This Japanese game is a knock-off of Dragon Warrior. Its creator is a sadistic monster named Shigesato Itoi. Why do I call him a sadistic monster? Because you have to invest at least six solid months of your life into leveling up in order to have any hope of beating this game, which none of you do to begin with because it’s in Japanese, which you can’t read.
My superiors question the utility of a video game review for a game nobody in D’Starkville will ever encounter. My answer to them is this: in five or six years, someone might make an awesome sequel to this game, and then somehow it will draw attention to this game, and then people might find themselves faced with the option of importing it, or if computers have evolved far enough to allow reasonable emulation of NES hardware, stealing a digital copy of it.
Should all of these things happen, our readers will remember back to this day, this glorious day, and they can say, ‘Yes! I read an article telling me to avoid this game at all costs!’
I’m not saying to avoid it because it’s bad. In fact, the dialogue is pretty clever, and if someone were to go through all the trouble to translate it into English (my game counselor Dan says this is being done as we speak, but the game will probably not actually be released) I bet it would sound snappy and clever.
The music is great (love that track that plays at the shopping mall), some of the enemy sprites are pretty detailed (even though the overworld sprites are VERY basic and one could argue that they suck pretty hard-core…) and it even has a few touching moments.
No, I’m saying to avoid this game because it’s just too time-consuming and difficult. Unless you can find a way to cheat. If that’s possible, I say go for it.
One thing I can tell you for sure is that this game will never spawn a cult of rabid fans united by a fancy network of interconnected computers.
Also, I’ve killed this farmer guy about 150 times.
