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It is the year 2050. Mankind has polluted the environment to a degree that the planet isn't able to sustain life much longer (postapocalyptic settings apparently used to be really popular in Korea). A man named Lein is chosen to lead an expedition to a long lost colony planet— the third earth. However, all three vessels of the expedition are shot down and forced to crashland on the planet's surface. Lein wakes from his cryogenic sleep an only can watch the last crew members being slaughtered by robots. On his way out he is attacked by local bandits, falls unconscious and awakes in what seems like a typical medieval fantasy village, only it is terrorized by marauding robots and a feared magic using race called the Cain. Lein embarks on his adventure to find the other ships, look for survivors and by the way solve all the little problems of the locals. Save for the story, this would be considered a classical JRPG, only it wasn't made in Japan. The combat with a party of up to five is strictly turn based and there is little strategy to it, without any formation options and a rather limited amount of abilities. The structure of making ones way from village to village, whith the obligatory dungeon in between, almost painfully traditional. On the plus side, te player is spared random encounters, and all enemies can be seen (and avoided) while walking around on the field. The system has balancing issues, though, and some encounters are ridiculously high leveled without any way to know so beforehand. Interestingly, slain enemies don't respawn immediately after leaving a field, but there seems to be some kind of growing algorithm undearneath. What saves the game to a degree are its interesting setting and lovely presentation. Makkoya originally designed it as a DOS game at VGA standard resolution, but switched to Windows as that platform became outdated3. This may sound like an unfortunate turn of events, but zoomed out the graphics look much better and the zoomed out perspective gives a nice feeling of orientation. Granted the game never uses the full screen even in bigger areas, but it only becomes a problem in battles. The scene there stands at its original size in a small window and feels tiny and claustrophobic. Makkoya tried to compensate for that with a zooming effect for attacks, but that while looking nice only makes the problem more evident. Still the game is one of the more good looking 16-bit style RPGs, if a bit lacking in variety. The graphics are accompanied by some beautiful, but also a few annoying musical tunes. Especially at the field sections the soundtrack could have used some more variation. Like with Open's EXP, menus and item names are in English, so the language barrier isn't quite as high as in other games. |
