Forgotten Beginnings: A New Afterlife

Forgotten Beginnings: A New Afterlife is a really interesting little RPG that feels like someone took the old NES style role playing games I remember and rebuilt one with some modern conveniences. I start off with a party that hears a strange voice before coming to life in a mysterious new world filled with conflict. I do not want to say too much about the story because a lot of the interesting information is deliberately kept hidden until later, but I liked the feeling of slowly figuring out what was happening. The turn based combat is easily my favourite part. I control a party of four characters, and each one has their own skills and role in battle. Enemies have weaknesses that I can exploit for extra damage, so I cannot always rely on using the same attacks. Some enemies can even reflect spells back at me, which caught me off guard a few times. The boss fights are also quite challenging, and there is some old school randomness that can occasionally turn a fight against me very quickly. I really appreciated that the game tries to keep grinding to a minimum. I can gain experience naturally through the journey instead of having to spend ages fighting the same enemies just to mak…

I don't recommend you play this game. If you truly crave some old famicom-style RPG, you're better off just replaying one of those titles or looking elsewhere. Please note all I'm about to vent over is from my three hours of gameplay, during which I got maybe 30-40% through Forgotten Beginnings, according to the bestiary. The preview images tell you all you need to know, aesthetically: the 'overworld' is one big vertical series of square plains connected by single-tile-wide tunnels, all the inns (or at least the first three) use the same map, and... just look at that 'forest' dungeon. The small towns you visit are the most interesting thing, visually, and those are comprised of only two or three buildings. This is a design issue, not an art asset one. Storywise, I think "... most information isn't revealed until late in the game..." is a huge understatement. You are given almost no direction and literally no characters to care about from the beginning (Xylozz doesn't count). Only bosses [i]allude[/i] to some bigger picture in their one or two blurbs of dialogue, which fail to entice on account of how sparse and flat the gameworld is - why care about an evil plot if there's nothin…

Puts me in mind of Final Fantasy 1. It doesn't cost money, just the time you put into it. It's alright if you're looking for an **old** school rpg fix. It's not my thing but it's alright.