Xanadu Next is a game that takes the best of many of Nihon-Falcom's titles with heavy doses of diablo-likes and does so very well. While not entirely a loot-em-up, it's similar in how the game is played. Items are usually found in chests with the majority of enemies dropping money unless you clear a room of enemies to get a special chest. Overall, you won't be shifting around with your inventory, but you still have abilities to warp to town at will if you run out of healing potions. With items, it's very similar to Falcom's Ys series, where you have a set amount of items you can obtain with the occasional "only in a chest" item. There's also a unique side-stab and backstab mechanic where you do more damage on the side and backs, and enemy evasion goes down so you almost always hit. You can also build your character via your skill points and can set them up however you'd like. I went with a more tanky build but focused on strength to use the best weapons possible! This port isn't exactly all that up to snuff. It adds widescreen support and other features like a borderless window, but I've had a share or two of strange things happening during my playthrough. There are only two things I didn't like about this game: The first is the last dungeon Caslte StrangeRock. It's way too long and the pacing is not good. And this is the only multi-leveled dungeon that doesn't have a separate map, so you get this mess that overlays on top of itself. The second is that the music has awesome moments, but it's normally very quaint and not that memorable, which is not something good for Falcom, but at least the final boss music was killer! I would very much so recommend you get this game! It's a blast all the way through... Until the end, but the final boss makes up for it.
Freedom Planet is not as good as people should be let on to believe. There are obvious faults with the game and the people giving five star ratings to it are either under heavy doses of nostalgia or really big furries. To start with, the story mode is an absolute joke. They hired about one or two decent people, and then picked random people on the internet to voice act in it. Plus the cutscenes are on average about 10 minutes long and they're terrible, and not even in a good way, they're just boring and not funny. The dialog is so ear gratingly bad it's unbelievable nobody spoke up and said "Hey guys, this isn't even close to funny." There's a mode that let's you skip the entire game's story, which is what I'd recommend if you ever do pick this up. The gameplay itself is a simple "I am not sonic please don't let anyone tell you otherwise" game. You have a health bar and levels with loops and crazy hills to run fast in, but it's not a sonic game. The level design remains largely unchanged for the 3 characters in it, even though the characters are different from each other. The level design becomes a mess where nobody really gets a good time from the characters. Plus they tweaked the physics to allow characters to just walk up walls and ceilings because they couldn't redesign or give them different levels. The controls are responsive however and at points the level design can be decent, so when the game does play well, it's fun. The graphics and music are very well made. Graphics have nice little qualities in them and overall are very pretty. The character designs are trash though, they've made little effort hiding the fact that they're just sonic ocs, and said effort makes them look ugly. The music is very well composed however, and since you're getting the soundtrack, enjoy. Overall, freedom planet is still an okay game, sometimes good when it can be, but there's a lack of focus in the gameplay department that can leave this game pretty mixed to people.
I got this game mainly for Might and Magic 6, I consider it the best in the series. But after playing through 3, 4 and 5, I realized how might and magic evolved and became what it is today. This is such an amazing game collection. 4 Amazing games and 2 dated but fun games, all for 10 dollars. Seriously, your wallet should be clawing at the monitor for this game. Please get it.
