Recent reviews by Dihy

I've been playing this for over 30 hours and barely hit Ch 6. This is primarily because there are a TON of tailing quests, in fact the most common kind of quest in this game is tailing, and they are mandatory for the most part. These quests artificially inflate the length of the game by forcing all gameplay to slow down.

Do not recommend.

MC is kind of a loser, lots of "loser trope" moments.

The author got inspo for this novel from grandmother-grandson complex stories.

Overall a meh experience.

HZD had an awesome story, "good enough" gameplay, and good atmosphere.

This game has a mediocre story, mediocre gameplay, and mediocre atmosphere. It feels that they tried too hard to put as much variety of content into the game, but not really focusing on developing any specific bloc of content so it doesn't feel very fleshed out.

There are so many different kinds of weapons but it's too expensive to manage upgrades for all of them (same goes for armors).

The quests are mostly "fetch" quests, which are painful until the very end when your traversal improves.

Lots of stuck corners, it seems movement is trigger based, if you don't scale a building or something in the correct order of moves, you're stuck until you restart the climb.

HZD was fine on its own, I think this one is skippable.

Gonna be honest, I've given it 5 attempts in the last 10 years and it's just extremely boring.

The game took me about 30 hours, I used the resolution patch with Locale Emulator so it did not track my hours correctly.

The story is better than 2, 3, 3a, not as good as one. With the conclusion of this, I have now completed 1, 2, 3, 3a, 4, 5, 5a, 6, and 7.

I rate this game 3.5/5, the mazes and combat is almost as painful as 3a, the story is better, the music is better, the plot is better than 3a. The gameplay is pretty rough, extremely grindy, and overly difficult with the crafting aspect.

My final tier:

1 > 4 = 7 > 6 > 5a > 3a > 3=5 > 2

3/5

Game is better than 3, but the mazes in this game are killer (as others will tell you). There are also a lot of battles in the mazes, so each maze takes hours to complete. Mazes have multiple levels so you're gonna be spending hours just walking through 1 maze. I ended up using a trainer to teleport to the end of each maze.

Story is very similar to 3 (and 2... and maybe even 1), I enjoyed the references to previous games, and the setup for sequels. Music is 5/5, graphics were probably good for the time, better than 3, but still quite blocky. I bet at launch this game ran like garbage on the computers available though.

Use the patches in the workshop (installs PatchConfig.exe) which allows for window resizing and higher resolutions.

This game is nigh impossible to complete without a walkthrough.

3.5/5

The story is "okay". There's a lot of tropes and the usual fan service fare.
Music is great, gameplay/maze/combat/movement is just janky. The controls are awful and very difficult to use, especially with the amount of camera control required. Double click/double tap to run (but tap very quickly). Move camera around to find boxes hidden in random spots.

Mazes are really annoying and enemies respawn so if you accidentally take a door you're in for a long painful ride.

Game is also very grindy, if you are underleveled you will get wrecked.

Plot again, is just ok. Better than 2, worse than 1.

Played through it with a trainer, it's extremely grindy, with a bunch of missable quests.

None of the quest rewards are really "worth it" though, you just hit RNG monsters and grind through the mazes until you get to the boss. That's the entire game.

Story is not as good as 1, on the weaker side.

Music is pretty good, lots of remixes from the first game. Graphics is ehh, feels mobile-y, runs on the same engine as XYS3.

Get it on sale if you really want to play the whole series, it's not a very strong story.

2/5.

I have beaten this game 4 times. Once in 1999, once in the mid 2000s, once in the mid 2010s, and just now. The first 3 times were the original CD versions (and subsequent expansion packs). The most recent time was the current version (mobile remake).

Classic sprite based art, unchanged from the 90s version (there's some upscaling, and upscaling up to 2K available for background and effects in the workshop), but it is mostly hand drawn water color style art, which still looks fantastic in 2024. There were some additional animations added in the remake version to a few of the character avatars/sprites, but honestly I wouldn't have noticed them unless they were mentioned to me.

10/10

The music is fantastic. The first track you hear in Venice is one I've listened to at least a thousand times. As you traverse the in game world, the music changes to fit the environment thematically. The sound effects are sort of glitchy (inconsistent volume), but overall sound the same as the original. There is no voice acting (same as original)

8/10

There is a significant differentiation between the new/remake/mobile version vs the original, and that is enemies have their HP cut by about 70%. For most of the first half of the game, every monster dies in 1 hit. However you can play the DLC version of the original DVD copy which has the original damage values. Keep in mind that these values were based around 90s game play, and they are tortuously hard to play with. We're talking hundreds if not thousands of hours of grinding for certain "special rewards". The remake vastly reduced the difficulty, to the point of it being almost boring to do fights because so many monsters are 5 to 10 second kills. The final bosses (and the secret bosses) can be killed in a minute due to a special ability acquired from the expansion (that was released 20 years ago). In the original version, this special ability while still overkill, would still not let you kill the bosses in a minute. HOWEVER, I honestly preferred the vastly easier version of gameplay because I've already done the 100% completion on the older, much more difficult version. So this time around I wanted to just cruise through the game. This remake/mobile also includes additional China Campaign quests which extended the length of playthrough but the quests themselves were very easy (minus the trivia questions). Many of the side quests are math or trivia questions, which may become tiresome and even unintelligible for some.

7/10


The plot is great. Perhaps it's nostalgia tinting my perspective but I really enjoyed learning and reading through the story once more. I played this in Traditional Chinese all 4 times and cannot comment on the quality of the English Translation (which I hear is not good). The story in Chinese is very intriguing and keeps the player guessing, learning, and understanding as the character develops.

10/10


I loved it. I loved it when it came out, and I loved it enough to do a full replay on the remake version, which I still loved. I honestly feel this is one of my favorite games, it is not perfect but the story, character development, monster crafting capabilities were things I loved to spend time on when I were younger, and still hold true today.

8.75/10


I wrote a guide and a post in the Community Hub for those trying to get the DVD version to work on the Deck. Happy to answer any questions.

Very tedious and frankly just boring.

Combat is very one dimensional.

Basically a raising simulator to pump stats, die (kill off your character), raise the next character and pump stats. Repeat until you are strong enough to kill the boss.

There's a game breaking setup that people in the boards have posted where you rely on the deaths to do crazy multipliers (with that you can beat the game by the 3rd or 4th death).