...and be pleasantly surprised! It's really just a DS rip off. But hey, I know we're not supposed to "discuss" price in our review, but when GOG puts this baby on sale for $5, how can you say no? As people say, yes, it's easier than Dark Souls - and much more forgiving. There are tons of checkpoints where you can refill your HP potions, endlessly, for free! But you will die a lot. You're supposed to die. (I think.) Since the punishment is much less than Dark Souls, feel free to die as many times as you need. I think they said there were only 10~11 bosses? I'm sure if you're good at games (I suck!), you'll breeze through it. So buy it ridiculously cheap (thanks GOG!), play through it with a "hmph" and enjoy yourself, you jaded dog you~. In the game, you'll be clunky, but if you wear medium armor and raise your endurance/strength a bit, it's not too bad. I feel like this game has improved my overall gaming skills because there really isn't a punishment for death, and you definitely learn to adapt to the patterns (which are very obvious. Maybe this will be a con for you, but for me, the sucky gamer, it's a pro). I had a bug where I couldn't select dialogue options/I would just get stuck on dialogue/locked treasure chests. I thought about uninstalling it, but when I looked it up online, people said to change the game to windowed mode (in your options). That fixed it for me. Make sure to try this! It hasn't crashed for me yet. I'm on a (gaming) laptop so if it was going to crash, it would have by now. There are a few bugs here and there but it's really nothing to sweat. Some of them are kind of fun. (Like the super hardcore mob enemies randomly not spawning so I could explore the area.)
I'm sorry, but I simply don't have the patience for this game -- like people have said before, it's a beautiful game and an excellent idea. However, the actual gameplay is very tedious, namely due to: - extremely slow movement speeds (the speed glyph doesn't help that much), - lots of revisiting locations you've already been to (with not many rewards), and - the same level concepts over and over again - basically just endless grind. Which might be fun for you, if you like that kind of thing. The graphics are amazing for the time it was released, but each "level" or area, while painstakingly designed, is the same thing as the last one, just in different packaging. It's definitely a grinder, so if you're someone who doesn't mind spending the time grinding, it might be for you. It's very atmospheric, and the voices that come in every so often (randomly, or when you harvest Color) make it worth putting some time in, but the balance between how much time you put in and how much story you're rewarded with is very skewed. If I had known that this was a grinding-type game, I would not have purchased it. I hope that if you decide to buy it, you have a lot of time on your hands to spend to fully enjoy it, because I could not.
