I tried some games the internet told me were good: Final Fantasy V, Octopath Traveler, and Lost Eidolons. They all sucked.

Final Fantasy V
RPG

This is the only one of first 10 Final Fantasies I never finished as a kid, because I found it too hard. I hear so many people sing its praises, so I thought I’d give it another try and… hoo boy, it is terrible.

This game is an object lesson in game design: No matter how well-designed the player side of things is, it counts for nothing if the enemy side isn’t equally well-designed. FFV is a standard example of “You can, but why would you want to?” You can use the job system and blue magic to create absolutely busted builds and strategies… but why bother when 3 fighters and a healer will work just as well 99% of the time? In fact, why bother when your reward for putting in that effort is usually just to skip the boss entirely with an instant win button? There are exactly two bosses in the first act that require a strategy deeper than “attack until it dies”, and both of them can be won in 1-2 turns with the right setup; several more bosses can be skipped with instant death spells. Why? This is like the early Mario games letting you skip levels. The player’s reward for engaging with the game is the ability to not play the game. The whole time I played I was reminded of Devil Survivor, which has a similar level of character customization but actually rewards the player for using it. If you thought FFV was good, please play Devil Survivor, you were robbed.

It doesn’t help that this game has the typical SNES-era RPG problem of being clear as mud at communicating things to the player. Unusually for Final Fantasy, some status ailments do work on bosses, but good luck figuring out which — not only does the scan spell not reveal status immunities, the game gives no indication of why an ailment spell failed. Did the spell just miss, so you should keep trying, or did it fail because the enemy was immune? It’s a mystery! And as a final insult, enemies have no visual indication when they’re suffering from status ailments. The ATB system also makes it completely opaque when enemies are using counterattacks, despite several bosses revolving around them.

(The story is unsurprisingly disappointing as well. At first it looks like it might be doing an allegory for environmentalism and climate change, but five seconds later it turns out it was all a spooky demon man’s fault. All served with your complementary 90s-era “Sexual harrassment is funny!” of course.)

You may be thinking, “Well duh, of course it sucks, it was made 30 years ago,” but a) so were Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG, which were actually good games and b) as I can attest from many of my RPG Maker reviews on this blog, these are lessons many jRPG designers still haven’t learned.

Octopath Traveler
RPG

Case in point. Everyone raves about this game but I found it thoroughly mediocre. The battle system is more interesting than average, I’d say. Striking enemy weaknesses will put them into a staggered state, making them lose their next turn and take more damage; this synergizes well with the other mechanic, which is a resource that accumulates every turn you can spend to attack multiple times. The stagger meters count down based on number of hits rather than damage, so there is actual thought involved in when to spend your extra attacks. Do you burn them all now to interrupt the enemy’s next attack, or do you wear down the enemy slowly so you can spend them for more damage during the one turn the enemy is staggered? Additionally, characters only have access to certain weapon types, so you’re encouraged to frequently change your party to match the weaknesses of the local enemies.

The problem is that even the most interesting game system becomes boring when you have to do it a million times, and that’s what we have here. I want to know what developers thought random encounters were acceptable in 2018. It’s not quirky or nostalgic, it’s bad game design and always has been. Stop doing it. As a result I got tired of the game before I had even finished everyone’s chapter 1s. I slogged through to finish all of them, but then I hit the chapter 2 difficulty spike and decided I had better things to do with my time.

Which brings us to the plot. As indicated by the title, there are 8 main characters all with their own separate plotlines. You choose one to start with, and after completing their prologue you’re thrown into the wide open world, where you encounter the other 7 characters in various towns and go through their prologues in order to recruit them. I don’t think this plot structure is inherently bad, but it was handled atrociously here. For one thing, 8 is just too many. You are all but forced to do everyone’s chapters before advancing to the next stage of the story due to level gating, so every time any one plotline advances you need to go through several hours (at best) of other plotlines before the story will circle back to them. If you’re more invested in certain characters than others, this is a slog. (You can also only bring 4 characters at once and benched characters don’t get any experience, so if you want to keep everyone leveled — and you will need to — it’s level grinding ahoy.)

This could work if the plotlines were intertwined and informed each other in some way, but they don’t until the very end. What’s especially bizarre is that the prologue chapters are very clearly written as if the protagonist is alone, even though the conceit for them joining you is that you’re helping them. Some scenes will even explicitly say the character is alone, but they’re not! (It’s also ridiculous that the protagonists recruit random strangers to help them too, especially since about half of them are doing explicitly illegal things. Primrose’s “Hey strangers, I’m planning to betray a crime boss so I can murder a member of an even deadlier crime gang, hope you don’t use this to blackmail me!” was the point where I actually laughed out loud.) It’s so weird that I have to wonder if joining the characters mid-chapter was a last-minute addition to the game, after they had already written the solo scripts and didn’t want to bother writing alts. That or the writing and gameplay divisions never communicated with each other.

This might be worth slogging through if the writing was good, but it isn’t. As soon as I did Ophelia’s chapter and learned the setting has a Satan figure, I knew everything was going to be a spooky demon man’s fault, because Squeenix can only write one plot these days. There’s also uncritical lionization of aristocracy, and one of the protagonists is a sex slave whose special ability is seducing people. Pass, thanks.

Lost Eidolons
Strategy RPG

This is an astoundingly sloppy game. Despite everyone and everything having painstakingly detailed 3D models, characters don’t have alternate expressions, so you have lines that are delivered like this:

The writing might actually be worse than Fire Emblem Fates, which is really saying something. We open with a flash forward that only serves to spoil several plot twists; then we get a worldbuilding overview telling us the terrible evil king evilly ended a civil war and instituted standardized currency and laws, the monster; then the protagonist is a mercenary who tries to help the battered wife of a noble and gets arrested for it while whining that they can’t arrest him without a warrant. Dude, you live in a feudal monarchy, why do you think you have rights? Then it turns out the evil noble has imprisoned an inquisitor from the capital and is planning to frame her so she doesn’t report him, and then instead of killing her he waits three days for her to carry out her elaborate escape plan, which is apparently to start a rebellion against the crown. Lady, you are the crown, what the hell??? Her logic is that the crown will kill her for killing a noble anyway, even though she is an agent of the crown with documented evidence for why the noble totally had it coming. What is this plot? It seems to me like the writers needed the main characters to join the rebellion for the story to work, and decided they needed this incredibly tortured justification to get them there instead of just starting the story with them in the rebellion.

As a final insult, the game is totally committed to real-is-brown, so everything is just a dingy wash of greys, browns, and beige. At least when Fire Emblem has terrible plots it’s over a colorful anime backdrop. Profoundly disappointing.

(Weirdly, I tried the demo for the sequel and found it a massive improvement on all fronts that fixed nearly all my complaints. I wonder if it was made/written by different people?)