dtgreene: Here are some of my criticisms of World of Xeen:
* Enemies don't respawn, for the most part. In particular, no enemies worth fighting for high level parties ever respawn. This means that , for instance, that if you want to play but don't feel like progressing, there's nothing for you to do.
* The game lets you create your characters mid-game, but undermines that by making most of the methods of improving characters one-time only, so you can't get new characters to catch up to old ones.
* Speaking of which, late game there is an event that improves stats, but only if they're below a certain amount. This means that, if you want maximum stats, you need to avoid raising your stats until this point, and then backtrack to get all the stat boosts you skipped; I find this sort of gameplay perverse, yet the game encourages it.
* The game lets you explore the Darkside early, but doing so gives you enough XP and money to unbalance Clouds.
* There's no numerical feedback during battle; the game does not tell you how much damage attacks deal, for example.
* At high levels, the game is imbalanced in favor of physical attacks. Taking Holy Bonus into account (and there's no reason not to have this effect active at all times, especially since it is included in Day of Protection), physical attacks scale quadratically, while scaling spells only scale linearly.
* Speaking of high levels, training costs scale quadratically, while XP requirements stop increasing before level 15. This, combined with the late game being stingy on gold, creates a situation where you have plenty of XP to gain levels, but not enough money to actually gain them. To make matters worse, a late game dungeon expects you to have a few million gold handy to pay protection money, while a typical first-time player is likely to have spent it all on training, creating a situation that is incredibly frustrating. There's also the fact that it feels like there's no rewards in the late game, because the game is only giving you useless XP and not the gold you so desperately need.
* I highly dislike the aging mechanic of the game, where your characters age each year of game time, and there's no way to undo that aging. It doesn't help that years are only 100 days and that entering a store takes an entire day of game time.
The aging thing drove me nuts! I looked at the manual enough to get the general idea of the game and just winged it after that. I missed a secret in one of the dungeons and wound up playing a lot of the more advanced stages before having to backtrack in order to get the proper weaponry to beat Xeen. I actually beat the Dark Side first. My characters were all above level 70. I wound up taking out Xeen with one hit, which was rather anti climactic.