To Aerthen

Tried this after finishing Scarmonde, which is a fantastic game. Sadly, To Aerthen is not a fantastic game. I don't regret paying for it, because I'd happily pay for Scarmonde twice. Anyway, go play Scarmonde instead of this.

Thumbs up with a BIG Asterisk This game is to me less an ode to older JRPGs but instead modernizing certain aspects of the experience while maintaining the roughness and jagged edges the genre used to have. Having played Venaitura, their previous game, this is all the more clear. This is a game for RPG enjoyers who love fiddling with dials on their characters with oodles upon oodles of equipment, and fussing with their party composition. The modernized bits: You can run away from pretty much every encounter you want, as long as you are within a level band of the enemies. You can get surprised, but it's very rare. Resource management is less stressed in this game with decent checkpointing with heal spots, and Save Anywhere. Characters, in general, feel balanced enough that you can justify all configurations throughout the majority of the game. Some characters ARE better than others, but you can truly play to your preference and wanted difficulty. Grinding is a choice - with good composition, action management, or just learning the fights beforehand and reconfiguring your equipment, I don't see anywhere that's a true "wall." Difficulty: This game I feel is of medium diffi…

Great game, easy to get lost in the way the old FF and DQ games would get you lost. (Took me about 40 hours to get everything but "conquering the ultimate evil" which I assume is a secret boss.) Might be because I play so many JRPGs at the same time but by the time I come back to one I can't remember where I was going. Ran around the world quite a bit only to go back to the last boss I had fought and see there were doors I could open behind them. On to play Scarmonde, that's where I was going. Hope there's another game in the pipeline to look forward to after that one.

This is a fun RPG, but it suffers from the same problem as the developer's previous game. Toward the end, the amount of random battles you fight make the bosses too easy. Otherwise, it's still a fun RPG if you want an old school vibe.

If there ever was a game that needed a place between recommend and not this is it. The gameplay is good, while it's your standard JRPG fare with turn based combat enemies do feel different enough that it never goes stale. The main drawback, and the reason I can only just barely put this as a recommend, is the writing. It tries really hard to be funny but it never is. I can't think there's a single moment in the entire game where there's any kind of serious moment. It's constantly over the top and "silly" dialogue happening. But again, it's just not funny. 6/10 - if you've played every other JRPG and want a new one, give this one a go, otherwise go play something else.

If you like to ignore the main story and wander about the world to render yourself as OP as possible, this game is for you. It seems specifically designed with this in mind. As soon as you get the boat, you can reach about a half-dozen optional dungeons which serve no story purpose, but which contain strong gear and lots of money. In fact, there's even an accessory to eliminate random encounters which you can purchase in order to harvest these items more easily. I had a lot of fun with it. One could argue that, at times, the dialog insists upon itself. I enjoyed it for the first ~20 hours, though, and it's fairly simple to just spam "enter" until you're past it. In my opinion, anyone playing this sort of game for the story or characters is missing the point.