40 hour grindquest; zero choices ever.
The way the developer bangs on about "choices" you'd swear he thinks he invented the JRPG or something. What you've got here is a fairly basic AdventureQuest knockoff with quite linear gameplay, which could have been extremely rich and nonlinear if the developer weren't constantly thwarting his own excellent core gameplay implementation with some arbitrary bullshit game rules.
- You can't visit areas you've already cleared. (Except for a repetitive sewer level that you can farm for free, and a single random dungeon that keeps refreshing itself when you leave.) This means that even though you can technically take the quests in any order you want, you are doomed to eventually complete them all. Worse, you'll be encouraged to do them in order of increasing travel cost (and, one assumes, difficulty.)
- It costs money to enter a dungeon. This means that once you enter a dungeon, you might as well clean it out completely. Otherwise you'd just have to pay again to come back and mop up the last of the treasure. This means that, like the quests, the contents of any particular quest are something you're doomed to consume. You can fight the enemies in any order you choose, but that doesn't matter either because:
- You can't see what enemy you're about to fight until after combat starts.
and
- You can never flee from a fight you're losing.
This means that for any given dunegon, you may as well fight the enemies in random order, or in alphabetical order, or in the order they're indexed in the array, for all the "choice" you have in the matter. There is no real tactical planning involved, no input skill required, and certainly no moral choices.
The entire supposedly nonlinear game can be played with the heuristic: Equip Best Loot; Goto Cheapest Dungeon; Fight Random Enemy; If Weak Use Potion; Repeat; And I couldn't think of any real reason to play the game in any other fashion.
Even the loot, normally an addictive greed-fueled source of longevity for dungeon crawlers of all stripes falls incredibly flat here. I'm not sure if the items you find are templates modified with stats like in Diablo or simply prefabs stored in memory as an integer like in Castlevania:SOTN, but either way the game sacrifices bonuses-per-item to ensure that you can store an enormous number of items in your vault. You won't be getting a +27 fire sword of Teleportation and Mana Regeneration in this game. I mean you might randomly find one, but it'll be Vlad the Immolator, one of 5 or 10 named weapons the designer invented. It won't be randomly generated and it certianly won't be upgraded by you from a weaker item.
There's a crafting system but I couldn't get into it. I couldn't even afford to buy my way up to 100% buy price, 50% sell price by buying and selling minor healing potions to get skill points in bargaining. It's obvious you're going to basically need to do this if you're ever to have any hope of buying the more expensive gear later, but it feels like cruel and unusual punishment.
You can choose sword, bow, or magic, and they all basically do the same thing with different stats, but the wooden sword that gives you a huge bonus to Learning that you find in the first dungeon means, again, the game takes a choice away from you rather than giving you one.
There's more to say but I'm running out of space. The bottom line is it's an okay RPG that could have been great. It's long. That's the best thing I can say about it. If you like grinding you'll love getting this much grind for free.
But you never choose dialogue options, combine things to make interesting combos, date (or indeed, meet) other party members, or do any of the other RPG things normally associated with "Choice." Achievements, skills, items and victories are all purely mechanical. They are a puzzle with one right answer, and that answer is painfully obvious the moment you look at it.
You never choose between factions. You never have a choice except "take this quest now" or "take it later." It is not a game about "choices," or even options.
Just grind.