Beautiful game Generally good voice acting (esp the protagonist) A good story and meaningful characters. I actually got chills when I finally got the orchestra to play. There's some very minor save and sound glitches. And of course, along the way there were a few puzzles I thought were misleading or unfair. But those were a very tiny minority. And, these days, with walkthroughs and built-in hints, those are just minor annoyances. I've been playing point and click adventure puzzlers for decades and this is definitely high end.
SirTech rushed this out, due to financial problems which shut them down soon after. It's short, hard, not well-balanced, and the hurry shows. JA is an awesome franchise, but has been a mess since JA2. Hopefully, JA: Flashback returns the series to glory. If you've never played JA and have any interest in strategy games, you absolutely must. JA Deadly Games is the best JA2 has better graphics and more options, but gets slowed down with a lot of fiddliness. JA is still not bad, if you can tolerate really dated graphics and UI. Unfinished Business? Totally forgettable. Tolerable for a few bucks, if you're really desperate for a new mission.
This is it – my favorite TBS game of all time. Digital crack. Chronologically, it lands between JA & JA2. Style-wise, it’s a great compromise between the two. It looks and feels closer to JA, while not as slow and clunky as JA, but avoiding the over-fiddliness of JA2. What really makes it superior to those two (very good, mind you) editions, though, is the nature of your missions. In JA 1&2, you’re working towards a greater goal – but most of what you do is just “kill everyone in the sector, move guards in to hold the sector”. In JADG, you have individual missions linked together (in the main campaign, plus you can use the editor to link any missions you want) – and each of these missions is different. Sometimes it’s to kill everyone, sometimes it’s to just locate someone or something, sometimes it’s to reach a certain area, or to escort an NPC there, or to blow something up, or to retrieve any item. It’s got variety! And, equally important – it’s got a time limit. Sometimes these time limits make logical story sense, sometimes not, but from a strategic standpoint, they are fantastic. Missions where you could easily chip at your opponents slowly and safely become frantic and dangerous when you’ve only got 4 turns left and aren’t that close yet. If you look hard enough online (maybe using wayback?) there used to be a lot of great user-made missions to add to your replayability. You can also challenge yourself by toughening up all sorts of other settings – make your max team size really small, make your max team size big (and voluntarily always fill all 8 slots – you’ll end up used some low-competence mercs), make opponents super-tough, reduce your bankroll, set it to lousy equipment, etc.
