I am just so unbelievably torn on this game. I want to love it, and there are parts that I do. As someone who spent a lot of childhood withI am just so unbelievably torn on this game. I want to love it, and there are parts that I do. As someone who spent a lot of childhood with NES and SNES RPGs, I appreciate the return to Final Fantasy 1 style classes (Knights, White Mages, Dark Mages, and some ones you may not have seen in a game before, such as Engineers), the ability to spend skill points earned in battle on new magic spells, and the tactics involved in forming a balanced party (including certain classes, such as the Hunter, which are useful out of battle moreso than in.)
But let me outline my beefs with this game... and no, none of them have to do with the use of default RPGMaker graphics (they have been implemented appropriately here... even though we've seen them many times before, they are used diversely to form lands of various sorts... grasslands, forests, mountains deserts, snow plains, and more.)
- If you play this game on a normal or harder mode, you're going to be rushing to inns time and time again like someone racing to the bathroom after contracting Montezuma's revenge. Like a lot of JRPGs, Last Dream makes the mistake of equating difficult with 'Oh, so you want longer battles, don't you?'. Sure, you can play through the game on very easy or easy mode instead, but the balance is off in that there are regular battles you'll be spending more time on than almost any of the boss battles.
- I appreciate a good story... actually, stories are my primary reason for playing as many JRPGs as I do... but this game throws walls of text at you about characters who do not have personalities that differentiate one from the other. The plight of that king or this townsperson or this or that warrior really doesn't grip you in any way when you have no way of identifying with any of them. I am not talking about the playable characters, because again, that aspect of the game is an ode to FF1--the characters are up to you, picked from classes, and given generic class titles as their names unless you choose to come up with your own--but the other characters in the game do not compensate for this.
- I'm going to keep this review spoiler free, but there is a major plot twist well over halfway through the main storyline that absolutely wrecked any fun I was having. There was no hint of it coming, and no need for it to exist.
- You'll spend way too much time on a ship, navigating the world using a map that, no matter how you zoom, does not show you the whole world.
- There are a variety of dungeons in which you'll find your health drained, with no item reasonably indicated that you can equip to avoid said damage. In one or two of these dungeons, it's a little more obvious, but otherwise, I hope you massively upped the MP of your party's healer. If you chose to have one, that is.
- There are a variety of game locations on small islands that are rather oddly placed. Why would the world's greatest casino be on a small icy island in the middle of nowhere with no towns around it and no major port that people dock at, for example? Perhaps the game designers wanted to play up the fantasy angle, but instead it's just... odd.
- This game is full of puzzles, which, upon completion, will reward you with treasure chests. This is somewhat engaging at first, but wait until you have to memorize a dozen or so digits, or repeat the wandering pattern of an NPC who wandered... maybe 50 or so tiles that you have to also memorize. I had to take pause at some of the mouse-maze ones and all of their dead ends, too. In short, these puzzles become memory games rather than true puzzles that challenge you to think in clever ways. I don't know whose idea of fun that is, but it isn't mine.
- Sooner or later, you will find a dungeon full of instant game overs that you'll have to be very, very fast to avoid.
With that said, I don't want you to think that Last Dream is one of those RPGMaker games that you'll beat in 3 hours that uses the default battle system, plays nothing but the typical built-in songs, and has little area to explore. In fact, people have reported hundreds of hours diving into this game's world, the battle system uses programming scripts that are regarded by the RPGMaker community as being good ones, and the game is chock full of beautiful, orchestrated versions of classical music staples. In short, this is a game with great expectations and a reasonable interface that fell victim to its tons of content not being engaging content (unless you are one of those folks who did plunge all those hours into this game--I respect what they found for themselves.) And if the sort of things that bogged this game down are mostly not present in Last Dream II (an RPGMaker game that has crowdfunded over $12,000 dollars) I will very much look forward to the sequel.
I wrote this review not to bury Last Dream, but to provide honest criticism that I hope will help motivate these obviously ambitious developers to create a truly brilliant sequel.… Expand
