This game in alot of ways reminds me of Azure Dreams or even Tao's
Adventure. You capture monsters for your team, and run around boring
randomly generated maps going from floor to floor. So yeah, this game
isn't very good. I love the cutscenes, but they're only used during the
most important dialog scenes, which would be the opening and ending of
the game.
The actual game itself is completely boring. All
the dungeons are exactly the same and most of the monsters are the same
aswell. Each character has their own strengths and weaknesses, but
that's about you'll need to use Sword most of the time anyways. The
game can be kinda difficult too since you can only take a few items
with you inside of a dungeon, and if you need another item, then you
have to pray your little heart out that it randomly appears on a floor.
One little mistake can cause you to die aswell, usually you're about 10
times more powerful than the enemies, and they can only cause you about
1 HP in damage, but there's traps that can weaken you, or take out 20
HP of damage, or the worst of all, monsters that curse all your weapons
and armor, take two turns to attack you, and dodge all of your attacks.
I've died MANY times because of these things. While the game is short,
it can be completely frustrating at times.
----------Battle System----------
Time Stalkers is a basic turn based RPG. From the first battle in the
game til the last, there really isn't much variation and you won't
learn much from the game. Basically, you have 4 meters you need to
watch, the HP and MP meters which are obvious and your Vigor meter,
each time you attack you lose some of your Vigor, so in order to use
effective attacks you need to keep your Vigor up. The last one is your
Hunger meter, this one just slowly drains as you run around and search
for traps, it was often so slow that I never had a problem with it. If
your Hunger Meter runs dry, then your HP will slowly decline.
All monsters are visible on the screen before attacking them. You can
initiate the attack, or just run past them, but if the monsters are
agitated then they will run after you or start the attack. Once the
battle has started, you will fight on the same plain as the dungeon,
like Azure's Dream or Tao's Adventure, or even Chrono Trigger. Each
character and monsters have their own skills, but for the most part,
they each have an Attack, Defend, Magic or Item option.
The
game is very strange in some ways. You gain a level for each 100
experience points, like Final Fantasy Tactics. You gain experience
points for each monster you kill like most RPGs. Your skills boost
after each level, and even your magic attacks gain levels too, each
time you complete a floor you get to distribute some bonus skill points
as well. The strange thing about this game is after you finish off a
dungeon, you start back to square one with level one. Also you can't
enter a dungeon with more than 4 items at a time, that means you have
to sell almost everything in your inventory or put them to Master at
your house.
Leveling up is easy, monsters are easy and fast
kills, so it's never a chore to get strong in the game, it's just
really stupid that they would do this.
There's six main
characters in all, but you can only play as one a at a time. Otherwise,
you can have a party of 3 characters at a time, so you have 1 main
character and 2 enemies that you captured. You can enter a dungeon
solo, and add a monster to your party later in the game, but they
always start at level 1, while the enemies on the floor might be at
level 15. This can work to your advantage, and got me through a few hot
spots in the game. If you put your level 1 monster on a later floor and
he survives the first monster attack, then he will gain a buttload of
experience, and so will your main character too. The first time I did
this was on accident, so I was fighting solo, on the 8th floor and
wanted to see what the monster buddy could do, so I fought four enemies
and my monster survived. My character, Sword gained around 50 levels
and my monster gained around 60 levels, making my characters invincible
for the dungeon. While this works out great, it can be a hard thing to
do and really depends on luck.
----------Characters / Story----------
You start the game as "Sword" a sarcastic kid that was attacked in the
woods, as he chases his attacker inside of an old castle, he finds a
magic book that warps him into a different time zone or dimension. As
he finds out, there's others that fell for the same trick, so he goes
on a quest to escape from this new dimension.
As you progress
through the game you'll meet the other people that fell for the trap,
some are good, others are worthless. The dialog is really cheesy in
this game, but it's more than most games offer. Each time Sword beats a
dungeon, he unlocks new worlds and friends. Also this unlocks new
houses and shops. More areas unlocked, the more NPC show up, and they
have plenty of personality atleast.
The game features
characters from other Sega games, including Nigel & Friday from
Land Stalkers, and Pyra from Shinning in the Darkness. It's a cool
concept, similarly used in the Nintendo cartoon, Captain N, or Squares
Kingdom Hearts.
----------Graphics----------
There's no
full blown CGI cutscenes, but all the cutscenes use the in game engine,
and it looks nice I guess, not quite on a Skies of Arcadia level but
almost close. The character models are highly detailed, but they're
really blocky and almost look like an advanced Playstation game. On the
bad side of it all the camera angles suck. The dungeons are randomly
generated and look like crap in the process (although I think the
dungeons look more impressive than Evolution). The enemies look generic
too. All the special attacks I've seen have been very basic and
unimpressive.
----------Sound----------
There's no voice
overs at all in the game, no battle cryies or grunts or anything. The
sound effects are pretty lame, but the music is catchy, but it's all
mostly keyboard driven and gets repetitive after a while. Each
character has their own theme atleast.
----------World Map----------
The world map is just a small island with dungeons surrounding it,
similar to Brave Fencer Musashi. After you beat a new dungeon, another
piece of land forms on your island making it bigger, and another
dungeon will appear. You then repeat the cycle until the game is over.
Inside the dungeon you get to pick between 2 maps (small / big) and two
camera views (overhead and 3rd person). The dungeons are randomly
generated and feel cheap and lazy to me. The dungeons remind me ALOT of
Evolution 1 and 2 (or Evolution Worlds for the Gamecube), the dungeons
have the same camera angles, you run into traps, find random treasure
and run around looking for the next floor. Luckily though Time Stalkers
features really really small floors, unlike Evolution.
----------Time to Complete Game----------
The game doesn't record your time at all. I hate games that do this,
but if I had to guess, I would say it is a 15-25 hour game. After you
beat the game you can go through any dungeon again if you want, and
gain more skills, find more weapons or capture more monsters. Each
character has their own unique ending, but they're nothing special and
really short, although Nigels was kinda funny.
