Let’s start with the story. There kinda isn't one, but it's mainly just a fun adventure. I’ll introduce you to my squad: We got £Fred the Warrior (pronounced “Fred Money”), Greg Man the Monk, 3 the White Mage, and Jorm the Red Mage. I kinda got attached to this squad, despite them not even having a single line the whole time.
The stuff with chaos towards the end of the game was pretty cool tbh. For the first game in the series it kinda surprised me in how it had this time loop situation. I think it's really cool that at the end, the adventure kind of didn't happen, because the heroes of light closed the time loop. They are the only ones who actually remember what they did.
It's literally just 4 guys going on an adventure at its most basic, and it was honestly a good time.
First let’s look at the “Job System” if you can even call it that. It’s kinda cool, albeit basic. You pick out of 6 jobs for your 4 characters, those being Warrior, Monk, Thief, Red Mage, White Mage and Black Mage. Later on they will be upgraded to become the Knight, Master, Ninja, Red Wizard, White Wizard and Black Wizard. For the most part the job upgrades don’t actually affect much other than stats, the main addition you get is if you have a Thief, the Ninja class actually gets to use some low level black magic spells. Which is kinda cool because they get to use temper, which in my opinion is one of the best spells in the game. I’ll talk more about how good temper is when I get to talking about the final boss.
Now let's talk about combat. Classic turn based, you pick everyone’s moves and then they all go in order of the character’s speed stat. Sometimes this works well, like in Dragon Quest VIII. Each character in that game has a variety of moves they can do, so they’re all pretty fun to use. In this game though they all sort of just attack or use a certain spell, so if you’re playing Pixel Remastered then you might end up having autobattle on the whole time.
There’s no MP in this game, like in the other games. Your mages will have spell slots for each level spell they can use. I don’t really like this system too much, especially when you try to use an ether and it just gives 1 MP per slot back. I’d rather just have a normal MP bar to be honest.
I think the difficulty of this game is a bit unbalanced. Maybe it's just the Pixel Remaster, but the game gets really easy towards the second half. The only part that gave me any trouble at all was Chaos. It was a really fun fight actually, but only because it was the only fight that really made me engage with the mechanics of the game.
So let me walk you through what each character had to do in that fight: £Fred had to just attack, that's basically all he did, he did the highest damage on the team so it kinda made sense. Greg Man for some reason just did barely any damage, so he was pretty much just using Hi–Potions the whole time. 3 was just doing normal healer stuff: Protect, Heals, Full-Life, etc. And then Jorm was just using Haste and Temper on £Fred to make him do more damage. It was basically like, everyone was working together to enable £Fred, and if he even died one time and lost his buffs then the run was just pretty much over.
I don’t really see myself wanting to play this again, but since it’s so short (only took me around 8 hours), there's a small chance I decide to play it over a holiday or something, since I have it on my switch