhere in a treasure box that you can get when dungeon crawling.
5- Someone else brought it up in their comments but I really didn't find it annoying but a little ticked at times at the skill tree where you really just should spend the points on learning the skill and not just unlock then learn.

That is about it for this game for me. Its not bad to the point where it is not just unbearably playable like some games for the PSP and there are some out there. This one is a good solid RPG if you can get passed the things that I mentioned. Atlus does a good job when it comes to turn based RPGs like this.

And here is a quick tip for anyone wanting to level up quick but this is not going to be easy:

Once you leave Hasburg or whatever there is a warp portal that will take you to this tower and if you have unlocked a good amount of medium to strong attacks you can level up quick and if you use Killian, Spinel, Lahduk and Henson you pretty much have a strong team that can get through to at lest the first three levels. And the tower first time all the way through is only ten levels until you find others. This tower can get you almost 3k+ skill points once your are able to get through without dying. Be warned though that in the beginning you have to have at lest Killians Blade of fury and any strong magic for Henson. Spinel and Lahduk are pretty much back up for them if they need magic potions or health. But once again in the beginning you will only be able to get through the first three levels if you are at LVL 20. Trust me this tower will net you a good amount of money and skill points once you are able to get to the tenth floor.

This is a good game for anyone that enjoyed old school RPGs.

I don't know what went wrong with this game. It starts off with great potential and then it just falls down a sewer. When people initially play this game, they will likely be awestruck by its beautiful hand-drawn artwork, its traditional RPG mechanics, incredible humor, and fascinating story; but then it seems the further you get in the game, the more the game frustrates you.

Contrary to others have said in the more "negative" of the reviews here, I do not think the armor system is that broken. I think the leveling system is broken. Leveling seems to have no affect on your character whatsoever, while armor and weapons make a much bigger influence. Unfortunately, most of the gear and accessories- especially in chapters 3 and 4- require an unreasonable amount of money to purchase, forcing players to grind to no-end. And without the armor upgrades, a normal equal-level mob can take 50% of your health away with one hit (assuming they don't crit, because then they can attack again up to 3x, basically killing you).

Another big problem with this game is its dungeon design. The first few chapters had a great set-up, they were simple but not too simple. In the later parts of the game, the dungeons all become these giant mazes where every single new room and floor looks exactly like the previous. To make matters worse, while trying to traverse through these labyrinths, you still have to solve puzzles on top of it and look for treasures. The worst feeling is when you finally find the exit, but then questions yourself whether or not you found all of the great items in the dungeon (especially considering how expensive gear is, as previously mentioned), making you save and turn back around into the maze, praying that you can find your way back to the exit again.

The skill system is also broken. In order to upgrade your skill from level 1 to 5, you need a series of medallions (bronze, silver, gold, platinum). If you have 100 silvers, 100 gold, and 100 platinum but no bronze, then your skill will never get higher than level 1. Unfortunately, bronze medallions are extremely difficult to acquire and once you get to the mid-point of the game, you can't go back to try to grind up some. In total, you have over 100 different skills and I only acquired 10 medallions throughout the entire game, most I used prematurely since I just assumed you'll be given the opportunity to get more later. I assumed wrong.

The last big issue I have with this game is the final dungeon, boss, and ending. I won't spoil the ending, but let's just say it sucked. It's short and lacks the needed substance to give you that closure and reward for all the hard work you put into game. [Minor spoilers]: The final set of boss fights are just as awful. For one, characters that you've been leveling this entire game will be suddenly omitted from those fights. One character in particular, receives his final weapon just a few floors from the bosses and then he's ejected from the final two fights completely. What's the point, then? Also, you're only allowed to use 3 instead of the usual 4 characters for these fights, and all three characters are characters you don't get to choose. One of the forced characters in particular is just awful too. Lastly, the final boss doesn't matter...literally. If you beat him, you get the ending. If you wipeout, you get the same ending. There was no point in even fighting him.

All-in-all, this game had so much potential and I really did love it initially, but then as it progressed, it just got worse and worse to the point where it actually kind of makes you angry. I recommend this game only if you can get it for a good deal <$20, anything higher and you'll feel like you've just been ripped off.