I was hoping this would be a really cute fun adventure game but in no time it turned into a grindy kusoge.

I sure hate to leave games unfinished but I just couldn’t bring myself to play this anymore. It started out really cute game where our hero Chocobo gets sucked into some world where a clock tower constantly meddles with people’s memories and makes them forget who they are. It’s up to him to go into their “dungeon of memories” to recover their memory. The dungeons are old school style (because this is a port of a 10 year old game) where you fight some durdles, get some items and beat up a boss.

At first I had no issues with this. It was fun also picking up various types of jobs and bringing a “buddy” along the way. One of the bonuses was Alpha from the Omega questline in FFXIV so that was really cute. I unlocked Paladin, Scholar, Black Mage, Dragoon and White Mage. I enjoyed playing black mage since it did a lot of damage and since there’s an elemental system in place you could do more damage if you used the correct element.

This was all fun and games until I hit a brick wall of grindage. Every time you go into a dungeon you’re bound to pick up tons of items such as gear or attacks or potions. Unfortunately your bag only has 30 slots (after the upgrade quest.) 3 of those slots are also used up by the armor you are currently wearing so in reality you only have 27 slots. Once your slots fill up you have no choice but to a) leave the dungeon to unload and start over or b) keep going without picking up items and hope you don’t die and lose all of them. Yes that’s right in this kusoge if you die you lose everything in your bag except the gear you are wearing. (If you play on hard mode you lose the gear too.)

So I was like ok fine, I’m just losing some junk items and potions I probably won’t care about right? Well apparently wrong. It seems like the way to defeat bosses in this game (since it’s turn based) is to cast slow on the boss and haste on yourself. This gives you more turns than the boss allowing for easy victory. Of course to get haste/slow books or potions you have to – you guessed it – grind more dungeons!

So where I pretty much ragequit was at Leviathan (at level 32). I expect side quests/dungeons to be difficult but I didn’t think I’d get walled off by a boss in a story dungeon. Leviathan has murdered me several times throughout several levels. The buddy is a useless sack of shite and would constantly die because until I found some guide telling me to do so, the game never informed me I can “kick potions at my buddy” to heal them. But if I heal my buddy who’s gonna heal me? And by healing my buddy I am losing a turn and getting punched by the boss. Probably the only way to beat this is to GRIND SOME MORE to just simply overlevel or overgear this boss but honestly….no thanks. I really did want to see the rest of the story but I can’t bring myself to grind through 10 floors of  a dungeon just to reach a boss that I can hope won’t kill me for the 10th time.

Also this game did have Nakamura Yuichi voicing Cid but in order to hear Japanese voices you had to set your entire console language into Japanese! I don’t understand why they just didn’t give you a language select option for both voices/text at the start. Some Japanese language jokes also get lost in translation like how in English “SHIROMA” is “Shirma” but the joke is SHIROMA literally means white mage, and the girl in question is wearing a white mage robe. Anyway overall incredibly disappointing on what could have been a fun easy game to pass the time. Some Amazon reviews on Japan called it a poor excuse for a roguelike game, but if I knew it was gonna be a roguelike I would have never bothered because that basically screams kusoge to me.