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I have never been a huge fan of dungeon crawling RPGs. A lot of them I found very boring and repetitive, aside from a select few (Phantasy Star 1, Arcana). For a long time I have seen this game around the net because of its translation and have had no interest to check it out, even though most reviews have been very positive. Well, boredom gets a hold at times and I found myself checking this game out.

Well, from the start I was dragged in. This is a very dark game concerning war and the after effects of nuclear winter. The story is actually really quite good but because of the games non-linearity it is very possible to miss out on certain events that might make more sense as the game plays out.

As for the translation it was well written but at times a bit vague. I found myself looking up walkthroughs a lot. But I looked through and the translation seems to be solid as for grammar and it does help to build some character development, especially when a major character is killed.

The game is definitely a dungeon crawler but that is not the main element of gameplay. Where the games heart is is in its battle system. There are certain characters that will have to be with you to carry the story, but there will be many other characters that you will essentially either talk or payoff to join your party. This will happen in the battle screen. As well, if you can't talk them into joining you or you can't pay them what they want you will be forced to fight them. It's quite unique and certainly keeps you playing. The only problem I see with this is that it makes the game much longer than it would be otherwise.

This is definitely a game worth taking a look at. Considering this game came out in the earlier years of the Super Famicon it's a fantastically complex game.

The game itself seems to be pretty well translated, at least dialogue wise. However your status menu will alternate between showing all of the text it's supposed to or showing the bottom half of it. I'm not sure about anyone else, but I'd like to be able to see how much HP/MP my people have left instead of guessing and having them croak. Though that's while playing on ZSNES.

While on SNES9x, everything appears fine. However the sound quality is horrible on said emulator. Really, play at your own risk on that thing.

Overall it seems fine, but they need to fix the text display problem for ZSNES.