Zenith

Pro: Good humour; nice graphics; plays smoothly under Win10AU, even on 3yo laptop. Con: Damn-near unplayable control scheme for anyone used to M&KB games; ear-shatteringly loud music or inaudible SFX, because no audio controls; you have to "Press Enter to Start" in order to quit; no control remapping - and no map of the controls that are actually baked-in. Save yourself a HUGE amount of frustration, and go play Sacred2 or Torchlight instead.

The good: good story with excellent humor, quite a few moments where I laughed hard enough to be heard on the top floor of my house. The bad: - Save system is terrible, based on checkpoints that are few and far between, no apparent autosave either, so if you have to quit before finding a checkpoint, say you're spending time on a sidequest to close the gates and you need to step away after 3 of them, better find a checkpoint or else all progress will be lost. - Speaking of sidequests, there is no means to track them once found, so better have a good memory or bring a notebook, since you'll need to remember where to go, what you're meant to do, and who/where to come back to - Fixed camera for all areas except for the world map is irritating - On the world map, only some of the major features are labeled with a name; coupled with a lack of a journal and sidequests are just that much harder to complete. In all, a good game but clearly a console port that could use some PC friendly updates.

The game plays like a simpler version of the Ys series and is heavily influenced by JRPGs. The writing is great, it makes fun of a lot of tropes and turns them on its head. Sadly I wish they spent more time polishing it as I can't rightly enjoy it. The game really needs some updates to fix a combat that started as inoffensive but ended being quite the chore, you level up very fast to the point that I near upgraded all skills and i'm not even close to having played more than 8 hours. What really killed it for me was one quest where the directions were nonexistent and I'm left just to wander and wonder what to do next. Plus the lack of a map makes it so that just trying to find where to go next requires some meandering. I don't expect anyone to write a walkthrough as desperately as this game needs it, I would recommend waiting on one.

Ladies and gentlemen. If you ever wanted to find the perfect example of a story so good it topples the most awful gameplay, this is it. I will start with the most awful, the gameplay. The programming was made by two people, literally. This resulted in a gameplay that feels like trying to sway a train with a car's wheel while listening to Abba. There is no volume control, there is no map, there is not even a simple attempt at a journal, nothing. The attack follows the mouse pointer, which would be ok if this was a diablo game. It isn't. It's an action 'rpg' the same way pringles is technically 'potato chips'. There are four slots for potions, but only three kinds of potions. You can't arrange inventory because every time you click something you immediately equip it. Yes, it's THAT bad. But the story is really good. It's not deep, but picks basically every single (and yes, EVERY SINGLE) rpg most used tropes and subverts it. There isn't a single style of overused humor that will grind your patience after fifteen minutes (I'm looking at you, Borderlands), it keeps switching humor styles and throwing curveballs at you. And it doesn't limit itself to humor, no. The main character isn't a complete jerk, none of the side characters is completely shallow in their characterization and development, every single one of them (except the racist zealot elf because racist zealot elf). The story asks good questions about the nature of war, about countries pushed too far to the point of utter and complete desperation and how it changes people, of science being used to deal with the problems of mankind right NOW instead of pushing it to the future in an irresponsible manner, but also going through boundaries considered sane in search of a victory whose cost may be too much. And when you think it's too serious, it tosses a joke to lighten the mood. It never gets too cliched, and if it threatens to do so, it's in order to poke fun at the clichés. Definitely deserves a Remake.