Pier Solar was originally designed and developed for the SEGA Mega Drive and SEGA Genesis. Yes, you read that right!! It was actually the only newly developed game for SEGA's 16-bit system in the new millennium. It's not a port, fan translation, or a copy of any other game. Pier Solar is a 100% bran...
Pier Solar was originally designed and developed for the SEGA Mega Drive and SEGA Genesis. Yes, you read that right!! It was actually the only newly developed game for SEGA's 16-bit system in the new millennium. It's not a port, fan translation, or a copy of any other game. Pier Solar is a 100% brand new, entirely original,16-bit RPG.
Being a turn-based RPG with state-of-the-art aesthetics, Pier Solar is a story-based RPG about the journey of three young heroes from the town of Reja. In this prospered and peaceful town there live three best friends: Hoston, Alina and Edessot. Young and curious, they want to go on a herb-seeking quest to help cure Hoston's father's mysterious illness. Little do they know ... it will be the beginning of their lifetime journey where they will learn the true meaning of friendship and the thrill of adventure.
This journey will demand their courage and wisdom to solve a long-lost mystery while they face the forces of destruction dispatched by an evil man who is trying to change the world for his own good. Through this escapade, they will be reborn as great heroes to protect the universe from a mistaken purpose...
A massive world to explore! Pier Solar has 50+ hours of gameplay, over 300 locations, nearly 500 unique treasure chests, and over 800 NPCs!
Epic Battle Tactics! Pier Solar features an innovative battle system that puts you in control of up to five characters and includes in-depth strategic moves such as counter-attacks and a special strategy called Gather, which stores energy to unleash even more powerful moves and spells!
Director's cut! Pier Solar expands what was the biggest 16-bit RPG Ever! We released Pier Solar on a custom 64MEG cartridge (the average SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis game size is 12MEG), making it the biggest 16-bit RPG ever! This allowed us to push the 16-bit medium to a precedent setting level, with state-of-the-art aesthetics and things like full-screen cut scenes, background scaling and 3D modes. But Pier Solar HD is more than just a port, the game is getting a Director's cut, and includes an expanded story with new locations and challenges, that couldn't fit on its original Sega Genesis/Mega Drive release.
I have a full review of the game here. http://www.aguywhogames.com/
Short version for those not interested, great old school game. Some issues with lack of enemy design, some very slow animations, and a few bad dungeon designs, the games combat is fun, and the story and characters intriguing. May not be good for your first RPG, as it does no hand holding and is on the difficult side of 16-bit era RPG's, though if you have any experience and joy with this genre, pick it up. More then worth it.
I can only repeat what many others here have said:
The battle system is boring as tar. Balance is uneven, some fights are a cakewalk while other's are nigh impossible. Enemies are recycled over and over and over. Story is flat, characters are even flatter. Gameplay consists of walking from A to B, run into tedious random encounters, rinse, repeat.
Don't buy this game even if you love old school JRPGs, it does not do them justice. You're better off with Cosmic Star Heroine, which while rather flawed as well is still leaps and bounds above this crap.
This game has all the flaws of games from a bygone era but practically none of the upsides.
- bad to no documentation of (important) spells
- places you can't go back to anymore
- terrible save system
- mandatory grinding in not fun to play battles
- flat story
- quite unclear missions and random running around talking to every npc multiple times to make progress
I've tried hard and endured a lot but in the end I had to abort it during the final bossfights since you can't rest/heal in the last town and if you've reached the last save point, you can't even go back to the last shops and are stuck with whatever you got. If you didn't grind enough to have a chance against the 4 bossfights (which prevent you from healing in between by the way) , then you are screwed.
In order to see both endings you even have to endure this twice.
You can set the random encounter rate in the game manually between 0% and 800% at any time, which made me set it to zero and only up if I needed to level up for a boss. That isn't feasible in the end anymore though since you can't rest or shop anymore.
Since I've reached the final boss with no way back but not enough grinding beforehand, I had no other option but to abort since the fights would have been extremely frustrating if winnable at all.
There were several unreachable chests in the game I though you'd need to go back to but then I've read online that there's an opening spell for those you got at a completely random point in the game without much notice.
This game doesn't seem to have been designed to have fun, kicks you in the face out of nowhere for no good reason at some points and often lets you wonder why you're stuck again now and what the last gained spells are actually for.
Not fun, feels like I've wasted my time and money.
It starts really cool and reminds you a lot about the Lunar games. Same style, graphics and wonderfull music. But the gameplay... URGH! It's terrible. Nostalgia can only get you so far.
There is too much wrong with the gameplay. AI management in battles is broken. Level design is TERRIBLE. It's never really clear where you can go and where not.
Sometimes you won't get any further if you don't consult the internet. The pathfindind is abysmal.
The more you play this game, the more it becomes a choir. I am not having fun anymore, but I've spent so many hours in this game, that I do want to complete it.
And guess what! They put a mandatory reaction mini-game after 20 hours or so which you cannot skip. How in your mind can you make a reaction based mini-game with such a terrible control system? For the turn-based battles it's doable and only annoying. But during this mini-game, it's gamebraking.
Don't believe me? Look it up: "Magic Trail 3 Pier Solar". And see the frustration which has given this to people. No. Want to play an old school RPG? Play Lunar on an emulator system.
I really wanted to like this game, but after 20 hours I have to conclude that it's a complete turd...
This review is based on the Linux version 1.0.0, using Ubuntu 14.04 with a nVidia Geforce 640 GT GPU and 8GB of RAM.
I love classic JRPG's in general, but I have never played the 16-bit original.
I probably wouldn't have liked the original as well, but there are porting issues which I will discuss after discussing the game itself.
= Level design =
First of all, this game contains so many Labyrinths that it comes across as a gimmick. rather than something which sets a specific level apart from the rest. It slows the pace down to a frustrating crawl.
= Graphics =
The worst issue I have with the graphics is that they are not clear about which part can be walked upon and which part cannot. This is true both for the 16-bit and the "HD"-graphics, except in towns.
The backgrounds have been largely redone and they look the part, but the foreground items and the characters have not. This does have one advantage: You can clearly pick them out from the background. The spell animations are both crude and too long; a spell as ubiquitous as Healing taking 5 seconds?! What a drag...
I would not dare to release this as "HD", although admittedly my standards for that are rather high.
The option for original graphics and sounds is a nice one, worth one star.
= Combat =
I don't like the Gathering mechanic, especially because gather levels can be lost by just a slight tap from an enemy. In contrast to this, defending is much more useful than in most JRPG's that I know of.
= UI =
Nostalgic types will probably adore the spinning selection wheel. I don't. A proper PC port would adapt the UI to the system ported to. In the case of the PC, that means a keyboard by default. The keys cannot be remapped and mapping shows up as tiny characters, hardly readable on Full HD *wink* screens.
1 save game is not enough for a game with many scripted events.
= Story =
The story is nice, but not enough to compensate for the issues stated above.
On top of that the game crashes quite frequently.
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